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Reflection for August 13, 2006

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Chuzzlewit

Come gather 'round people / Wherever your roam / . . . And accept it that soon / You'll be drenched to the bone. / . . .Then you better start swimmin' / Or you'll sink like a stone / For the times they are a-changin'. (Bob Dylan)

"It was pretty late in the autumn of the year, when the declining sun struggling through the mist . . . looked brightly down upon a Wiltshire village . . . The wet grass sparkled in the light; . . . the birds began to chirp and twitter on the naked boughs, as though the hopeful creatures half believed that spring had come already . . . the fallen leaves, with which the ground was strewn, gave forth a pleasant fragrance . . . On the motionless branches of some trees, autumn berries hung like clusters of coral beads." How pleasantly the author of Martin Chuzzlewit describes what we would call a moment of Indian summer!

But then the text says, "A moment, and its glory was no more. . . The sun went down beneath the long dark lines of hill and cloud which piled up in the west an airy city, wall heaped on wall, and battlement on battlement; the light was withdrawn; . . . the stream forgot to smile; the birds were silent; and the gloom of winter dwelt on everything." Dickens then goes on to describe an angry wind descending upon the scene chasing the fallen leaves - scattering them pell mell so that they seemed to be taking frantic flight. But to no avail as the wind drove them on and followed at their heels until "weary of such trifling performance, the boisterous rover hurried away . . . roaring over moor and meadow, hill and flat, until it got out to sea, where it met with other winds similarly disposed, and made a night of it."

Now Dickens was not writing as a meteorologist describing a sudden change in the weather. What he's really doing is describing a violent cultural change that was taking place in 19th century Britain. He's speaking of the winds of industrial and political revolutions, imperialism, materialism and secularism which were wiping out the placid ways of simpler times; chasing people like fallen leaves from quiet villages into the slums of factory towns and (on the death ships of our ancestors) to continents beyond the sea. Where once all was stable, now mobility, commerce, a new invention every day were estranging one generation from another. Dickens saw all of this and this is what he so powerfully describes by way of a sudden storm putting an end to an Indian summer.

Is his metaphor out of date? Is there anyone here who can't testify to radical changes that have occurred in his or her life since childhood? I grew up in what seemed like an eternal springtime only to discover it to have been an Indian summer to be blown away by astounding technical changes, new influences, unexpected career changes, even by the recent shakiness of my once solidly imagined Church. Literally the idyllic parish church of my boyhood is today a pile of rubble in what has become a blighted neighborhood.

Of course at my age I've given up trying to put together the Humpty Dumpty of my pre-cell phone and internet days - especially after a visit last week to the cemetery of my old monastery where ninety percent of the friars I knew are pushing up daisies. I cling now to only a few things to keep my sanity, namely the Eucharist which seems almost miraculously to endure from generation to generation and where I can still catch echoes of God's Word rising beyond the reach of modern amplifiers and where I can touch Christ as someone ever new yet ever old; and where I can dine upon the Wisdom of my religious heritage which has withstood the blasts of history no matter how violent. And of course I also have my fellow human beings of whatever generation who despite radical circumstantial changes remain capable of the same old vices and the same old virtues - with (I hope as time goes by) ever so much a tilt toward virtue.

-- Geoff Wood