By Peter Fritzell
Professor emeritus of English
Lawrence Today magazine, Fall 2003
A long time ago, I said — before woman and man desired one another, before anyone had to pick cotton or cart lumber or make coffins, before anyone was concerned about being regular or irregular, normal or abnormal — before there was any need or any desire “to get something for hit,” as Dewey Dell says —
Parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles, and sibling rivals: If someone near you, someone destined for tomorrow’s Commencement, has just mumbled something like, “Oh No!,” it’s because she is remembering the first words of the first lecture she heard in Freshman Studies (a lecture ostensibly on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or, as she and her peers came to call it, As I Die Reading) — or if he, next to you, has just expressed some momentary puzzlement, he’s doubtless doing so because he suspects that he’s just heard something he’s heard before but can’t quite remember where or when.
A long time ago, I said — before there was any need or desire to tell stories, or to retell them, before guilt and responsibility, before motherhood and fatherhood, before love and fear and care, before b-flat and middle-c, before proof and disproof, before belief and disbelief —
A long time ago, I said — Prometheus stole the fire from heaven, the fire that fuels our quest for understanding, for truth, for peace, for justice, for sanity. A long time ago, Prometheus stole that fire. And Zeus was not happy. Zeus was no dummy.
By way of revenge, he called on Hephaetus to make a woman out of earth, a woman who would bring misery upon humankind. Aphrodite gave her beauty. Hermes gave her boldness and cunning. And they named her Pandora, meaning “all-gifted.” And Hermes took Pandora as a gift to Epimetheus, who was immediately taken by her beauty, and conned by her cunning, and who by now had forgotten the advice of his brother. (Prometheus had said, rather intelligently as it turns out, not to accept any gifts from the gods.)
And after Epimetheus had made Pandora his wife, she opened the jar she had brought with her, and all the human ills escaped and spread over the earth. Only hope remained in the jar.
Or, I said — A long time ago, the Lord God “planted a garden eastward in Eden” and made to grow in that garden “every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food” — and more than those trees even, “the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” And into the garden so planted, the Lord God put the man and the woman whom he had formed — with but one condition on their perpetual existence there, that they not partake of the fruit of those two central trees.
“Of the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” He said, “thou shalt not eat…for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
The rest of the story you know reasonably well, even if you think you don’t. Even though the woman had “taken to heart” the Lord’s stipulation, she was tempted, fatefully tempted, when the oh-so-subtle serpent said to her of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil: “Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” The serpent was no dummy either, perhaps.
What the woman didn’t know, of course — what she couldn’t have known, before the fact, so to speak — was that knowing, or trying to know, good and evil is no pleasant condition in which to live.
In any case, she took of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil — and she must have known almost immediately, because she “gave also unto” the man of that fruit, “and he did eat.” Otherwise, why would she have bothered to give him even a nibble? You can almost hear her thinking, “If I am going to have to live in this desiring, despairing, hoping, dying, lonely condition, then, by God, he will too.”
The Lord God, of course, was not much happier than Zeus was. He said to the woman, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children,” and he said to the man, “cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee . . . till thou return unto the ground.” And He concluded this benediction of sorts with some considerable irony, the Lord God did: “Behold,” He said, “the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.”
After all these things and a few others had been done and said, “Adam knew . . . his wife, and she conceived.” And, you know what? — what Dewey Dell suspects in her own way, toward the conclusion of her own and her family’s rather driven, awkward, hopeful, sacrificing journey — there really hasn’t been too much “to get for hit” ever since, not much to get for this human condition, not at the drugstore or anywhere else.
And that’s why we have Baccalaureate services, that’s why we’re here this morning — because we are fated, or we have fated ourselves, to trying and trying, and trying again, to get something for “hit,” to get something for this human condition.
On this occasion, as on others of its traditional kind, we do not seek to alleviate our condition, much less to cure it, and certainly not to escape it. We seek, rather, something that may enable us to continue to tolerate our human condition, something that may enable us to acknowledge it, in all its ambiguity, with all its limitations.
Creeds, catechisms, and forms
When we were young, we were taught, and we learned, our words and our letters,
our numbers and our colors. We were taught, and we learned, our chipmunks
and squirrels, our equilateral triangles, our b-flats and middle-c’s — our
common denominators, someone might say.
As we grew, we were taught, and we learned, that all men are created equal, perhaps — or that chipmunks and squirrels are species. We were taught, and we learned, about mass and velocity and about means and ways of measuring them. We learned a little something about electrons, perhaps. We learned about other cultures, as we say. And thus, we were educated in our creeds and catechisms — in the basic terms, forms, and figures of our worlds — as we had to be educated.
Then we set off for college, seeking some freedom, perhaps. Perhaps we came to Lawrence because we had read in its catalog that “liberal learning liberates, freeing us from the restraints of time and place.” In any case, we continued to learn things, including things that seemed to undercut what we already knew, or thought we knew.
We learned, perhaps, in our college years, that all such learnings, all such freedoms and liberations — all conceptions of space and time, all notions of harmony and disharmony — are culturally relative. Perhaps we even learned that all statements are culturally relative, that all statements are functions of the times and places and cultural traditions which give rise to their formulations — or, as a member of the Lawrence Class of 2003 might say, that all statements are paradigm-derivative and paradigm-dependent.
While we were learning such things, we were learning as well that mass and velocity cannot be measured without influencing the mass or velocity that would be measured. That no one, not even one of Plato’s philosopher kings, has ever seen an equilateral triangle, that none of those equilateral triangles in our high-school geometry books is equilateral, that each of their sides and angles is unequal to each of the other sides and angles. And more, that no one has ever seen an electron — and more yet, that no one has ever seen a species or a literary character — and that every syllable and every note, every middle-c and b-flat, is different from every other syllable, different even from the “same” syllable repeated, the same note repeated.
At some point in this process of being educated, we may have begun to suspect
that, if it is true that all statements are culturally relative, then that
statement must also be culturally
relative — and that one — and this one — and it may have
begun to seem to us as if all we were hearing in our statements were
the echoes of our own thin cries.
In fact, we may have learned such things so well that for a time, at least, we thought we had lost our faith, that all the old absolutes were dead, that God is dead, that all coherence is gone, that the world is meaningless—as in the following not-so-imaginary dialogue:
Student: “All coherence is gone.”
Instructor: “Not quite yet.”
Student: “The world is meaningless.”
Instructor: “Not in that sentence.”
Student: “Everything is relative.”
Instructor: “Yes, but relative to what? You don’t mean, ‘absolutely relative’?”
Student: “I’ve lost my faith.”
Instructor: “Not yet, you haven’t.”
Student: “God is dead.”
Instructor: “Not quite yet.”
Student: “Oh, you mean that He or She is just a word.”
Instructor: “Yes, in a manner of speaking, I mean that He or She or it is just a word, as Yahweh or Jehovah or faith or electron is just a word — nothing more and, far more significantly, nothing less — nothing less than a word, so significant a word that whole buildings, including this one, thousands of buildings, and millions of books, and billions of lives have been built and spent upon that word and its cognates and even more have been dedicated to its elaborations, refinements, and amplifications. I mean that, like species and myth and peace and justice, like equilateral triangle and liberation and the United States of America, like the electoral process and free-market economics, like the SARS virus and natural selection and the genetic code, it is a highly complex, elaborate, and highly influential figure of human thought and speech and need — and no less significant or impressive or real for being so.”
When we were growing up, we learned, perhaps,
that you can’t step into
the same river twice. When we got to college, we may have learned the
next lesson, perhaps the penultimate lesson in our liberal education — that
you can’t step into the same river once and that, because you
can’t,
you must learn ways of imagining and thinking that you can, fairly
elaborate ways of assuring yourself not only that you can step into
the same river twice
but that you can do so over and over again and that you can join others
in doing so, in the same ways, with the same understanding — because
if you don’t, you won’t make it to Commencement tomorrow.
Hells-bells, you won’t be able to make it to lunch, much less
be able to follow this sentence — or to complete this phrase — or
soon to sing, and louder sing, “Let there be peace on earth.”
If all has gone well in our liberal education, we have come to understand
that all those sciences and arts, all that history and mathematics
and music-theory and philosophy; all those football games and track
meets
and econometrics;
all that psychology, anthropology, and political science; all those
languages and literatures are neither more nor less than means, methods,
and devices
that we, and others of our kind before us, have formed, modified, refined,
and elaborated in our efforts to assure ourselves that we can step
into the same river over and over again, even though we otherwise know
better — indeed,
because we otherwise know better, that the language of musical scores
and mathematics, and indeed any other language, is a direct function
of our knowledge that no
two syllables (or notes or molecules or electrons or snowflakes or
chipmunks) are the same.
If things have gone well in our liberal education, we have learned that we need these forms, these naturally artificial forms, these formative, awkward, and sustaining figures of thought and speech and need — because, quite frankly, we have precious little else to go on, much less to keep going on.
If things have gone well in our liberal education, we have come to sense the all-too-human irony in that statement from the Lawrence University catalog, “liberal learning liberates, freeing us from the restraints of time and place.” We’ve come to sense not only that that statement is far from free from “the restraints of time and place” but that, when a liberal education has gone well, it has done something rather the opposite of “freeing us from the restraints of time and place” — that what it has done is to increase and deepen our awareness of the restraints of time and place, made us conscious, and maybe even self-conscious, of our very most immediate and continuing dependence upon the forms and figures of time and place, including this time and this place.
It’s an old, restraining inheritance,
in which we are pretty much bound to seek our freedom and our peace
and our justice and our understanding, and
it’s all wrapped up, or we try to wrap it up, in the conscious
and self-conscious celebration of our Baccalaureate services, so that
we can hear the pain in
the joy, see the tears in the laughter — as we seek to give form
to our knowledge of our condition, as we seek atonement, in a way,
by acknowledging
the god-awful pride in the rather pathetic forms of our doing so, the
god-awful pride that got us into this condition in the first place,
the god-awful presumption
without which there would be no need for prayer or for singing — and
the ironies, ambiguities, tautologies, and contradictions without which
there would be no need for mosques or synagogues or churches, nor even
for poems.
As in Philip Larkin’s “Church Going” — as in
going to a church that, like all churches, is going:
Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new –
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
‘ Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What shall we turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or another will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Disperse, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these – for which
was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here.
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
So what remains when disbelief is gone? Why, nothing more or less than
the belief that disbelief is gone. And what remains when the belief
that disbelief
is gone,
is gone? Why, the disbelief in the belief that disbelief is gone, which
is naught else than a belief, of course. And so, someone might say,
the story
goes on and
on, forever and ever, as it were.
Peter Fritzell was invited by the Class of 2003 to speak at their Baccalaureate service on June 14. A member of the Lawrence faculty since 1966, he did his undergraduate work at the University of North Dakota and earned the M.A. and the Ph.D. from Stanford University. He has published widely in the area of nature writing. A recording of Prof. Fritzell’s 2003 Freshman Studies lecture on Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac can be heard here. (RealAudio software required).
The poem “Church Going” by Philip Larkin (1922-85) is reprinted by permission of the Marvell Press, London.
