Today is a sobering day for me. When you live in California, you have to decide for yourself when Autumn has arrived. And it did today, for me, in a very bad year.And the only verbal vehicle I could ride was a sentence I remembered from George Steiner's "In Bluebeard's Castle" (1971):
"In locating Hell above ground, we have passed out of the major order and symmetries of Western civilization."
I don't exactly remember how I came into possession of that book--my guess is that it was used in a class my brainiac stepbrother took at Notre Dame, and was part of my habitual stealing of books from my own home.
The above quote from that book, of course reminds me of our responsibility in creating Iraq as it is today, though the author is referencing the Holocaust. If you accept his premise, it has been some time since we passed out of the order etc. of Western civilization.
I want to hijack his idea and say that, in Iraq, we took America down, too. We were attacked, and somehow decided to finish ourselves off.
Thanks to those internet tubes, I was able to re-read the Steiner piece instead of having to dig through boxes of 6 years unpacked books.And this is what stood out to me:
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"The wide-scale reversion to torture and mass murder, the ubiquitous use of hunger and imprisonment as political means -mark not only a crisis of culture but, quite conceivably, an abandonment of the rational order of man. It may well be that it is a mere fatuity, an indecency to debate of the definition of culture in the age of the gas oven, of the arctic camps, of napalm. The topic may belong solely to the past history of hope. But we should not take this contingency to be a natural fact of life, a platitude. We must keep in sharp focus its hideous novelty or renovation. We must keep vital in ourselves a sense of scandal so overwhelming that it affects every significant aspect of our position in history and society. We have, as Emily Dickinson would have said, to keep the soul terribly surprised. I cannot stress this enough. To Voltaire and Diderot the bestial climate of our national and social conflicts would have seemed a lunatic return to barbarism. To most intelligent men and women of the nineteenth century a prediction that torture and massacre were soon to be endemic again in "civilized" Europe would have seemed a nightmarish joke. There is nothing natural about our present condition. There is no self-evident logic or dignity in our current knowledge that "anything is possible." In fact, such knowledge corrupts and lowers the threshold of outrage (only Kierkegaard foresaw both the inchoate possibility and the corruption). The numb prodigality of our acquaintance with horror is a radical human defeat."