My cousin Kathleen and her husband Chuck Oldsen were in Washington from San Diego for about a week this spring. One Sunday, we drove over to Gettysburg, a place I had not seen for almost thirty years, when I went with the late Father Dick Spillane. In many ways, Gettysburg remains the most powerful of our national monuments. As you walk along Cemetery Ridge, contemplating Pickett’s famous charge, again the statistics of might-have-beens become visible. On the opposite side, where Lee was roaming on a ridge named after a seminary, you ponder the ironic juxtaposition of cemetery and seminary.
Lee, of course, might have won that battle in the Pennsylvania countryside, outnumbered though he was. But he didn’t. So along the federal ridges now stand hundreds and hundreds of stone and bronze monuments to the victors, to Meade, to the sundry regiments from Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, even Minnesota and Vermont. And of course there is the address which tells us that we cannot forget what they did here, even if we forget the words spoken here. Ironically, we are more apt to remember Lincoln’s words, brave words about not perishing from this earth.
I was thinking of this scene of a warm spring Sunday at Gettysburg, as I later reread Albert Camus’s essay, “Death in the Soul,” which is set in Prague. Camus’s descriptions of Florence, Prague, and the cities around the Mediterranean almost make me want to travel again. Camus wrote:
Man is face to face with himself: I defy him to be happy…. And yet this is how travel enlightens him. A great discord occurs between him and the things he sees. The music of the world finds its way more easily into this heart grown less secure. Finally stripped bare, the slightest solitary tree becomes the most tender and fragile of images. Works of art and women’s smiles, races of men at home in their land and monuments that summarize the centuries, this is the moving and palpable landscape that travel consists of.
“At home, in their land and monuments that summarize the centuries”: Our land and our monuments do indeed seek to define what we are, bring us face to face with ourselves, and help us to avoid the death of our souls.
Nietzsche, in Book IV of Die froliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science), remarked that a weary traveler one day slammed the door behind him and wept. Why? Because he kept being beckoned by new and fascinating things, by a passion for what is true. Yet he only encountered bitterness in such travels. “I must go on, I must look back in wrath at the most beautiful things that could not hold me—because they could not hold me.”
Something quite different is found here in Nietzsche. He does not travel to learn new lands or to remember his own. Rather he is nostalgic, if not bitter, that the wonders of lands and monuments cannot hold him. He blames them for what they cannot give. He seeks for something that might hold him.
In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin wrote:
We sailed from Gravesend on the 23rd of July, 1726…. Perhaps the most important part of that Journal (kept on this voyage) is the plan to be found in it, which I formed at sea, for regulating my future conduct in life. It is the more remarkable, as being formed when I was so young, and yet being pretty faithfully adhered to quite through to old age.
Franklin on his voyage did not pine for what he had left at home, for the solitary tree, nor did he think there was nothing that could hold him. Rather he calmly planned his life so that his future conduct would be well regulated, by himself, I take it. One almost catches a trace of Nietzsche in Franklin, of a world that is exclusively ours to order.
In the French edition’s Introduction to his The Agony of Christianity, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, in exile in Paris, told of attending the Divine Office, on November 24, 1924, at St. Etienne, a Greek Orthodox Church, located on a street named after George Bizet. Unamuno noticed that around the arch were inscribed in Greek the words, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” He worried that perhaps “Truth can kill us, and Life can make us persist in error.” He concluded with these remarkable words:
For history, which is the unfolding of the thoughts of God upon this earth, lacks an ultimate human finality and is en route toward oblivion and unconsciousness. And all human effort tends toward giving to history a human finality; a supra-human finality, according to Nietzsche, who was the great dreamer of that ultimate absurdity: a social Christianity.
Such are, of course, remarkable words. Already in 1925, Unamuno understood, from Nietzsche, that a “social Christianity” might well be one “designed to hold us,” one based solely upon our own inner-worldly constructs while disguised by Christian phraseology.
Here are no longer the monuments of Gettysburg, the broken but real world, nor do we have “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” in a Byzantine church in Paris. We have the death of a soul that can count upon its own plan, which will “hold” us because there is, by definition, nothing else. No music of the world can enter into hearts grown so secure with their own ultimate finality. No travel will be necessary, because all places will appear the same. We will not look back in wrath because the “oblivion and unconsciousness” of actual history will have been replaced by ourselves. We will have become dreamers of the ultimate absurdity.