UNHINGED FROM TIME

Billy Pilgrim, the profane and now deceased absurdist writer Kurt Vonnegut, jr.’s protagonist, in Slaughter House Five becomes “unhinged from time” and “wonders from place to place, epoch to epoch.” In these post-Christian, post-modern times, it feels a lot like that today. It feels like we are “unhinged from time.”

Walter Brueggemann reminds us Christians if there is one thing we have, we have had, will always have is history. Sacred, divinely appointed history.

One connection I have to this history, this past, is the classics. The classics – defined as a recognized, seminal work of unparalleled quality, that survives multiple readings – bring unity, and connections in my life. There is precedence among our Christian forebearers. Origen often quoted the classics. Dante was as knowledgeable about the classics as he was about anything. John Milton’s works are full of classical metaphors and allusions. Finally, C. S. Lewis often quoted the classics.

Saul Bellow’s Preface to Mortimer Adler’s and Seymour Cain’s groundbreaking (and now out of print) series on Imaginative Literature argues that “the modern writer will inevitably find himself trying to establish whether the living man can be measured by the measure as the Homeric” hero (p. vii). Each generation of culture creators must maintain this connection to the past or it may find itself concluding “that there are \perhaps two different types or orders of humanity . . . one contemporary and one from the past (p. vii).” Ergo, the resulting temporal schizophrenia may lead to a cultural meltdown that dooms the present generation, like Billy Pilgrim, to be unhinged in time, and to wonder in the cosmos with no metaphysical or cultural mooring place.

Adler and Cain argue American writers have always been peculiarly sensitive to this conundrum. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter introductory chapter, ceremoniously skipped by generations of benign American readers, entitled “The Custom House,” speaks of “the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively” upon us and blames Americans for running away from the past as if it is the enemy. A wiser course, Hawthorne continues, would be to “diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of today, and thus to make it a bright transparency.”

Bellow finishes by urging us all to reexamine the classics that “are sources not only of wisdom and pleasure but of energy and power. We must learn to live with their greatness. (p. viii).

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