Justification by Faith

You're sitting in your History class which is referred to, in an attempt at disregarding the European, PostModern deconstructions that have disassembled the body, "American Heritage". Your professor is in front of the class. He has a doctorate, right?

"You can flirt with nihilism for a time. I know. I did it. But it can't last. That's why Ideology is so dangerous. Why is it that the 19th century is the most peaceful century the West has known, and the 20th century is the century whose single most distinguished characteristic is the mass slaughter of people by their own governments? 50 million people died in the wars of the 20th century. 250 million people were killed by the governments over them in the 20th century. Many of those by a government they had elected and believed in. Who taught Pol Pot? In France. He was educated by Sartre. Everyone quotes Nietzsche's "God is Dead." but what does he say right after that? "God is dead. We have killed him." And what are the countries that are killing their citizens? Russia, Dostoevsky's Russia. Germany, which had Beethoven, Goethe. What did Wagner do, trying to unite Protestant South and Catholic North? He tells us himself in a diary entry while writing The Ring of the Nibelung - "I must kill the old gods."

After class, the Philosopher who speaks in old-timey Plato and Aristotle and Wittgenstein words comes up to you and says "I heard that they wouldn't let him convert on his death bed."

"Who?"

"Tolstoy. His family was afraid for his book sales, because he was supposed to be a great Atheist author. He wanted to convert on his death bed, but his family wouldn't let him. Isn't that terrible?"

Outside, Spring is in the air. You can tell by the men and women sitting in sunlight and silent communion with either God or nature; by the breeze that only cools you because of small beads of sweat, stolen from your brow.

You mull the words over in your mouth. "You can flirt with Nihilism for a time, but it can't last." From the depths of unaware thoughts, e.e. cummings comes floating upward "wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world, my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom."

The sunlight is a dancing and the dark, sophisticated clouds approaching from the horizon signal to you that this is a stillness which will soon break into beautiful, redemptively symbolic turbidity. You remember the moment of clarity and mystery when, right before dawn, after the third fatigued shot of espresso, your wandering mind, which had been casually whisping its attention from one word to the next while lost in its own breeze, had suddenly found Raskolnikov kissing "that filthy earth with delight and happiness."

You once heard that cigarettes were the 20th century man's way of taking control of his destiny by killing himself slowly. How American. The poet B.H. Fairchild had written:
"Yes, they kill you, but so do television and bureaucrats and the drugged tedium of certain rooms piped with tasteful music where we have all sat waiting for someone to enter with a silver plate laden with Camels and Lucky Strikes, someone who leans into our ears and tells us that the day's work is done, and done well, offers us black coffee in white cups, and whispers the way trees whisper, yes, yes, oh yes."

The trees are beginning to whisper in the breeze of the approaching "Sturm und Drang". Why do you always seem to fall asleep when Beauty, like the Mediterranean tide in the sun, washes over your eyelids?

This is a world that has survived genocide time and again. She has outlived the particle-storm of communism and the benign and salutary neglect of political christianity. And still, she gives us peascods for the necklaces of foolish lovers. Still, she gives us fairy rings.

"I've no wish to find the thing that will find me."

Relaxed in the shade of a crooked-cross tree and waiting for the storm to come, it is spring.
And flirting is a springtime thing.