What Profiteth It a Man, Though He Gain the World...

I just finished an Irish book published in 1963, An Gleann agus a Raibh Ann (The Glen and Those Who Lived There), narrated to one Seamus O Maolchathaigh by an old fellow also called Seamus, of the Burke tribe. I have actually been to Clonmel--walked through it and over the mountain described by old Seamus to spend the night at a rural bed-and-breakfast. I walked over 600 miles in a month on that trip, all of it in Ireland. It was in many ways the high point of my life.

Old Seamus confides toward the end an extraordinary incident. His best friend from childhood, Sean Baroid, had emigrated in bitterness after a tragic misunderstanding with his betrothed. (The girl's father, scorning Sean's relative poverty, had turned a blind eye as a third party slandered him wickedly within the daughter's hearing.) The young woman wasted away once she realized the consequences of her jealous fit. Seamus was in attendance when she gave up the ghost, her final act being a spectacular leap from the bed as she shouted Sean's name ecstatically and reached for an empty doorway. Returning home soon thereafter, just before the sun rose, Seamus saw a familiar-looking figure run past him. Though exhausted, his mind belatedly registered the odd fact that the runner's footfalls made no noise. Upon peering at the figure more closely, Seamus recognized Sean. He raced to overtake him, for the figure had turned onto a straight lane with no egress... yet the road lay bare in either direction. Another acquaintance encountered Sean's image in similar fashion at about the same hour. Months later, they would learn that Sean had died in an Alaskan logging camp approximately two hours (adjustments for time zones having been made) before his cruel beloved had expired shouting his name joyfully.

You'll have to accept my word that Seamus does not come across as a fraud or a gullible rube anywhere in his long book. He was a canny, pensive man with some education, and he tended to smile at the tales of waifs and banshees which shortened long winter nights. Old people in our own culture used to recount many adventures similar to his, in fact. My grandmother could summon several instances of what might loosely be called ESP, and my mother and sister both witnessed an inexplicable slamming of an entry door to our old house at the very time when my father had flat-lined after a heart attack. (On that occasion, he would be revived.)

There is a danger in equating such experiences with the eternal life of the spirit, which our faith and our higher inklings require that we index to a purposive goodness. A released soul would have better things to do than wander around raising hackles. Yet we glimpse here, I believe, something like the afterglow of the spirit's exit. We see, in other words, that there IS spirit, and that it does not conform to physical laws (which are all, in any case, eventually self-contradictory if carried to logical conclusion). That those of us living presently in a horrid tangle of car-harried streets and cookie-stamp subdivisions have few or no such encounters can hardly be surprising. Figs don't grow on thistles, as the Italians say. Why would you look for a shooting star in a tar pit? Spirits apparently revisit--once or repeatedly, briefly or with lingering affection--the places that meant most to them. I pity my own, however, if it should try to locate the tiny house where I grew up, or my grandmother's elegant antebellum home, or the residence that my wife and I built in Tennessee before a careerist hound (who prayed publicly and unctuously at the drop of a hat) chased us from it. All of those places have either been wiped from the map or altered beyond recognition. As for us migrant-professional types, our lifeline to special places severed, we blow like dead leaves in the wind to pursue a new job, a promotion, a more enviable bit of curbside. If we wanted to point to some plot of land and say, "This is the face of my past," we would spin and spin until our nose finished in the dirt.

These are the kinds of sobering reflection to which I am driven by the squalid spectacle of a degenerate people deciding how to divide its civilization's carcass in an impending election. Will the filthy-rich be permitted to make off with regal settlements after the collapse of insanely speculative ventures? Will they and the generally well-to-do, instead, be ordered to dish out goodies to the less fortunate? Will the bank be allowed to foreclose upon my mortgage? Will I have to fund my child's education out of my own pocket? Am I really expected to pay more for gas? What about my retirement account--my rulers aren't going to let that diminish in value, are they? Why should I have these worries to a degree greater than anyone else? Which candidate will give ME the best deal--will reach deepest into the pockets of others or multiply the nation's debt most recklessly in order to assure MY short-term comfort? I certainly don't want to hear a word about true fairness--about a flat tax, say, or a sales tax levied on every non-staple item which any consumer has money disposable to buy. No, fairness to me means raking more chips into my pile from the hands of those who can stack their counters to the ceiling... or to a level higher than mine, anyway.

The only enduring truth lies in the spirit. As we have chased spiritual afterglow from our scenes of loss with rabid restlessness and ephemeral vulgarity, so we have chased spiritual warmth from our daily lives with short-sighted hunger for selfish, material profit. We are a decadent people on the eve of receiving just what we deserve. If I were to die this evening, the only reason I wouldn't waft my way to Clonmel like Sean Baroid would be to linger at my son's pillow one last time.