Une Autre Epoque

Sometimes people say that they feel they were born in the wrong time. You hear this from girls sighing at the end of a Jane Austen movie, just wishing that people still spoke so elegantly or dressed so well or knew how to court a lady. Those were the good old days. People had dignity then. Class.

It’s not so much the courting rituals that I covet. Certainly not. I consider myself fully appreciative of my modern freedoms: of dress, of speech, of study. Whisk me to a world with any kind of caste system, and I would flounder. John Locke runs through my veins. Put me in constrictive clothing and I get jittery and exhausted. I like people to say what they mean. Don’t give me the poetic runaround.

But there is something about a former age that I long for. There is a big part of me that mourns the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment. I feel at times that I am drowning in information and argument. Authority used to be in scripture, in hierarchy, in what one was told and what everybody just knew. Truth was looking up at the night sky and seeing pieces of heaven leaking through the blackness of earth’s blanket. God was physically up there, just far enough away, and all one had to do was to complete the work his or her role required and look up at night and know they were doing God’s work, and that they’d be with him someday.

Of course, there were myriad problems with this. When all people know is what they are told, they can be conned, they can be kept down. There is immense value into seeking one’s own solution to something, to equal opportunity. The monopoly on knowledge faded. Now everyone was responsible for figuring out the truth. It was a human responsibility, and the answer was found through experimentation, reason: human faculties.

And then the world exploded into more and more denominations, schools of thought, political parties. Separate groups, all claiming authority. This is what I mourn. The bright, affirmative concepts of “freedom” and “individuality” and “reason” lead to more and more divisions, people barking at each other. This is not the world as it is meant to be. Don’t tell me that it’s a positive, natural thing for me to be separated from my brothers and sisters by a sea of differing authorities and interpretations. My heart longs for unity. Not mindless conformity. But harmony. A sense of peace with one’s place in the world, with the piece of truth that everyone could grasp, a sense of community.

And now I am told we live in a postmodern age, where we can no longer bark at each other. We have been so divided for so long that we have given up. We can’t figure out who is right, so, everyone is. It’s not unity, it’s not harmony. It’s endless dissonance. Is it childish of me to want a resolution? I’m not hoping for utopia. I’m not proposing we join hands and sing “Imagine.” But there is something in me that aches for an authority. I feel that there must be real answers to the questions that everyone is trying to hack answers for. I admit that people are free, and that they should have the right to seek those answers. But I hate the divisions that those freedoms have created. And I don’t buy the dissonance.

Gosh, I must be religious.

Utopia (or, the worship service)

How easy it is to gather a throng and get them to sing. They come from everywhere, some eager, some grudging, but all end up in the same big room like a cathedral and look up at the same north star. Some start in with heart and gusto, and some feel separate and unsure. But the music plies them all, and there is a sway that sneaks in and stays. The music leaks into the lungs of them all, and slowly the air becomes condensed with the hopes and beliefs and good intentions of those hundreds. In the course of an hour, they have laid down their burdens and reservations and taken up with song.

And they believe that this song will change them and carry them through their days with this melody propelling their steps. They believe that their voices will have changed for singing this song, that their mouths will be from now on full of kind words they didn't know existed. They look around and see hands raised, bodies pulsing to this newly known rhythm. They see backs of heads; no faces, but how easy the faces are imagined-- joyous, benevolent, beautiful. In this room, there is a grace that makes everyone believe everyone else is beautiful.

Life makes sense here. One is alone, but surrounded, lifted up by this bright communal breath, full of sharp temporal understanding. The congregation is an ocean, united, crashing, making the same noise. A warm silence descends, and all pray, hoping and believing that their neighbors' prayers have the same voice, the one they sang the songs with.

Everyone walks away. Their walk home is full of lovely thoughts, thought hard. And then one phone call, one errand, one item on the checklist shakes off the pixie dust; bugs crawl back in the brain, the callous on the heart starts itself over again, and where has Utopia gone?