This I Believe

This series is called This I Believe, but I am not sure I myself can go much beyond, this I generally think, for I am one of those people afflicted with a rebellious curiosity, an almost fatal gift for seeing both sides of a question. I’ve tried to turn these handicaps—for in every field they do handicap belief—into virtues by telling myself that one only learns anything about life from an endless process of dialogue: dialogues with other people and dialogues with oneself. But to that there is one hitch: dialogues ought to have a general sense of direction. If only I could feel, as many writers do, that writing, just writing—well an end in itself—I should be perfectly content. I should write as well as I could, enjoy myself as much as possible, and wait for death in the happy certainty of extinction.

The trouble is that most of the time I don’t feel that at all. An art, any art—writing, for example—without dedication seems to be not worth having. But dedication to what? I suppose the answer must be, to a consistent idea of the world’s purpose. I’d like to think of my end life, and everybody else’s, as itself an art, with its varieties of color and tempo, its gifts and pleasures, its disappointments and hopes, all to some extent under control. I like to imagine myself perfecting that control all the time—if there was a blast, not to waste a single heartbeat. And if I get what I want, I shall in the end have built a small castle of civilization, so to speak, and held it successfully against the enemies who besiege all of us, night and day. But small castles aren’t much good unless they are part of a general defensive system. And so I believe, and believe in it strongly, that the civilized part of mankind ought to be guarding and extending its positions consciously, and all the time.

But even that isn’t enough, because of a horrid uncertainty about what happens when we die. Suppose we even accept the possibility of continuing after that, in some form. Then everything we do at this very moment affects us forever, and the art of living becomes, in the most literal sense, infinitely more complicated. And what does one do about that? Does one assume that truth is a little bit different for everybody, or that everybody ought to reach the same conclusions, more or less?

I generally think—for as I’ve said, I find it hard to assert, I always believe—that the Christian tradition, as it has been defined by successive centuries, lies as near truth as we shall get in this world. It gives full escape for dialogue, it gives a meaning to writing and all the other arts; it enables the human race to participate in a coherent act of creation. And I like the Christian sense that we are still only on the threshold of history. At any rate, I like it better than the alternative notion: that our one function is to get and spend and make a few patterns in the sand until such time as the scientists have at last learned enough to blow us all sky high.