On a Ship to the Outer Solar System

[Image: “At the Hinge of Daylight (Carmel-by-the-Sea, California),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

I’m going to start this Friday post, uncharacteristically, with a quotation from a source other than whiskey river — and not remotely a source I’d usually cite. (Fear not; the river‘s turn is coming.) It’s this:

The World Is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. —Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

(William Wordsworth [source])

In the face of so much wrongness in mid-2022 — I won’t bore you (or raise your blood pressure) with a catalog of specifics — who doesn’t sometimes dream, like ol’ Bill, of frolicking with the gods of antiquity? especially if the alternative is (as it seems to be) more bad news from every quarter?

Now let’s consider this, from whiskey river:

Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an emotion, merely “subjective,” and therefore that all affections are more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons. But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong.

(Wendell Berry [source])

…and this, not from whiskey river (and a pretty fair distance from William Wordsworth, for that matter):

I spent most of my [young] life angry, a chip on my shoulder, afraid. At some moment I simply changed my mind. I decided to be happy more or less, no matter the circumstance. Whatever I have to work with, and that’s not a lot really, I tell myself: imagine you are on a ship to the outer solar system—every single experience on this earth would be welcome, good or bad. Be on that ship, for one day this will all be over. Treasure it all. Be a joyful noise.

(Rickie Lee Jones [source])

Wordsworth wasn’t wrong to feel angry and frustrated with current events. (Haha, right: like I’m sure his ghost looks down upon my approval and sighs with relief.)

But really, at any given time in recorded history, you can find many, many smart, good people who believed that the world had gone to sh!t in their lifetimes. What’s hard for anyone to bear in mind is that those lifetimes (let alone the sh!t years) are mere blips in the universe’s — or the planet’s, or their neighborhood’s — history. Over centuries and millennia, the quality of “things” smooths out. And if anything, things — the arc of human history — tend to get better over long spans of time.

The difference for our age, I think, is climate change. I don’t know that I’ll live to see how it all plays out, but I mean, come on: we collectively as well as individually simply will not live forever. And all the angry storms, floods, droughts, fires, widespread extinctions of other species — all that, I believe, is pretty much just the world expressing its distaste for us. We’ve pushed it to the limits of its patience: we are too much with the world. I doubt that we’ll “win” in the contest of wills, nature vs. humanity.

But even if my fear is right, or even if everyone else’s — that war, indecent human politics, rampant capitalism, racism, transphobia, etc., are going to destroy us or ours — is right, well… it doesn’t matter. In the meantime, we can live our lives as we maybe should have been living them all along: just paying attention to what and who are in front of us at the time. We can have happiness. We just have to choose it.