"Swann had, in fact, reached an age the philosophy of which - supported, in his case, by the current philosophy of the day, as well as by that of the circle in which he had spent most of his life, the group that surrounded the Princess des Laumes, in which one's intelligence was understood to increase with the strength of one's disbelief in everything, and nothing real and incontestable was to be discovered, except the individual tastes of each of its members - is no longer that of youth, but a positive, almost a medical philosophy, the philosophy of men who, instead of fixing their aspirations upon external objects, endeavour to separate from the accumulation of the years already spent a definite residue or habits and passions which they can regard as characteristic and permanent, and with which they will deliberately arrange, before anything else, that the kind of existence which they choose to adopt shall not prove inharmonious."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 296
There is a point in life when intelligence and sophistication and disbelief becomes absolutely exhausting. On the now famous Trip of Excellence with my great friend Sanford Zale we had this running friendly argument about which age is better, the Enlightenment or the Romantic, with Sanford favoring the former and me the latter. While we were mainly play-acting to keep our sanity while driving thousands of miles, we did truthfully come down on the sides we had chosen. I think I've been fighting a battle, largely unconsciously, over the last few years between faith and reason, as, I suppose, most people do, so I shouldn't make too much of it. Year ago I wrote an unpublished novel (thankfully, because it really was quite bad), which started off as an exercise that celebrated the power of the intellect, and in the end, essentially organically, became an affirmation of the heart. Novels tend to write themselves, and mine had become something quite different than its initial intent. By the conclusion the protagonist (and more importantly, in this case, the author), without having anything as dramatic as an It's a Wonderful Life moment, came to understand that the mind if left alone can justify any sort of behavior. Back when I ran Playboy to the blind in Atlanta I remember reading an article where some man had researched affairs and placed them in a number of categories, one of which was Maintenance Affairs. This would be affairs which actually allow you to stay in your marriage because they provide something that the marriage was lacking, which could be sexual or it just be someone who actually enjoys going to the museum. At the time I thought this was quite interesting and insightful, but maybe I liked it because it provided a lovely justification for bad behavior. Maybe I've just reached the point in life where I want to believe in something, and not just my steadfast belief in disbelief. In Nasr's brilliant The Heart of Islam he talks about secular fundamentalism, which doesn't get nearly as much attention as Christian fundamentalism or Islamic fundamentalism or Hindu fundamentalism. When I first read that book I was really taken aback because I realized that, at that particular moment in life, I was pretty guilty of being a secular fundamentalist - my default setting was that people of faith clearly didn't understand what they were talking about, and was in many ways as close-minded as the worst sort of religious fundamentalist. Maybe the reason why I found this so unsettling was because I was already beginning to feel this internal struggle and, in classic cognitive dissonance, was reconciling it by being so close minded to issues of faith. A long road awaits on this one.
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| The stack of books sitting next to me while I was working, which somehow seemed a fitting metaphor for the discussion. |
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