Crisis as Chrysalis: Hard Times Forge a New Self
The good news about the bad news
My worst times have been my most instructive. They showed me who I was and wasn’t and how to be better. They crashed through my complacencies and scared the devil out of me. I would never repeat them or, having survived them, erase those experiences from my awareness. Education hurts – and hardens. “Out of life’s school of war,” taught Nietzsche, “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
This paradox blankets our hellacious national moment with a grim satisfaction. Never in my years has America been more at risk. Until our Second Civil War concludes, we won’t know who won or the cost of victory. The casualties will likely be steeper than any of us imagine – both in lives and hopes. All civilization may be lost to this revived brutality.
Oh to be living in another hour! But since we’re not, let’s pull up a chair, hang up our jackets, and take in the show. For sure you’ve never seen anything like it. Though I predicted this calamity, I never really believed it could happen. Wide-eyed I watch the turpitude and mendacity of our misleaders and the pusillanimity of their enablers: who’d have thought such vileness possible in our educated epoch? I watch myself reacting to the shocks, oscillating unpredictably between determination and despair. I watch my fellow partisans waking to our peril and weighing their choices (fight or flee? shout or shush?). I’m keen with curiosity what words I might contribute to the conversation. Never have our words been more urgent – mine, yours, all – to discover our whereabouts on the map of time and subdue our surging souls.
I’m a wreck. You too, I’m guessing. Everyone knows we’re careening but nobody knows toward what. We’re crash-landing but where – safely in a lucky meadow or fatally into the freezing sea? We shiver on pins and needles, our hearts in our throats.
From the wreck, if we survive, a new me will emerge – crisis as chrysalis. Will I admire my species more or less? Will I sprint to my finish line, energized by my chance, or crumple in indolent gloom? A few times in my life I endured what I believed I couldn’t. These are the episodes I remember with pride. When the going got tough, I got going – good for me!
Whatever emerges will differ essentially from what went before. No more “same old,” no going back. We will have encountered our vulnerability. The day kids discover death, they graduate from innocence, never to return. These days we’re facing the death of an ideal we’d believed, if not eternal, durable to the horizon. We were safe in our house. After housebreakers, we’ll never be safe again. How will we cope?
Veterans typically recall combat as their most vivid period. Never before or since had they felt so thrillingly alive. Yeats captured this weird exaltation in “An Irish Airman foresees his Death,” one of the best poems ever:
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
Would we were elsewhere but thank God we’re here.