Memorial Day 2021

A further thought or two on the sun on the horizon

The sun on the horizon has been an interesting symbol.  As the last delegates were signing the new Constitution at the end of the Constitutional Convention, Madison wrote in his journal:

Doctor Franklin, looking towards the President’s chair, at the back of which a rising sun happened to be painted, observed to a few members near him, that painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art, a rising, from a setting, sun. I have, said he, often and often, in the course of the session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting; but now at length, I have the happiness to know, that it is a rising, and not a setting sun.

We might pause to consider the implications of this celebrated meme.  The starkness of endings is etched on our minds.  We are left with the empty chair, the abandoned toy and the last letter from a dead soldier son. 

And, our own time of life is short.  And even when the sun does rise in the morning, the day before us is no more or less than the day just remember.  Its repetition only a further irony.  For continuation is not progress, only a reprieve from a final end. 

Thus, even the pledge of a rising sun is no comfort for those who struggle in the grasp of seemingly unalterable forces, who survive on a handful of rice, who search hostile streets for work, who bear the waste and suffering of war and despotic rule. 

Do we take too great a comfort in continuation as an anodyne for our time?  Franklin lived his life on the edge of a future he believed in, although he had lived through experiences that would have challenged such optimism in a lesser mind.

It is this that we honor in the American experience.  It is this that we celebrate, even as we mourn, on Memorial Day. 

We take from experience the branch seemingly withered and dead and see clearly the emerging nobs of new life on the end.  I remember in this trying and still inhospitable Spring, Archibald MacLeish lines from the play JB:

I would not sleep here if I could

Except for the little green leaves in the wood

And the wind on the water.

Or perhaps another quote from MacLeish should be with us in these times of partisan fatigue and bitterness:

“To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”