Reason and Ectasy
Submission to reason for the first eight, but not the last, inning.
“When to the heart of man
Is it any less than a treason
To go with the drift of things
To bow with grace to reason
And accept the end of a love or a season?”
What is it about reason that seems lacking, even sterile? Or at best incomplete? Reading Submission, a novel by Michel Houellebecq, a book that I’m told is part of serious conversations in Europe, this seems an important question. Perhaps, THE question for our times.
The above stanza from Robert Frost suggests an answer. Indeed, much of Western literature of the past 200 years echoes with dissatisfaction over the way in which our elite culture has elevated reason. They seem to be saying, and I feel like I am agreeing, that the “human stuff” of which we are made (cf. DNA) does not align with the rational humanism of the Enlightenment, from which so much of current civilization and culture has been seeded. How can we reconcile cold reason with soaring elation?
Last night I realized that the answer lay at hand. In fact in front of me as I watched my favorite baseball team achieve an unexpected doubleheader sweep against the defending World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers. Both a defiance of the odds by the very fact of victory, but more astonishing (satisfying) by several (not just one but several) moments when victory was taken from the very jaws of defeat (a hackneyed phrase that I choose to keep as a way to explain the heart stopping, joyful moments in sports that Bart Giamatti so well explains in his final gift of inspiration, the short monograph, Take Time for Paradise.)
Improbable, impossible, a sky bolt, random magic as if destiny, A God smiling on the earth.
Are such experiences of emotional freedom an answer for the limitation of an Age of Reason?
Perhaps. But not, I would add, by lifting us from the paths of reason. Our task is to retain clear sight, science as we call it, without denying the power of art, in all its many voices, to transcend our “surly bonds.”
I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence.
Hov'ring there, I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air…
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high un-trespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
— John Gillespie Magee