September 1, 1939
The date of Germany's invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II.
Reading September 1, 1939 by Auden, I was suddenly struck by the date and the trajectory of my life. Born January 4 in 1939, I was that child of a “low dishonest decade” but not yet aware of the “waves of anger and fear” that “circulat[ed] over the bright and darkened lands of the earth.”
And so another September has come, not at the beginning, but at the end of my life, at a critical moment that has already seen its full share of anger and fear.
We may all want to pause and reflect amidst the lies and distortions, as “the wise men” (and a few women) of public life, fill the news cycles, beating on a discordant drum.
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
Lost perhaps, but not abandoned, even when the news is filled by searches for the missing and guesses as to an unknowable future. There was a time during my life when uncertainty was at arm’s length, as we came to believe that the patterns, the cycles of fortune and misfortune had been smoothed or silenced. It is not so on this September 1, 2023.
Now, all we have it seems “is a voice”
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
And yet there is not chaos. There is order, but of a kind. Naïve comforts and the simplistic sedatives we call our principles may not withstand the winds that shake all nations in a fury of promise, hope and fear. Clarity requires the rigor of a new kind of education. A preparation for life, and citizenship, that embraces complexity and learns to construct new meanings out of old truths.
So we say with Auden:
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame