201.  Regarding the Value of 🌈 Magic 🌈

Recently some thoughts about the value of magic and its relationship to happiness flickered into my brain – thoughts triggered by watching (on the Turner Classic Movie channel) the 1950’s film “Member of the Wedding”, with Julie Harris.  First, let me clarify what I mean by “magic”.  I use that term to mean a sense of possibilities beyond “normal” reality – soul-soaring possibilities disconnected from pedestrian physical laws.  Possibilities often tenuously -- or deeply -- rooted in some whisper-thin or crystal clear sense of God.

I grew up in the 1940’s and 50’s, and I have come to believe that I was part of the last American generation to feel genuine wonder about our immense, astounding world – and universe.  Let me explain.

My childhood imagination had far wider, grander terra-incognita to explore than today’s wired-entangled children.  In the adventure sense of the word, there was serious “romance”. It was possible that there were still tribes nestled in some corner of the globe no foreigner had ever contacted; still wilderness areas so vast and empty that – who knew – maybe deep in some hidden valley or jungle some genuine variation of Shangri-la thrived –

-- some Oz just a tornado away.  Right here in America there were regional pockets of cultures that were fascinatingly different.  America, and the world, had not yet been sliced, diced, dissected, and homogenized.

It seemed to my age-12 television-less imagination (one channel would arrive in El Paso a year later) as though the sun rose out of a golden east, rainbow-shimmering in exotic, inconceivable adventures. 

It seemed as though the setting sun beckoned west to marvels glimmering mirage-like on a shining highway leading to an amazing, glorious future. 

To look into the midnight sky was to sense endless possibilities, and one of those distinct possibilities was that there was something beyond earthly reality – something infinitely more amazing.  

Long, long story short:  as the world shrank, so did the magic, and thanks to television and now the internet, the globe -- information-wise -- has shrunk to the size of one of those prize-winning pumpkins.  About the only thing we can’t entirely “explain” concerns matter so invisible that scientists can only theorize it exists by using unfathomable-to-non-geniuses mathematical extrapolations.  The human genome is being decoded, and the chemistry of the brain is being deciphered and mapped, and meddled with.  Even God – some would have you believe -- has been “explained” away.

So . . . back to Julie Harris and “Member of the Wedding”.  This movie, adapted from a successful Broadway play, revolves around the adolescent angst of a 12-year-old girl, played by Harris.  I had seen this movie a couple of times in years past, and while I wouldn’t call it flawless, it did have certain charms. 

As I alluded to earlier, something happened with this viewing.  Prior to the film starting, the TCM host said a few introductory sentences, one of them informing me that Julie Harris was actually 28 when the movie was shot. 

I was mildly stunned.  Previously she had seemed, well, not 12, but maybe 15 or even 18, and she was reasonably believable.  This time, as the movie unfolded, I – armed with my new knowledge -- couldn’t escape noticing how much older Harris now looked.  Hell – she looked 28!  Unavoidably, sadly -- my “suspension of disbelief” for the entire movie slowly collapsed, much like Jimmy’s cake left out in the rain.  

So – the exact same movie experience I had twice previously enjoyed had been irredeemably undermined by a single fact.  And it is here I arrive at my thoughts about modern happiness -- and the value of magic to happiness.  We are all now –

like the Joad family’s California-bound truck – terribly, heavily, over-burdened with thousands of Julie Harris magic-undermining facts.  “Hell no, Virginia, that Santa thing is bullshit!”   

We are, in a word, jaded – with a capital J.  In three hours of television we can easily see more stunningly beautiful women than your average soul saw in his or her entire life a century ago.  During my town’s annual July 4th fireworks extravaganza I see kids gazing -- not up at the flashes of brilliant colors and patterns, but down– texting.   Nothing fazes people – bizarre sexual practices (no longer bizarre); horribly gruesome murders; waltzing Siberian tigers; shuttles to the moon; panoramic tattoos; hair and dress styles that might as well be neon signs flashing “look at me, look at me -- I insist you look at me!” 

Nothing is shocking – the abnormal has been normalized.  Tens-of-thousands clamor to permanently exchange -- on national television or the web – their dignity and self-respect for a flickering moment of fame.  Notoriety and sex appeal are the two undisputed coins of the realm – astoundingly seductive, narcotic-like usurpers of the mystic.  In Western, educated circles, belief in God is in full retreat.

I believe it is this jaded negation of magic that leads more and more former god-seekers to use alcohol and other drugs to momentarily relax their brain’s clinched fist enough to release their reality-trapped souls – release them to briefly wander green pastures located a few inches, or a few miles, above the earth.

The relatively safe, comfortable, lives our intelligentsia enjoy, combined with (a) their secularism, (b) the current horrible misuse of religion by Islamists, (c) the Catholic Church’s child-molestation scandals,

(d) their tendency to regard all Evangelical Christians as snake-handlers, and (e) their determination to completely ignore – to “remove from the record”, so to speak -- the profound, historical good that religion has for millennia brought to human existence and instead focus entirely on its failures -- has misled these elites into a seriously flawed conclusion:  that mankind would be better off -- more moral, better behaved – if it adhered to a belief system rooted entirely in logic and hard science – i.e. -- in man-made morality. 

They are, I believe, profoundly wrong.  Magic is one of the key ingredients in coping with the harsh, brutal realities of life – ugly realities most of the world faces on a daily basis.  It graciously and mercifully bestows a sense that there is more here than meets the eye – possibly much more.  It is this sense of “something more” that makes millions upon millions of wretched lives bearable. 

Perhaps religion really is “the opiate of the people” – but perhaps most people really do need opiates.  The multitudes living wretched lives in Manila slums or inner-city gang-infested ghettos or violent, disease-ridden, collapsed African states, etc., etc. -- are not going to respond well – not well at all -- to some secular gospel telling them:

Alas, we have become victims of our “all-knowing” knowledge.  Our elites grow ever more confident that they "understand" everything, yet their morality is rooted in nothing deeper or more profound than an over-arching political correctness.  My childhood’s mantra “we are all brothers under the skin” has morphed into a PC Frankensteined “your group cannot really understand my group”.  My childhood’s Christian gospel of forgiveness and redemption has been replaced by permanent victimhood seeking permanent payback; my childhood’s “elegance” and “grace” have been replaced by “attitude” and “in your face”.

Like crazed prosthelytizers of Mr. Spock-style reason, our progressive elites relish destroying non-secular beliefs, always eagerly turning the harsh glare of their spotlights on any fallen prophet who espoused aspirations to something higher than unemotional logic -- while happily turning a blind eye to the millions of spiritually inspired acts of kindness and bravery that regularly percolate through our daily lives.

Worst of all, what makes these false prophets truly dangerous is that in their refusal to come to grips with the realities of human nature, they are seriously undermining our belief in ourselves – our belief that we are the children of something much higher than just natural selection.  Should we become engaged in a serious conflict with enemies that are united in an ardent belief in the rightness of their cause, and in their God and their God’s morality, we are very likely going to lose that war.  And, in case you haven’t noticed, that enemy is approaching -- and jaded sophistication and cynicism will be no match for its true believers.  Our “Julie Harris facts” are not only ruining our life’s “movies”, they are fracturing our society by undermining what were once our universally-held core beliefs about God and virtue and honor and the rightness and goodness of  America.  We are thus rendered much more vulnerable.

 We need to retrieve some magic, starting with retrieving our aspirations.  We need to deeply believe in the sanctity -- yes, SANCTITY -- of marriage and its value to society; we need to deeply believe that America, for all its flaws, is superior to any nation on earth; we need to deeply believe our free-market capitalism-based democracy, for all its flaws, is superior to any other form of government.  And these beliefs should come easily – for they are all entirely true. 

Most of all, we need to understand that it is not possible to “knowledge” away God.  The farther our celestial-probing instruments stare out into the universe, the more apparent it becomes that that universe is never, ever going to end – and that we will never, ever cross even the nearest reefs of that star-dusted ocean. 

We need to grasp with our hearts, minds, and both hands that – just as we will never cross that ocean -- we will never ever be able to rule out the possibility that there are dimensions in this inexplicable infinity that are infinitely beyond our mortal comprehension – that beyond our sight there exists magic – with a capital “M”.

We need to begin believing again – not fooling ourselves -- but rather admitting there are distinct possibilities we will never, ever, be able to discount.  Magic has long proven itself to be – when properly harnessed -- a most reliable and valuable beast of burden.  We must not allow “Julie Harris facts” to destroy the deep spirituality that longs to bloom in even the hardest of hearts. 

                        So, Willy, here's to "live and let live", and to the midnight sky,

                        And to our spirits' mutual blind spot

                        I, for all my faith, will never prove there's more than meets the eye

                        And you, for all your science, will never prove there's not

                                               .    .    .

I conclude these thoughts with an excerpt from a piece written by Anthony Daniels in The New Criterion entitled Flaubert's simple heart:

A few weeks ago, however, on a day for which, rather unusually, we had absolutely nothing planned, we had, after coffee but before breakfast, a short lesson in real literary, and not only literary, greatness. We woke up and I read Flaubert’s story, Un coeur simple, to my wife.

Shortly before, I had bought a cheap edition ($2) of this conte, complete with a scholarly apparatus that doubled the length of the story but still left the book slender enough. This apparatus was in itself not without interest. It was directed, I think, at secondary school pupils, who needed, apparently, to be told in a footnote that “the Napoleonic wars required numerous soldiers” (an assertion for the truth of which a book published by the same publisher was cited as evidence).

Even more necessary, apparently, was an explanation of Catholicism, for example that lighting a candle in a church is “a rite of popular piety to ask for a favour from God,” that until Vatican II Catholic services were conducted in Latin, that Catholic dogmas are “points of doctrine that must be accepted on pain of exclusion from the Church,” that “in confession, the Catholic confesses his sins to a priest who has the power to grant him God’s absolution,” and that the Holy Spirit is “one of the three persons who, according to the Christian religion, with God the Father and His Son, make up ‘one God in three persons.’” The Christian religion and its associated rituals were here referred to as if they were as alien to the current generation of children of the Eldest Daughter of the Church, France, as the witchcraft ceremonies of the Azande, and required the interpretation of an anthropologist to render at all intelligible. The footnote explaining First Communion to the young readers is heavy with irony: “In the religious France of the nineteenth century, they debated very seriously the opportune age at which a child should take communion for the first time.” One can just hear the squeals of incredulity that such a question should have once seemed important: for the strange thing is that the more officially multicultural we become, the less seriously we can take anyone’s point of view but our own.

As it happens, Un coeur simple is a magisterial example of how to do this; of how it is possible to enter into, and convey to others, a mental world that is not one’s own, indeed that is very alien to it, without the least disdain, condescension, or disapproval, and how the ability to do this suggests (though it does not prove in any formal sense) that there are more important or valuable things in life than mere cleverness or intellectual acuity.

Since Julian Barnes summarized the plot of Un coeur simple so elegantly in his novel Flaubert’s Parrot, I shall quote him to save myself the trouble of doing it not so well as he:

The narrator of Barnes’s novel (like me, a retired doctor) goes on to say, with justice:

Imagine the technical difficulty of writing a story in which a badly-stuffed bird with a ridiculous name ends up standing for one third of the Trinity, and in which the intention is neither satirical, sentimental nor blasphemous. Imagine further telling the story from the point of view of an ignorant old woman without making it sound derogatory or coy.

But actually the difficulty is not just technical. It is not merely that the writer has to engineer his sentences in an elegant way (Barnes himself is certainly capable, being one of the best stylists now writing in our language). It is also a question of emotional insight, obliteration of self, and emotional self-control. In one sentence of the narrator’s summary, which I have not yet quoted, the narrator (and I suspect Barnes himself) gives himself away. He cannot resist a snide remark that adds nothing to the summary qua summary, but is deeply revealing about his underlying attitude: 

Logic is certainly on [Félicité’s] side: parrots and holy ghosts can speak, whereas doves cannot.

To put the Holy Ghost into the plural is to satirize from a superior intellectual standpoint, precisely what Flaubert does not do, though he himself is no believer in the Holy Ghost. The tiny act of removing the definite article and adding the s to Ghost lets us know that we are back in the world of the metropolitan intellectual. But it is the very respect that Flaubert accords the beliefs of the simple heart, when he shares neither the beliefs nor the simplicity, that makes the story so deeply moving. Again Barnes, or at any rate his narrator (one should not confuse the two), shows not a simple heart, but a shrivelled one, when he says, “The parrot is a perfect and controlled example of the Flaubertian grotesque.” It would be hard to think of a word less appropriate for the parrot and Félicité’s relationship to it than “grotesque.”

Of course, no summary can do justice to the subtlety, acuity, or beauty of Flaubert’s story. The only real way of doing it justice would be to repeat it word for word. Let me, however, point to just a few instances, not by any means exhaustive.

We learn of Félicité’s disastrous love affair that was to have a permanent effect on her life. First comes a description of how she appeared after having spent fifty years as a servant:

Always quiet, her figure straight and her gestures restrained, she seemed like a woman of wood, functioning in an automatic way.

The account of her affair many years before then begins with a lapidary change pace and tone: “She had had, like any other woman, her love affair.”

At the age of eighteen, already an orphan, she meets a young man called Théodore at a village fête. On walking with her afterwards, he half-assaults her; later, he apologizes to her and attributes his conduct to having drunk so much. Félicité is not innocent, having been brought up among farm animals, but she is virtuous; she accepts Théodore’s apologies, and allows him to woo her. His ardor seems increased when she refuses to submit to him before marriage, but, at the last minute, he jilts her, marrying instead a rich widow to ensure that he is not conscripted into the army.

In her grief, she runs away to the small Normandy town of Pont l’Évêque, where she immediately meets Madame Aubain, the widow who takes her on (at the lowest possible rate) as a maid of all work. We already know that that is where she will stay because the story begins as follows:

For half a century, the bourgeois women of Pont l’Évêque envied her servant, Félicité.

For a hundred francs a year, she cooked and did the housework, sewed, washed, ironed, knew how to bridle a horse, fattened the poultry, beat the butter, and remained loyal and faithful …

With the greatest possible economy and humanity, that makes most psychiatrists seem like intolerable windbags, Flaubert shows us how one disastrous experience can affect the rest of a life, especially where the person is as vulnerable as Félicité: orphaned, illiterate, poor, and without protectors or confidants. And all this without sentimentality, because we cannot imagine that her life with Théodore, had the marriage gone ahead, would have been any better—quite the reverse.

Though her life appears dried up, Félicité (the very name is ironical) demonstrates both a need and a great capacity for unselfish love. She loves Madame Aubain’s children, taking happiness in their happiness, and when the daughter dies of tuberculosis she spends two days and nights praying over the body.

She grows deeply attached to her nephew Victor, having been reunited by chance with her sister and becoming immediately fond of her son because of her great need for fondness. Victor goes to be a sailor, but dies in Havana of yellow fever, and of course this is another hammer blow to Félicité’s heart. For someone with an interest in medical history, incidentally, what Flaubert tells us is illuminating:

Much later, Félicité learned of the circumstances of Victor’s death from the captain himself. They had bled him too much for the yellow fever. Four doctors did it at once. He died immediately, and the chief said:

“Good! Another one!”

The last living object but one of Félicité’s love is Loulou the parrot. The bird comes to her not by a series of coincidences, but by a series of chances. A French consul who returns from South America settles in the area with a parrot that he has brought home; but after the revolution of 1848, he is promoted to a prefecture. He cannot take the parrot with him, so he presents it to Madame Aubain as a souvenir. Finding it noisy and inconvenient, she consigns it to Félicité to look after. Félicité falls in love with the parrot.

Loulou dies, and Félicité, desolate, has him stuffed. Then Madame Aubain, learning that she has been swindled of much of her property, also dies; and Flaubert conveys Félicité’s essential, and one might say existential, modesty and humility:

That Madame died before her troubled her, seemed to her contrary to the natural order of things, monstrous and unthinkable.

After Madame’s death, the house was put up for sale:

What worried [Félicité] mostly was having to leave her room—so comfortable for poor Loulou.

To this sentence, in my cheap edition, there is a footnote to help the adolescents understand what Flaubert meant. It says: “An example of the irony of the author towards his protagonist who treats the parrot as a living being.” This footnote, in my opinion, is an example of the corruption of youth in the direction of crudity by a cheap rationalist, for surely Flaubert intended no irony here, but rather a compassionate description of the universal human tendency—and need—to keep loved ones alive in the mind after they have died. (Twenty-five years after the death of his friend Alfred Le Poittevin, Flaubert said that he thought about him every day.) Perhaps the editor sets his pupils the task of going down to the local cemetery and persuading people who come to place flowers on the graves that their activity is redundant, since the person under the slab is dead and not in a position to appreciate the flowers.

Félicité’s final love, the one to which the love of Loulou leads her, is the love of God. The beauty of this bird, even when badly stuffed with its wires protruding though its feathers, persuades Félicité that the catalogue of loss and suffering that she has endured in her life is not without higher purpose, that all the love that she has poured into vessels that have broken has not been lost. Incidentally, a visit to any cemetery with nineteenth-century graves will soon persuade anyone that Flaubert has not manipulated his story for cheap emotional ends: such cemeteries are full of tombs of children who died forty years before their parents, “contrary to the natural order of things”; even today it is not impossible to find a grave of a child who died aged four fifty years ago, with flowers placed upon it by parents.

I once heard a Catholic theologian of the school of Liberation Theology denounce the more traditional forms of religious belief as “merely consolatory”; the proper task of religion, in his opinion, was to build heaven on earth, here and now. (I thought at the time of the Tower of Babel; now I would think of the Muslim fundamentalists.) Presumably he thought a time would come when life would be so perfect that Man would need no consolation: the existential equivalent of the time when society was so perfect that no one would have to be good. Suffice it to say that I do not see that time coming soon.

Neither, I think, did Flaubert. What his wonderful story shows us (not, I hasten to add, in any preacherly fashion) is the redeeming power of love. This love is not so much in return for any service rendered to us by the world, for the world has played Félicité, for example, many dirty tricks, but an approach to the world that in the end is rewarded by an assurance that the world is itself good and that suffering is not arbitrary but has some meaning. Whether or not this is true, it is certainly consolatory in a way in which we all need consolation sooner or later.

Not long ago, I shared a platform with a famous Australian intellectual. The subject of our deliberations was what it took to be good. She stated that it took, as a precondition, high intelligence and intellect. I found this profoundly horrible (as well as obviously untrue) because of what was unsaid: that only one percent of the human population possessed the intelligence and intellect.

Flaubert, who was no Pollyanna when it came to his assessment of humanity, would not have agreed with this, as is shown by Un coeur simple. In it, he managed the difficult technical feat of making someone interesting who was good but ordinary and not particularly intelligent, and he also managed the far more difficult emotional and ethical feat of entering the world of someone with whose outlook he did not agree, and portraying it with sympathy, understanding, and admiration, recognizing in it the beauty that it possessed. Here is true tolerance, in a non-ideological sense; it is rare in an age of diversity in which ignorant armies nevertheless insist on clashing by night.