When I taught Freshman Composition, I tried to vary the reading selections I used as examples of rhetorical models. I didn’t do this because I thought my syllabus might become redundant—after all, my students were reading the selections for the first time—but I wanted to keep my own perspective fresh. However, I never could find a better example of comparison-contrast than Mark Twain’s essay, “Two Views of a River,” and I returned to it repeatedly over the years. It’s easy to find it on the web now just by searching for the title. Apparently, a few thousand other English instructors have had the same experience.

 

When I read Thaddeus Kozinski’s essay “The Theological Origin and, Hopefully, End of Modernity” on the First Things blog yesterday, Twain’s two views came to mind—along with my own personal experience of “two views,” which, in egocentric youth, I believed was unique to me, and which I’ve long since understood to be universal. Twain recalls his boyhood impressions of the Mississippi, its mystery and magic, and contrasts those impressions with what he knows as an adult, a practical, down-to-earth “reading” of the river necessary for safe navigation. He concludes with a rumination of how much has been gained by his adult knowledge and how much has been lost. It’s a good question and one we all contend with at some point in our lives.

 

The tragedy (I use the word decisively) is that, as our knowledge expands with age and experience, our childhood wisdom diminishes. Sometimes it vanishes completely, leaving us old and empty. But our Lord told us clearly that, unless we become as little children, we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. We know intuitively that is true—even those among us who don’t believe he spoke as the Son of God and source of all wisdom—like many of the romantic poets, who sat around the ruins of monasteries and grieved for they-knew-not-what while writing odes to childhood.

 

Personally, my own happy re-discovery came about via J.R.R. Tolkien. I could never understand the profound magnetism The Lord of the Rings held for me, bordering on obsession, until I read a phrase in the St. Austin Review (I’m sorry I can’t remember the issue or the author) that referred to Tolkien’s “re-enchantment of nature.” Simple, I know, but it was a sudden light in the darkness. All puzzle pieces literally fell into place, along with a flood of memory, and the realization that I had, thanks to Tolkien, found “that which was lost.” I ceased to question the cause of my great good fortune and simply gave thanks to God. 

 

And now, just as that single phrase in StAR opened for me the door of my personal memory, Kozinski’s essay opens the same door for universal memory. We all know, intuitively, just as Twain knew, that we have collectively experienced a profound loss. Some of the romantic poets knew, but lacked the courage to confront it, even as they wandered among the ruins. Wordsworth came close in one line, “the child is father to the man,” but, dismissing intellectual inquiry as he did, could not articulate it even poetically. Kozinski’s essay, overtly engaging intellectual inquiry, manages to cite the loss—Twain’s, Wordsworth’s, my own, the grief that modernity has brought to us all. How he manages that lies in the essay’s title. It’s of theological origin. Because we always knew—didn’t we?—that the loss was too deep for any merely scientific cause, even too deep for the powers of a poet. Vaguely we knew that the long slow death began sometime around the Enlightenment and the birth of modern science, and we more or less loosely connected the loss of faith to the gain of science. But why should that be so? Why must we pursue godhood in our quest for scientific knowledge and thus become something less than human? And why must we lose our wonder of the river in gaining navigational knowledge? The answer is that we don’t have to. The sundering is completely artificial. The Great Divorce never really happened at all. Other forces were at work, and they were not those of intellectual maturation . . . quite the contrary. And amazingly, once identified, they vaporize. It works that way sometimes—sometimes a brief essay on a blog, or just a single short phrase, can become a golden key that will open a door out of the darkness.