For the first time in my career as a professor of literature, I think I understand why T. S. Eliot named his famous poem "The Waste Land." Yes, it was an apt name for the spiritual exhaustion of between-the-wars Europe, and it aptly referred to the waste land of Arthurian legend, wherein the seekers after the Grail were to heal the Maimed King and end the terrible enchantments laid upon the land. But I now think there's more. "Oed und leer das Meer," writes Eliot, "waste and void the Sea," alluding to the first verses of Genesis -- for we are told that before the creation of light, the earth was waste and void.
The Hebrew for that is tohu v'vohu, and those are words, especially tohu (vohu always appears doubled with tohu, and never on its own), with profound scriptural resonance. For a city laid waste is tohu, which might seem appropriate enough; but also, and primarily, the idols, the works of human hands, are tohu. They are nothingness, unreality, vacuity, inanity. It is not, in Jeremiah (for a prime example), that the false gods cannot deliver on their promises, so much as that they are null and void, as is, and this too Jeremiah insists upon, the reliance upon human power. In essence, every city that aspires to the condition of Babel sets itself up as an idol, a thing whittled away at or sculpted by human hands, from which we can expect no deliverance but rather slavery to nothingness; a fall into what is tohu v'vohu. To live in the city named Unreal is to be confronted, every day, with man's failure to trust in God, and his attempts, mostly pathetic, to provide for himself a little happiness, as does the woman with the gramophone, and the clerk carbuncular.
If Eliot is right, and I think he is, then secular humanism is a lapse back into Unreal City, that place of dashed human projects and fallen idols. It promises -- what? Lots of food, and warm houses, and few children, and the flickering blue light of a television screen. No holidays, no opening of the heart to something more vast than the heavens; no gazing with wonder upon the God-ordained beauty of a human body or of a human soul. Endless politics, but without a true polis; tools designed to supplant the human act, as a television is a substitute for talk, or play, or prayer; mass management of education, one juvenile unit after another; salvation, secured by poisons, pills, and white balloons, from the irruption of a child into our twilight city; amnesia, lest the nobility of our forefathers embarrass us, or lest we learn from their sins; a kind of aggressive bodily health, as of sleek cows and bulls. I imagine a great map of the earth's airways, with flights marked out from Unreal to Unreal.
Where is the real city to be found? It is as small as a mustard seed. It is like the leaven that a woman kneaded into three measures of flour. It is a pearl, found by a merchant. It is where two or three are gathered in the name of the king. Pilate scoffed at it, but ancient Rome, that unreal place, is gone, and it remains. The Communists scoffed at it, but red Moscow, that unreal place, is gone, and it remains. It is adorned as a bride for the bridegroom. Unreal smirks, or sneers, but the true city sings.
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