brothers and sisters

It's been raining again, nervous people are probably rushing the depleted stores once more for bottled water and other provisions. But it looks like it'll be a calm, pleasantly cooler day. A good day for reflection. (Like most of the others.)

If you asked me to name the film or stage show that had the greatest impact on me as a young person, I'd have to say South Pacific. I first saw the adaptation of James Michener's tale performed on the large outdoor stage at St. Louis's Municipal ("Muny") Opera.as a kid, in the intense humid midwestern summertime, in the middle of the civil rights struggles of the '60s, at a moment when I was having my consciousness raised about racial bigotry. I'd just seen Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, [clip] whose impact on me was also profound,  and would soon read my baseball hero Bob Gibson's ghosted memoir From Ghetto to Glory. Dr. King had been shot the previous summer. (I may in fact have seen this show at the Muny as early as 1963, but it was the '69 performance that I'm pretty sure I'm recalling.)

Michener caught a lot of snark from lit critics who thought his approach ham-handed or unsubtle or something, but he was a very good man. His "This I Believe" essay aired yesterday.

Around the world I have lived with my brothers and nothing has kept me from knowing men like myself wherever I went. Language has been no barrier, for once in India, I lived for several days with villagers who didn’t know a word of English. I can’t remember exactly how we got along, but the fact that I couldn’t speak their language was no hindrance. Differences in social custom never kept me from getting to know and like savage Melanesians in the New Hebrides. They ate roast dog, and I ate Army spam, and if we had wanted to emphasize differences, I am sure each of us could have concluded the other was nuts. But we stressed similarities and, so long as I could snatch a Navy blanket for them now and then, we had a fine old time with no words spoken.

It was in these islands that I met a beat-up, shameless old Tonkinese woman. She would buy or sell anything, and in time we became fast friends and I used to sit with her, knowing not a word of her curious language, and we talked for hours. She knew only half a dozen of the vilest English obscenities, but she had the most extraordinary love of human beings and the most infectious sense of this world’s crazy comedy. She was of my blood, and I wish I could see her now.

walking the trail

Another earnest treasure from the '50s "This I Believe" vault. There are many ways to light a candle. Louise ("We Took to the Woods") Rich: 

So now I have grown up. I don’t believe in myself anymore, not in myself alone. I do believe in myself as a member of the human race. I believe in the decency and sympathy and kindness of every man and woman and child that I meet. Nobody, not even Big Louise, can walk the trail alone. I know that now.

I believe also that I have an obligation. Whenever I see one of my brothers or sisters in trouble—a car off the road, the need of a cup of tea in my shabby living room by the elderly lady down the road who is lonesome—I am privileged to have the opportunity to repay, in a small measure, my debt.

I don’t know about God. He’s too big for me to understand. But I have seen his visage reflected in the faces of the people who have helped me through my hard times. I hope to live so that someday, someone will say, “Louise Rich? Oh sure, I know her. She isn’t so bad. She’s human.”

I believe in humanity.

conscience

What another of my favorite novelists, Wallace Stegner, believed in...

Conscience, not as something implanted by divine act, but as something learned from infancy from the tradition and society which has bred us...Man is a great enough creature and a great enough enigma to deserve both our pride and our compassion, and engage our fullest sense of mystery. I shall certainly never do as much with my life as I want to, and I shall sometimes fail miserably to live up to my conscience, whose word I do not distrust even when I can’t obey it. But I am terribly glad to be alive...

He was a Humean: social tradition rules, and mostly rules well. Except when it doesn't. Everyone should read Angle of Repose, Crossing to Safety, Spectator Bird... 

believers

The "This I Believe" testimonial I was trying to recall in class yesterday, from the young woman whose environmental credo is all the more poignant in light of her own tragic fate: Michelle Gardner-Quinn's "Reverence for all Life." Another favorite: astronaut Dan Tani's orbital optimism. And, as noted: Unitarian Robert Fulghum's version of the trans-end-dance.


Here's the title I mentioned in class, The Secular Conscience by Austin Dacey. It argues that discussions of "private" religious belief belong in the public sphere. The Times reviewer applauded its  "confidence in John Stuart Mill’s principle that every idea should be 'fully, frequently and fearlessly discussed,' lest it “be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.”


And here's the one I confused it with, also written in the spirit of J.S. Mill: Science and Nonbelief, by Taner Edis, who says "God is not a purely philosophical problem, and supernatural concepts are not insulated from scientific criticism."

Believe this

LA 5, StL 1. My team folded its tent much too quickly this year. I need a little consolation, in the form of a reminder from Crash Davis that baseball's only a game, & lots of things are more important. "This I Believe" was never so frank...

Margaret Mead

Another stirring profession of belief from yesteryear, this one from anthropologist Margaret Mead:

I believe that to understand human beings it is necessary to think of them as part of the whole living world. Our essential humanity depends not only on the complex biological structure which has been developed through the ages from very simple beginnings, but also upon the great social inventions which have been made by human beings, perpetuated by human beings, and in turn give human beings their stature as builders, thinkers, statesmen, artists, seers, and prophets.

We're "part of the whole living world," obviously. Just as obviously, the whole living world has yet to absorb this truth. We have a lot more building and thinking (etc.) to do, but it's great to have this radio archive of role models.

Atheism here & now

In the Beginning, Man Created God.

Taking a cue from English precedent, the campaign for open discussion of religion and philosophy has actually arrived in America."The intent of the campaign is to stimulate discussion of religion and its place in our society...the ads aren’t an attack on religious people but an affirmation of a different point of view."

Atheists have long tolerated the charge of being too "negative." They do need to be more affirming about what they're for.

For instance: the comic Penn Jillette affirmed, for This I Believe, that "there is no God."