780. “so true”
Truths … are too often considered as so true, that they lose all
the power of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the
soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.
Coleridge, from Aids to Reflection
I take Coleridge’s point here to be that the power of truth comes into being only in a struggle with an army or whisper of doubt. Its only hope for rescue from a listlessness worse than death, an absolute infirmity where it shares a bed with the least interesting mistake, is to make it new enough to take it out of the airless realm of the universally acknowledged.
Before I met him, my first boyfriend had another boyfriend. Sometimes, to recall the thrill of their romance, the two of them would go out to a club and pretend they didn’t know each other, and act like they were meeting for the first time. Genius!
Note: “Power ceases in the instant of repose” (Emerson).
Stephen Crane
What a crazy little simile! It helps mark the overwrought and oddly amped transition from war to peace at the end of The Red Badge of Courage (1895). Strange pastoral, the peace that Crane describes; a peace that surpasses any common understanding, any understanding of the common. The weird guy at the center of the story has gained some degree of honor in the eyes of other men, and surpassed the need for more; he is happy and ready to leave behind (at least today) “the red sickness of battle,” a redness, from where he stands, at least as much the color of shame as the color of blood. As he walks away from the field of conflict, he walks away as well from the fear that his cowardice will be found out there; as that field fades, so too does his term of service in the toils of social engrossment; by the end, all bets, all rules of engagement are off, replaced by a most wacky garden scene:
For a time this pursuing recollection of the tattered man took all elation from the youth’s veins. He saw his vivid error, and he was afraid that it would stand before him all his life. He took no share in the chatter of his comrades, nor did he look at them or know them, save when he felt sudden suspicion that they were seeing his thoughts and scrutinizing each detail of the scene with the tattered soldier.
Yet gradually he mustered force to put the sin at a distance. And at last his eyes seemed to open to some new ways. He found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them truly. He was gleeful when he discovered that he now despised them.
With this conviction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, nonassertive but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point. He had been to touch the great death and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.
So it came to pass that as he trudged from the place of blood and wrath, his soul changed. He came from hot plowshares to prospects of clover tranquilly, and it was as if hot plowshares were not. Scars faded as flowers.
It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks—an existence of soft and eternal peace.
Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.
An old story: for a self bound up with society to escape society, it must escape from itself. The individuality of this flickering character, dubious from the get-go, is freed by the end of individuation altogether. The new world “of soft and eternal peace” is a world for him all right, except that this him has relinquished all characterizing borders: “Scars faded as flowers”—but whose scars? To lose the marks of pain is to lose the marks of the self.
A specific twist on an old story: getting away from a society whose defining badge is men at war can be as much murder as remaining there.
Notes:
1. “a lover’s thirst”—what a crazy little phrase! Both what it purports to describe (a desire for images) and, before that, the very idea that a lover’s yearning feels like thirst.
2. The pastoral escape from society this passage describes makes itself dense with abstraction.