William Deresiewicz’s admonishment was perfect for the first week of 2023. Honestly, I’ve felt like I was living in The Twilight Zone until this article enabled me to understand why I’ve felt untethered from the world, let alone my particular place on it.
“To say that history will judge is to make the future our sock puppet, our ventrilo…
William Deresiewicz’s admonishment was perfect for the first week of 2023. Honestly, I’ve felt like I was living in The Twilight Zone until this article enabled me to understand why I’ve felt untethered from the world, let alone my particular place on it.
“To say that history will judge is to make the future our sock puppet, our ventriloquist’s dummy. It is to engage in a particularly feeble form of imaginative compensation.” Actually laughed at this one (there were so many), like it was a glee-filled Christmas when I was a kid. Nobody says this stuff! Well, very few say it. Perhaps they, like I (until now) haven’t had the perspective to articulate something we’ve known in our bones for such a long time. For myself, I’ve felt an irritation to these platitudes, but never stopped to break them down, to give any thought to what the words actually mean. I’m terribly grateful to Deresiewicz this morning (and will be for many mornings to come) for his critical thinking and the laser sharp skill with which he clarifies it for those of us who don’t run with the front of the herd. I was close but I may never have gotten here.
Two months into lockdown, a publisher asked me to write a piece for a series he called “The Coronavirus Dispatches.” In my piece, I talked about the Martin Luther King arc quote. MLK, too, was inspired by those words, first said in 1871, by the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker in a speech or a sermon—as Deresiewicz’s article astutely points out, they are often used in the same way—addressing his opposition to slavery in America.
Here’s what I wrote:
“When I am lost in this upheaval, when I read about flattening the curve to slow down the spread of this new coronavirus, I think instead of bending the arc.
“’The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’
“Three years ago, my brother Harry Nicholson wrote this description of Parker’s words:
“‘That long arc of the moral universe? Doesn’t look so much like a rainbow as a series of thunderbolts, broken and bent, and soldered with mud into a rickety, dangerous bridge from perilous precipice to a leased Eden. But the continual building of it, and it’s maintenance, is what justice is and what justice does.’
“I include my brother’s description of the moral arc of justice because it gives me permission to see it for what it is, an imperfect arc. My greatest heartaches have always been predicated on the ridiculous notion of a transformation that will be perfect – one where the arc is a refraction of light – a glorious, multicolored spectrum, traversing the whole sky – requiring nothing of me but to wait for the sun on a rainy day.
“To look at it instead as what we build with the broken shards of our wreckage and hold together with band-aids and spit, continually building and patching that fragile bend toward justice, makes it seem possible. It will not be pretty. It will not give us everything we want. It will be hard work maintaining it. But it is possible. Great upheaval brings great change. It brings incredible hardships, but in my solitude (a very different thing than isolation) I have found comfort in looking to history, marking the pendulum’s continual swing back and forth between what seems to be imminent ruin and the justice of our leased Eden.”
So, I thank Mr. Deresiewicz for sharing his view from the head of the herd. For me, ignorance is never bliss.
William Deresiewicz’s admonishment was perfect for the first week of 2023. Honestly, I’ve felt like I was living in The Twilight Zone until this article enabled me to understand why I’ve felt untethered from the world, let alone my particular place on it.
“To say that history will judge is to make the future our sock puppet, our ventriloquist’s dummy. It is to engage in a particularly feeble form of imaginative compensation.” Actually laughed at this one (there were so many), like it was a glee-filled Christmas when I was a kid. Nobody says this stuff! Well, very few say it. Perhaps they, like I (until now) haven’t had the perspective to articulate something we’ve known in our bones for such a long time. For myself, I’ve felt an irritation to these platitudes, but never stopped to break them down, to give any thought to what the words actually mean. I’m terribly grateful to Deresiewicz this morning (and will be for many mornings to come) for his critical thinking and the laser sharp skill with which he clarifies it for those of us who don’t run with the front of the herd. I was close but I may never have gotten here.
Two months into lockdown, a publisher asked me to write a piece for a series he called “The Coronavirus Dispatches.” In my piece, I talked about the Martin Luther King arc quote. MLK, too, was inspired by those words, first said in 1871, by the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker in a speech or a sermon—as Deresiewicz’s article astutely points out, they are often used in the same way—addressing his opposition to slavery in America.
Here’s what I wrote:
“When I am lost in this upheaval, when I read about flattening the curve to slow down the spread of this new coronavirus, I think instead of bending the arc.
“’The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’
“Three years ago, my brother Harry Nicholson wrote this description of Parker’s words:
“‘That long arc of the moral universe? Doesn’t look so much like a rainbow as a series of thunderbolts, broken and bent, and soldered with mud into a rickety, dangerous bridge from perilous precipice to a leased Eden. But the continual building of it, and it’s maintenance, is what justice is and what justice does.’
“I include my brother’s description of the moral arc of justice because it gives me permission to see it for what it is, an imperfect arc. My greatest heartaches have always been predicated on the ridiculous notion of a transformation that will be perfect – one where the arc is a refraction of light – a glorious, multicolored spectrum, traversing the whole sky – requiring nothing of me but to wait for the sun on a rainy day.
“To look at it instead as what we build with the broken shards of our wreckage and hold together with band-aids and spit, continually building and patching that fragile bend toward justice, makes it seem possible. It will not be pretty. It will not give us everything we want. It will be hard work maintaining it. But it is possible. Great upheaval brings great change. It brings incredible hardships, but in my solitude (a very different thing than isolation) I have found comfort in looking to history, marking the pendulum’s continual swing back and forth between what seems to be imminent ruin and the justice of our leased Eden.”
So, I thank Mr. Deresiewicz for sharing his view from the head of the herd. For me, ignorance is never bliss.