more vulnerable thoughts

Cees Nooteboom


My reading this morning of the rather more congenial Cees Nooteboom has brought me back again to this idea, expressed rather differently by Headmaster Hawkes, that we inevitably become alienated from some of our cultural mythologies (while in the process of creating or establishing new ones). Hawkes described it as a society coming to have 'only a nominal understanding of its own faith', but Nooteboom's reflections are naturally more elusive, and more penetrating.

Nooteboom is looking at some sculptured sandstone figures in Aragon, and his reflections are worth quoting at length:

...the images of Creation, of Eve emerging from Adam's rib, of original sin and the expulsion from paradise, of monsters and taunters and of Cain the farmer and Abel the shepherd, the eternal panopticon to which we are becoming progressively blind, until our dwindling knowledge reaches the point where the whole show means as little to us as a symposium of Greek gods.
The ever accelerating mutations of progress have eroded the idea behind these images, leaving no more than a fable that you may or may not have heard. During my journey these thoughts have to be pondered over and over again. This is not intended as an exercise in nostalgia, but such encounters always lead to confrontation, something collides with something else, the definite past is still present in the stones, its age alone is enough to lend it gravity. But what does a thing mean when it has dropped out of its meaning, when it no longer means what it meant? Does that leave simply art, which is both accessible and not accessible? Or is it the very confrontation, the realization that you do not recognize the ideas of your own kind, that makes you so sure that one day your own thoughts too will fail to be understood? In that case what have I been looking for during all my travels? Perhaps it is the thrill of danger that such musings inspire, the sensation of the carpet being pulled out from under you, the desperate diachrony of those who venture further into the past than is good for them, not because they want it back so as to reinstate it the way fundamentalists do - quite the contrary, it is 'because they', as Ortega y Gasset says, 'love the past for its own sake', that which has ended and yet will never end because it lives on in the present.

I'm not sure that I love Christianity for its own sake, but I can certainly testify to the idea that it has ended and yet will never end in me. Perhaps I'm in love with the struggle with it, or at least captivated by this struggle. Most of my secular friends just find the issue boring and irrelevant, and I often envy them. I'm still not sure, and perhaps never will be, whether my bemusement and irritation with the world of faith is something I've chosen or something that has chosen me.