This time of year the weather makes me think about Faulkner. One Sunday earlier this month I set out on an early morning run that’s become for me a weekend ritual: park outside Coburns’ General Store and run a 5-mile route, pick up the Sunday papers and whatever else we need to get through the day, and head home for a big breakfast.
This particular Sunday felt suspended between two seasons, with a ghostly mist that blurred my glasses and melting snow that fanned from the roadside into the woods. It is this seasonal limbo and its promise of death that makes me think of William Faulkner and particularly his novella The Bear, a coming-of-age tale of a young man born in the American South just a few years after the end of the Civil War.
It wasn’t the imminence of hunting season that brought The Bear to mind as much as the atmosphere of the morning and an ominous feeling that a heroic test was about to unfold. I say heroic in the classical sense, meaning monumental trials against overwhelming odds and not always successful. But because my thoughts are never linear when I run, the first tests I imagined that morning were banal — the slippery roads before mounting the snow tires and neglected garden hoses left outside to freeze up.
There are so many ways to come up short in life, and this time of year is perfect for thinking about them; but my Faulkner thoughts eventually brought me to the moral crisis we face in our country today.
The Bear begins as a simple tale of the annual hunt for a legendary bear — and indeed the focus of the first chapter is on a boy named Isaac and his 7-year “apprenticeship” as a hunter — but after this first chapter and the death of the bear, Faulkner changes the subject into a more complicated quest. As an adult, Isaac must figure out how to live in a post-war South where the wilderness is disappearing and the legacy of slavery will not go away. It’s a stunning examination of the complexities of race and racism manifested in fiction with a clarity Faulkner could never maintain in his own personal life. And it all begins on a wet November day when the temperature hovers just above freezing.
The moral challenges our nation faces today are no less complicated than the post-war South. I am not just thinking of the midterm elections (although they can be an emblem for the bigger picture the way hunting a bear works for Isaac), but of the larger question of what it means to be a citizen in this country, this continent, this world and this universe.
I have learned some sobering things in my seven decades: that we will never stop fighting wars or destroying the planet; that there is no such thing as a lasting peace; that human beings will kill one another whether in depravity or greed or self-defense or for some notion of justice, and then struggle to explain or justify the meanings of these terms; that we will never eliminate poverty or hunger or treat every citizen fairly; and that we will continue to bring sweet children into the world, knowing that one day they too will become disillusioned.
Realizations like this should bring a person to despair, but that’s not the case for me because in literature I find hope. Camus, for example, recasts Sisyphus as an existential hero for the way he thinks as he trudges down the hill to retrieve his stone.
We are at a time in American history where we need to hold onto a few truths that might save us: Empathy is holier than pride, political beliefs must be open to reasonable challenge, compromise is not automatically a sign of weakness, and choosing between science and the arts is a false dichotomy.
There are other truths, but my point is that most people already agree with them although their behavior sometimes suggests they do not. Who, for instance, doesn’t understand that in a functioning family compromise is essential? Who, trying to assemble a wheelbarrow from parts in a box, doesn’t want instructions from someone who has already completed the task? And who doesn’t know that children have a natural appetite for songs?
“Fine,” the skeptic says, “but these are platitudes. The real question is what are we to do to heal the discord in the country and to solve problems like income inequality? What are we to do about the refugee situation?”
Three miles into my run, my mind returned to where it began, to the weather of the season and to Faulkner.
When Isaac turns 21, he inherits a sugar plantation farmed by former slaves and their children, who like Isaac were born after slavery had ended. Some of them, it turns out, are also descendants of Isaac’s white ancestors, making them his kin. Now that presents a moral dilemma.
Isaac’s answer is to renounce his inheritance and live the life of an ascetic, and here lies the wonderful difference between literature and polemics. What he becomes may be no model for a nation in trouble, but his heroic pursuit of the truth is. No one wants to end up like the heroes of most literature (think Hamlet or Mrs. Dalloway) but we recognize our own struggles in theirs, and we emerge from reading about them or seeing them on stage a little wiser.
Near the end of my run I felt something like hope. Perhaps it was the endorphins or the promise of breakfast, but there was something else as well. At this time of year the leaves have fallen and the land reveals itself clearly, almost like a confession. Ridge lines, invisible for months through the glory of foliage suddenly jump into focus, and outcrops and boulders as well, some of them fuzzed with vibrant moss.
It’s a kind of truth we see at this time of year, and with truth come some possibilities.
Jonathan Stableford, of Strafford, can be reached at jon.stableford@gmail.com.