I was headed to a cabin on the lake with my two eldest children. We had been there once before. It’s not a cabin, really: granite counter tops, sprawling deck, glass rails. The time promised to be a good one. The Sehnsucht was strong and we relished the longing. I turned on the radio. Advertisements. I fished for a station with music. We found one. This tune was hip and thumping and catchy: “I’m coming out, so you better get this party started”.
My son wrinkled his nose and plugged his ears.
My daughter’s peers listen to this kind of stuff. She was curious. I left it on.
“…I’m coming out so you better get this party started
Get this party started.
Making my connection as I enter the room
Everybody’s chillin’ as I set up the groove
Pumping up the volume with this brand new beat
Everybody’s dancing and they’re dancing for me.”
My daughter wrinkled her nose and shook her head. I was glad for her aversion and so I bobbed my head and waved my hands, disco style. I rolled down the window and turned up the radio to share my dance with the world. My children writhed in pain and begged for mercy. I should have been more generous. Indeed, my generation had its own musical expression of personal empowerment. We are the Michael Jackson and Madonna generation.
Most of the world has outgrown Madonna and we cling only nostalgically to Michael Jackson. We’ve set the table for songs even more tuned to our self-gratification. We’ve raised the stage and set the lights for our current priests who preach a gospel of perpetual youth. One of those more recent priests is Jay Z and his song “Forever Young” was a chart topper. Allow me to sing you a few lines:
“So we livin’ life like a video
Where the sun is always out and you never get old
And the champagne is always cold and the music is always good
And the pretty girls just happen to stop by in the hood
And they hop they pretty ass up on the hood of that pretty ass car
Without a wrinkle in it today ‘cuz there’s no tomorrow,
Just a picture perfect day that last a whole lifetime.
And it never ends cause all we have to do is hit rewind.
So let’s just stay in the moment, smoke some weed, drink some wine,
Reminisce, talk some shit.
Forever young is on your mind.
Leave a mark they can’t erase, neither space nor time
So when the director yells cut, I’ll be fine
I’m forever young.”
I can say it no better than Thomas Howard: “That ain’t the way it is, baby.”
It’s tough to be too hard on Jay Z. He doesn’t realize how quickly he’ll be defrocked. He hasn’t figured out that the rewind button sometimes breaks or that he will someday get old—even the pretty girls and the pretty…well…nice car. What mark do we leave on the world by sitting on cars and flirting, smoking, drinking, and talking shit? What if that’s a mark we’d rather someday erase? And what if the director yells cut and the curtain falls and I’m nearly naked with no place to go? If that’s what life is all about—if life is only about staying in the sandbox and holding onto this single moment of dissipation—then I want out of the proverbial sandbox. There’s got to be more to life than that.
Toad wanted to stay in the sandbox. Swept up in every passing fancy, Toad became fortune’s fool. When we first meet Toad in The Wind in the Willows, he is a pie-eyed buffoon who chases anything with an engine, anything with power and zoom. The inheritor of Toad Hall and a load of spending money, Toad wanders the byways in search of something to keep his short attention span busy.
“Glorious, stirring sight!” cried Toad when he saw the car. “The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today – in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped – always somebody else’s horizon! O bliss! O my! O my!”
His friends, Mole and Rat, try desperately to give him some sense, but Toad can’t seem to help himself. He makes resolutions, of course, and like most of us he breaks them. Toad’s compass was set to personal pleasure and he did anything possible to avoid discomfort. He confused titillation with happiness; personal pleasure was his religion and, therefore, he moved not toward transcendent Beauty, but away from it.
Our trajectory during this sojourn, with or without suffering, depends on which direction we take as a means to communion with God. A vibrant life, a Joy-entranced life, is had only by those heading in the correct direction. Beauty is true North. If we move toward Beauty, we move toward God, and we will find Joy. So this spiritual pilgrimage requires a daily attentiveness to the shadows, the footprints, the fingerprints, the road signs of beauty—of eternity. Every created beautiful expression is a road sign pointing toward True Beauty. None of them are the destination. None of them will satisfy because none of them are the object of our Sehnsucht.
Food? A taste of pleasure, a facet of Beauty. “Not here, not yet,” says food.
Further up and further in.
Entertainment? An emotional charge that quickly fades and needs more. “Not here, not yet,” says entertainment.
Further up and further in.
The next i-gadget? A fleeting attainment of possibility. “Not here, not yet,” says technology.
Further up and further in.
Sex? A taste of euphoria, of deep fellowship, of climactic pleasure, but the morning comes, and so even sex says, “Not here, not yet,” Friendship? Fellowship, but fickle. We cannot hold friends in a permanent stasis. “Not here, not yet.” Vacation? Come and gone again. “Not here, not yet.”
Further up and further in.
These are the signs, the footprints.
These alone cannot deliver the vibrant life. So we spend our lives trying to build bridges from the finite to the infinite, from ourselves to ultimate Beauty, but our bridges are made of passing pleasure and cannot span the divide. Persistently dedicated to satisfaction, we chase the pleasure until it is no longer pleasurable: sex, food, friendship, leisure. Pilgrims who glut themselves upon these things will find themselves bloated and sick. These are only the taste of Beauty, her footprint upon the sand. How quickly we lose the trail, the scent, and find ourselves barking up an empty tree. The vibrant life evades us because personal pleasures are not the source of Joy. We need the eyes of the soul, the imagination, to see beyond these things.
Until then, we wait and watch for Joy, but the image or physical quivering, the sense of Joy is only “the mental track left by the passage of Joy—not the wave but the wave’s imprint on the sand” (C.S. Lewis). It was only the footprint in the sand meant to draw my eyes down the beach to their source, who even now waves at me to follow hard after him.
