The Great Reduction. Jay Trott

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СКАЧАТЬ things are full of labor; man cannot utter it.

      The rivers are always flowing into the sea. The seasons are always changing. The bird is always feathering its nest or looking for something to eat. The squirrel is always storing up nuts. The tides come and go with the phases of the moon.

      When you are young, this perpetual exchange of energy is energizing; but when you are old it may seem exhausting and pointless. Solomon looks upon all the ceaseless labor of nature and is appalled. There is no rest. There is no peace.

      The world too is full of labor. The most ambitious among us are constantly toiling. It was not enough for Solomon to build the temple; he had to build a palace too. It was not enough for him to write an exquisitely beautiful love song, the greatest ever penned; he had to write a thousand.

      But we are not like nature’s creatures. We grow old and long for rest. We have a home that is not our natural home. We are looking for a place that is not the place where we live and have our being, and this is the source of our discontent.

      The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

      We can see or hear beautiful things and enjoy them, but the eye and ear always want more. This is the law of desire. Or as Solomon says in Proverbs, “Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied.”

      When we are young, desire seems like a blessing. Let the seeing and the hearing commence! And when we say “young,” we think this feeling probably extends well into middle age, while the life-spirit remains strong and we have not become too reflective.

      But a strange thing has happened to Solomon, who is now well beyond middle age. As former pleasures fade, he has seen the dark side of desire. The eye is never satisfied; the ear is never filled. And this poses a problem for someone who longs for contentment.

      To be content is to be filled. Desire ceases its restless striving because we already have what we want. But then contentment and the desires of the ears and eyes are at odds with each other. The eyes and ears continue to seek pleasure but can never be satisfied.

      Solomon is speaking philosophically. The pleasures of nature, for example, as great as they are—and they are incomparable—cannot provide contentment. The very force that makes them seem so desirable also deprives us of the rest we are seeking.

      The fault is not in them but in ourselves. They cannot fill us because we have another longing that we are trying to satisfy with the things of this world. And this is even more true of the things we ourselves have made or won or earned.

      Solomon built a famous temple, but his eyes could not be satisfied with it. He heaped up gold, but it did not make him happy. He married seven hundred wives, but he longed for a single wife whom he could love and who would sincerely love him in return.

      The eye is never satisfied because the soul desires life. Thus the great pleasures of the eyes can become a curse as well as a blessing.

      The thing that has been is that which shall be.

      More on the theme of the perpetual return.

      Old people are tired. They do not have rest from the pleasures of seeing and hearing, but they may be tired of those pleasures. They do not have rest from their labors, the rest they were seeking all along, but they are tired of their labors and cannot go on.

      This puts them in a strange predicament. They continue to be restless, but their weariness now stands in the way of contentment. The only way to make this clear is to make their weariness clear; which is just what Solomon is going to do, at some length.

      First, the thing that has been is what shall be. Or as he will say later, there is nothing new under the sun. You are blissfully unaware of this when you are young because, well, you are young. You have not lived long enough to see the perpetual return.

      The passion of the moment is what governs youth. We think we are Changing Things, and this energizes our labors. But the older we get, the more conscious we become that things never really change. Yesterday’s big initiative is replaced with tomorrow’s big initiative—and in that sense they are the same.

      Think of the professional baseball team. There are certain things they must do in order to win the World Series. But once they have won one, those things do not change. They still have to do them in order to win. And twenty years later they have to do them all over again.

      Or think of the brave young DA who has come to town to clean up things and put an end to corruption. If she is a very energetic young woman, she may succeed in cleaning up some things, but she will never put an end to corruption. There will be many DAs after her following the same path to glory.

      This is the perpetual return. While we are engaged in our labors we do not see their repetitive nature. We think we are accomplishing something great, something new. But when we grow a little older and see other people doing the same things, we realize that history has a repetitive quality.

      The thing is done over and over again and nothing really changes. Success does not give us what we are looking for. It does not bring happiness or closure. This is why the thing itself—the effort, the great initiative—has become wearisome to Solomon in his old age.

      Is there anything of which it might be said, See, this is new?

      Not really, no. Oh sure, there are new things, like computers and jets; but Solomon was not thinking of exterior things. He was thinking about the arcs of our lives.

      Aren’t we all children at one time who go to school? Don’t we all grow up and get married and have children of our own and jobs we think are important? Aren’t we all interested in making our homes comfy? Don’t we all have our favorite sports teams and political parties?

      Is there anything new in all this? We can hear Rosalind speaking as clearly to us today as the bright young girl who lives next door. We can empathize with Diomedes when he says the war he fought with such great success did not lead to the happiness he was seeking.

      Their old stories are just like our stories because, no, there is nothing really new. There is only the perpetual return and the sense of weariness it can produce in the soul.

      There is no remembrance of former things.

      Aha—we caught him. Of course we remember former things! There are histories. There are whole museums.

      But that is not what Solomon has in mind. First, histories are seventy-eight percent stories. We are not remembering the past so much as we are seeing someone’s interpretation of the past.

      Solomon knew about Job and Abraham and Moses and Joshua and some of the things they had done. Very few people make it into written histories, however. And in the case of the vast majority of us it is literally true that there is no remembrance of former things.

      If you don’t think so, try to find out the history of your own town. Try to find out what was going on in the life of the average citizen, your counterpart, two hundred years ago. You can’t. It is literally as if the vast majority of those who lived in the past had never even existed.

      Consider the case of Sally Barnes, resident of the bucolic town of Sherman, Connecticut, from 1771 to 1846. Sally was once very likely a fresh-faced young highland lass, full of dreams. She may have been a great mother СКАЧАТЬ