November: Lincoln's Elegy at Gettysburg

November 9: Never Forget (Nights of Broken Glass)

[ π≥ ] n o v e m b e r 9 Never Forget (Nights of Broken Glass) Remembering is the same thing as hoping. —Paul Ricoeur Between Lincoln’s time and the new millennium stretches a century of barbed wire and broken glass. Sixty years ago the Nazis burned, defaced, and destroyed businesses and synagogues all across Germany. Shattered windows of businesses owned by Jews gave November 9, 1938, the name Kristallnacht, ‘‘night of broken glass.’’ As leaves cease falling in November, the forest floor becomes a pale brown uniform. Like ghostly soldiers, gray tree trunks spread their battalions across the swales of sweet-smelling, crisp decay. Skies are gray and sunsets are bloody. Farmers burn bonfires; into the night their shreds of smoke rise and cross, making broken crystal of the cold November heavens. It is di≈cult to fix a date for the end of the Modern World, but since the Holocaust we have known it was over. The world we knew might have vanished on November 11, 1918, when the Western Front’s eerie silence ended the vast nightmare that shelled to pieces the illusion of human progress. The old world might have ended in November 1914 as Albert Einstein finished work on his General Theory of Relativity, which showed that the universe cannot be like anything the human mind is capable of imagining. n o v e m b e r 9 [ π∂ ] Or perhaps for the present generation of American leaders the Modern World, with its belief in reason and progress, ended on November 22, 1963, perishing as the body of John F. Kennedy lay under electric lights in Parkland Memorial Hospital. Maybe it perished in Vietnam. Many of that generation have never trusted reasonable explanations since those days, nor can they think of ‘‘progress’’ without irony. The world they grew up in has become a childish fantasy. But the evaporation of what human beings over centuries have learned to rely upon from day to day did not begin with us. It is possible that modernism was struck its death-wound during the American Civil War. The time since has been a long, slow dying, a steady darkening of the modern era. Now we are engaged in ‘‘a long twilight struggle.’’ Modern ideas do not seem to work anymore. With the ideas have gone the beliefs. Law, poetry, history, and theology have been deconstructed into free-floating nets of language with no connections to anything else—mere words, words, words. We are left . . . as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. Some people are happy that the Modern World is gone, because modernity meant complacent belief in material, artistic, scientific, political, and social progress on human terms, in human hands. Modernism bypassed our spiritual nature and proceeded as if there were no God. After the grass of the field was thrown into the ovens, and human smoke ascended into vacant skies, no Word of the Lord has remained. Those who rejoice over the end of the Modern World and its mistaken glories need to think about what comes after an age that assumed human beings were valuable and that certain happy truths about them were selfevident . The bright days of looking into the human mirror may be gone; now we wander alone through nights of broken glass. As darkness drops, a clamor rises, climbing, winding around the ascendingashes .Thegloomisallthemorenightmarishanddeepforitsinterlocked and blinking technology, its absorbing surface of information. Our brains got us into this; perhaps memory can help us get out. We need to reconnect the past to the future. Vietnam and Gettysburg can be forgotten if we agree to abandon the duties they impose on us. History’s e√ects on us can never be escaped, and what we forget will descend upon our children. The children. If the Holocaust is unthinkable, then how men and women could do what they did to children is unimaginable. If our rights n e v e r f o r g e t ( n i g h t s o f b r o k e n g l a s s ) [ π∑ ] to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness came from God, where did the SS get their right to kill, confine, and destroy children? I think Mr. Lincoln knew where it came from. He saw it clearly. It was not simply in the...