The Drama of Possibility: Experience as Philosophy of Culture

1. Threadbare Crape: Reflections on the American Strand

one threadbare crape Reflections on the American Strand  For my head-text, I take a passage from Hobbes’s Leviathan. At the end of the last chapter of part 2, ‘‘Of Commonwealth,’’ Hobbes writes as follows: I recover some hope, that at one time or other, this writing of mine may fall into the hands of a sovereign, who will consider it himself (for it is short, and I think clear) without the help of any interested, or envious interpreter, and by the exercise of entire sovereignty, in protecting the public teaching of it, convert this truth of speculation, into the utility of practice.1 The admonishing word is practice. No less than the austere, American theologian Jonathan Edwards holds that ‘‘holy practice’’ is the ‘‘greatest sign of grace’’ and that ‘‘Christian practice’’ is the principal sign of those twelve which distinguish ‘‘Truly Gracious and Holy Affections.’’ Of a profoundly different cast of mind and presentation, Immanuel Kant tells us likewise. For those intrepid souls who make it to the closing pages of Kant’s epochal work, The Critique of Pure Reason, they read his telling us that the upshot of both the speculative and the practical reason come {  }  the drama of possibility to these three questions: ‘‘What can I know?’’; ‘‘What ought I to do?’’; and ‘‘What may I hope?’’ For Kant, the doing is ‘‘practical’’ and he adds, warningly I take it, that we can only ‘‘hope’’ if we do what we ‘‘ought to do.’’ Enough—although more, much more in this ameliorative vein could be cited, for it has struck me over and again that most of the major figures in the history of thought, despite their often dazzling speculative forays, maintain the abiding presence of the need for practice, the need to do something, to forage, to nurture, to sustain, to maintain, and to build. Sooner or later, sheer talk runs out and the great conversation becomes solipsistic. I turn now to the title of this presentation. Following the wisdom of Kierkegaard, who tells us that we should ‘‘live forward’’ but ‘‘think backwards,’’ I start with the second line, ‘‘Reflections on the American Strand.’’ This is a play on the opening of the Magnalia by Cotton Mather, a work as fascinating as it is arcane. Quite directly, Mather writes of us as ‘‘flying from the Depravations of Europe, to the American Strand.’’ Equally direct, almost three hundred years later, my reflections tell me that it is increasingly apparent that we have turned in on ourselves such that the ‘‘Depravations’’ allegedly left behind have become reincarnated in this contemporary version of our American Strand, once so promising. In turn, these reflections then generate the first line, the head-line of my discussion, namely, ‘‘Threadbare Crape.’’ As you would expect, it comes from our American poet, Walt Whitman. I exhumed this phrase from a line suppressed by Whitman in subsequent editions of Leaves of Grass, a line which holds of life that ‘‘nothing remains but threadbare crape and tears.’’ Now, let us bring the title to storied life. On behalf of the memoried tradition of Whitman, this story is deeply personal and yet is revelatory of all of us together in our contemporary American time. I was a young child in the bleak decade of the American 1930s. Three of my grandparents were dead. My paternal grandfather was buried on the nasty January day that I was born in 1932. My remaining grandparent was my maternal grandmother, known in our family as Nana. Widowed at an early age with three young children, she made a living for them by scrubbing fire-house floors and sewing men’s ties. She was a follower of threadbare crape  the New York Giants, of John McGraw, and a whiz at pinochle. My entire extended family was shanty Irish. We had nothing, except the American dream, Irish style. I correct myself, for I should not say ‘‘nothing.’’ For the shanty Irish did manage to obtain, grab, or perhaps even purloin one precious possession , lace curtains, to be had no doubt in defiance of our often offensive and patronizing peers, the lace-curtain Irish. My Nana had such a set of curtains. Each spring they would be ceremoniously washed, starched, and tacked to a long, nail-pronged stretcher. For decades, I helped to do that. And then, as she failed in strength, I did them for her...