By Wayne Allensworth
The boy jumped over a fence and headed toward the pond, where a rock pile at one end made a rippling waterfall. It’s cold out, a few days past a warm Christmas. The wind is blowing fiercely, and the last leaves have flown and left naked branches on the trees near the pond. The limbs rattle and sway on the tallest trunks. The evergreens provide splashes of color against the clouds and gray-blue sky. And the wind whistles past me on its never-ending journey around our world.
The boy is barefoot and wearing a T-shirt. He doesn’t seem to notice the cold. I nod at him, not expecting him to acknowledge it. He sees me and goes on to climb among the rocks and collect some trash — wrapping paper and a few plastic bottles — that the wind has blown our way. I watch him collect the trash and head back home.
I’ve known this boy for years. I’ve watched him straighten trash cans and line up stones and climb trees. And watch. He seems to always be on the lookout. I speak to him, calling him by name, sensing that at some level he knows me. Unresponsive does not mean unaware.
He knows his little corner of the world intimately. And we, his neighbors, know him. He is part of life here. And I’ve grown to feel at home. I walk and watch the animals on the trail and in the pond. I observe the Moon’s phases and watch the clouds pass overhead and the stars in their courses in the firmament. I think back to the mythic past of this land and the part my people played in its story.
All of us need a sense of where we are, of where we belong. A home. It informs and supports who we are and what we are and can be. My mind has been running this way since my oldest daughter and her family moved over the holidays. I hope they come back to us. I left for a while, but the call of home — Texas — and family brought us back. If not, they need to establish a new home in Georgia and make it their own. I’ve told them that some of our people came from the Deep South, mingling with the pioneers that followed the Appalachian Trail down from the Upper South. They were part of the American narrative, the mythic trek of the pioneers.
Modernity tends to deracinate and displace us. People need a sense of belonging and all the attributes that make them distinct — accents, customs, the clothes they wear, the foods they eat, the mythos that undergirds their identity. But apart from the mobility of post-modern people, technology enables them to create artificial bubbles that are beyond space and a sense of time as in history. One that lacks continuity, wearing thin the “thick” cultures that once helped stabilize our lives and place us in a context of place and a web of family and neighbors. Attempting to create our own separate and atomized selves, shorn of community, family, and cultural context hasn’t worked out very well. It is the path to individual and societal madness.
My Russian friends used to tell me that the West took a “wrong turn” long ago, when the linear thinking of rationalism became dominant, ruling out paradox, the complementarity of apparent opposites, and, with it, mystery, intuitive understanding, and a sense of the Divine. Odd, as Christ himself was a walking paradox, his parables and sayings contradictory yet so piercingly true. The Russians thought the West had disabled itself by adopting a philosophy that made the Gospel, and everyday morality, obscure and in need of rationalization. In learning about them — the Russians and their tragic and poetic culture — and from them, I grew to understand that the universal is always to be found in the particular and the particular in the universal. They were uniquely themselves, yet I saw us in them in the predicament they faced after the collapse of Communism: The need to establish a post-Soviet identity that drew on their past but hoped for the future.
Educated post-modern Americans long for what they call “authenticity,” culture and all its artifacts that have evolved from the ground up, that are organic, shaped by time and place, and thus real in a way that our plastic pseudo-culture can’t reproduce. Yet their drive to break down all boundaries destroys the necessary context for culture to thrive and for humans to flourish. Capitalism demands the removal of all barriers to “the market,” including the family, and modern bureaucratic, managerial regimes also demand standardization and homogenization, depriving of us of the things that make us fully human, that make Russians, and Japanese, and Mexicans, and, yes, Americans, distinct peoples with their own cultures that can enrich their lives and humanity. “Diversity” turned out to mean bulldozing anything distinctly American. Lucifer rebelled against God and Faustian man rebels against the culture that nurtured him. We tear down historic monuments and think of all of the artifacts of our past as disposal, suitable only for museum exhibits. We bulldoze our hometowns and then build Disneyland’s “Mainstreet” to visit. We long for Mainstreet, as we long for the communities and the sense of belonging we have deliberately, purposefully destroyed. We love movies like It’s a Wonderful Life, claim to admire George Bailey, and long for our own Bedford Falls. But we opted for Pottersville. Washington, D.C., long ago displaced Moscow as the seat of global revolution. The “new Soviet man” was a failed illusion. Globalist capitalism’s “universal nation” is as illusory and is proving to be more destructive in the long term than its Soviet cousin.
I lost my home in the personal sense a long time ago. The house my father built was razed to the ground. I no longer recognize the neighborhood I loved, the one that nurtured me and mine. We long for somewhere, for a place and an identity, but have become people from nowhere, lost and disoriented. That longing itself is a good sign, maybe a small flash of light in the cultural darkness.
My family came together for Christmas at the new home my oldest daughter and her family are making in Georgia. It was heartening to learn that many of the neighbors had lived there for a long time, even for a lifetime. The tall oaks and majestic pines swayed gently in the breeze as I walked by them every day. Each morning, I soaked up the silence and the stillness. I watched an eagle fly across the canopy of the trees and saw a glimpse of the divine in the faces of my grandchildren. I pray for them and for all of us. Any new beginning has to start where we live. With ourselves.
Wishing all the best for the New Year.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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