The Suffered Past

“How is this relevant?” someone might ask about some venerable work from the tradition, such as the Aeneid or King Lear or Aristotle’s De Anima. The one doing the asking might seem to be in possession of a burning truth about the uniqueness of the present moment, but the more we commit the past to living memory, the more we understand where we are and where we might be going. Just ask our veterans.

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Earlier this week, I went into a small store in Lander with two cash registers and lots of people already backed up in line at each of them. I found the item I needed and came back to wait my turn. That’s when I saw what the hold-up was. There was a gaunt old man at the register on the right who had coins spread all over the checkout counter belt, hundreds of them—dimes and nickels, but mostly pennies. Did he have dementia? Was he so desperately poor that this was the only money he had? How could he be so oblivious to the growing irritation around him?

Ahead of me in the line on the left was a huge, tough-looking Wyoming fellow in his 70s; he could have been a Mountain Man back in the days of John Colter or “Jim Bridger.” He stepped over and asked the man with the coins if he was a veteran. Had he served in Vietnam? The other man looked a little confused, a little scared, but he mumbled what might have been assent. Clearly embarrassed for him, Jim Bridger told the cashier that he would pay for whatever it was the older man was buying—an implied homage to his service in Vietnam. Jim also clearly hoped to relieve the focus on this display of infirmity. For his part, the cashier was dealing with the old man patiently, not showing any frustration if he felt it. He glanced up at Jim to explain that the fellow was just cashing in his coins.

Why the old man chose that cash register in that store at the busiest time of day instead of going to the bank, I don’t know. Maybe he always came there. What struck me (besides the patience of the cashier) was the generosity of Jim Bridger and the instinctiveness of his interpretation. Like me, he remembered the many homeless Vietnam veterans of our generation—men, often suffering from addictions, who came back home to criticism and often opprobrium instead of a hero’s welcome. He could have been a Vietnam veteran himself. Maybe he was stereotyping unfairly. Maybe he jumped to an erroneous conclusion, but I instantly understood why, because I vividly remember the tensions of the Vietnam era and the controversies surrounding that unpopular lost war. Jim was doing his bit to acknowledge what the past can do to you, and he tried to redress something about it in a situation where you would never have expected the Vietnam War to have any bearing. Incidents like this one inevitably remind me of the famous quotation from the novelist William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

The past might not be past, but, thinking back on the scene and the store, I realize that most of our students and perhaps a sizable fraction of my colleagues on the faculty and staff at Wyoming Catholic College would not have had the same, almost visceral understanding of where Jim Bridger was coming from. It is no surprise that most of our younger faculty do not remember the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the escalation of the war in Vietnam, or the Watergate scandal; a few of them might recollect the fall of the Berlin Wall; but most of our underclassmen were not even bornon September 11, 2001. It is hard to say what exactly in our past does claim immediate recognition. Just as an index of cultural forgetfulness, I have to relate what my wife told me last night: she mentioned Paul Newman in class, and her seniors had no idea who he was.

Already in one of his first published speeches, the “Lyceum Address” of 1838, Abraham Lincoln (no Paul Newman in looks) was already worried about the consequences of American forgetfulness. In prose a little overwrought compared to his later style, Lincoln points out that at the close of the Revolutionary War, “nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was, that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son or brother, a living history was to be found in every family—a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received, in the midst of the very scenes related—a history, too, that could be read and understood alike by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned. But those histories are gone. They can be read no more forever.”

What do we do to restore pieties that were once part of our flesh and bone? Lincoln thought that Reason had to supplant passion: “cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense.” Perhaps I may be forgiven for thinking this solution to be utopian. He must have thought so himself by 1861. Memory, consciously cultivated, is crucial to sustaining our loyalty to hard-won truths and noble institutions. But for many people today, the past is a tyranny, and erasing or condemning it is the mode of liberation—a dangerous folly that makes real tyranny more likely.

Where will we be if all that we have is the shallowness and shortsightedness of the present moment? The education at Wyoming Catholic College cannot re-create the mangled limbs and scars of the past, but it can and does plunge students imaginatively into the great images and ideas that have illumined minds and moved souls in a tradition that goes back 3000 years. What happens in class? I am reminded of Faulkner’s character Isaac McCaslin whose old half-Choctaw mentor Sam Fathers would tell the stories of the past “until at last it would seem as if he himself had not come into existence yet… and that it was he who was the guest here and Sam Fathers’ voice the mouthpiece of the host.”

When I was growing up, one of my family’s favorite albums was called Johnny Horton Makes History. I still remember the lyrics to such songs as “The Battle of New Orleans” and “Sink the Bismarck.” But this week I remember Horton’s song, “Jim Bridger,” which I probably have not heard in 60 years. I don’t even have to look up the lyrics:

Let’s drink to old Jim Bridger. Yes, lift your glasses high.
As long as there’s a USA, don’t let his memory die.
That he was making history never once occurred to him
But I doubt if we’d have been here if it weren’t for men like Jim.

Don’t let his memory die ultimately means getting the images of hope and heroism into song—into the curriculum—where young people can live and suffer and learn in the richest presence of the past.

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.

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The featured image is “Foggy winter day in Vinderø” (1901) by Laurits Andersen Ring, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.