High up on a hallowed hill sits a tall, silent chapel. Its bells were quieted long ago at the complaint of grumpy townspeople. They were replaced with a tiny music-box that plays every day, except Sundays, a soft, unassuming song that marks each hour that passes away into irrecoverable history. The tower’s woody exterior was lacquered with resin, mummified, and painted with thick white paint. It is the distant past preserved in fine detail for the goggle-eyed moderns, like an ancient mosquito or pharaoh.
What was once an American Alexandria, complete with lighthouse and library, now stands dumb and dull on a much slighter mound. Its only beauty is in its surrounds, still courageous enough to remain true to their nature. Ah, if the trees could tell this village’s story! Their dirge would surely lament the sad decline, the reckless dash toward empty mirages, the melting down of the bells.
The gown-clad men and boys who used to walk the gravel paths of this place were contemplative and humble. They were the products of their gilded age, to be sure: they dressed commonly, they spoke commonly, they lived as their fellow countrymen did elsewhere. They were not unique in their personality. No, their distinction was their poverty, their indigence; it was in their chance to gain a little of what the great men of history had affirmed in their heroic martyr’s deaths or inscribed in books. Opportunity and enlightenment, piety and moral probing, life lived with the passion of Thoreau and the restraint of the saints.
They spoke a common language, an English still alive with the simple, strong roots of a Saxon past. There was meaning in talk of right and of wrong, of justice and of mercy. It was agreed-upon, understood, and it was universal, covering the surface of the Earth just as certainly as the vacant expanses of outer space. Literature was for the enlarging of the imagination, science for the exploration of the natural. The telos of man was the glorification of that mysterious Power whose sovereignty bounded the soul but granted it liberty to seek and to love and to wander and drink deeply of creation. What descendants saw as repressive conformity was really the joy of common premises, of shared values.
But those generations, like the hours the bells welcomed into silent decease, like the bells themselves as they lay grounded on the muddy football field, eventually returned to the hush of nonexistence. With them went the virtuous mission of the cloistered college they’d loved and to which they’d owed their minds’ lives. Their descendants, little by little, dismantled the spirit of terras irradient that had animated life beyond the place and propelled the departed generations into the waiting world where they could educate and empower and pass on the gift they’d been given: sturdy knowledge and the humility of the lettered.
No one even learned Latin anymore. The incoming throngs of new pupils had to have the college motto translated for them, and even then it was understood as nothing more than a moralistic anachronism, a vestige—or maybe “light” could be recast to mean a sort of secular, worldly kindness after all. Teachers now struggled to explain the moral dilemmas found in the classics to students suddenly hostile to absolutes. Within sight of the whitewashed bell-tower were a few souls who still proclaimed, in the language of the dead, the unbending truths of the past and defended traditions long forsaken, but they were marked as the village fools and treated much like expired milk—avoided and then, eventually, thrown out.
Classes were still held in English, but it was now a language filled with grey and fuzzy, floating sense and populated by qualifiers and beaker-grown modifiers. Any claim to knowledge and any appeal to timelessness were met with furrowed brow and puzzlement. Premises had to be laid out anew every time anyone assembled to converse. In this domain of infinite logics new and outrageous conclusions were drawn out, and questions were posed that only the smart-alecky schoolboy of old would have been bold enough to pose. Do I exist? Well, that truth only applies to you and not to me. And then there were the teachers who had themselves become lost in the vast potential of boundlessness. Let’s say we reject the law of noncontradiction—now what do you think when I say that I exist yet do not exist? Oh, there can be no judging of the ancient Maya and their bloody human sacrifices—they were living a long time ago when that sort of thing was culturally acceptable—but we can of course judge the National Socialists for their abominable crimes. It’s simple, really. Or is it complicated? I’ve forgotten. Everywhere was the uncertainty of translation, of terrifying transfiguration sans radiance.
So was born a new Babel, a lifeless village where truth is a tool of oppression, where invisible, mystical forces pummel the downtrodden while authorizing the powerful, where the Greeks are taught as protosocialists and the Romans as protototalitarians, and where the learned life is not a bridge to humanity but rather an elevator out of it.
