Fighting The Wind

 

I awoke from troubled sleep thinking of Miniver Cheevy and Don Quixote.  In all of this “Make America Great Again” nonsense, America seems fixated on a past that never existed.  There was no perfect America.  America, and democracy, have always faced challenges and difficulties.  It takes work to be free.  We have, indeed, lost something along the way, but no cheap slogan will heal our divisions now.  No stuffed shirt, with a fake tan, and bird’s nest hair will fix what is broken.

“Miniver Cheevy” is a poem by Edward Arlington Robinson from his classic The Town Down The River.  In it, Cheevy spends all his time dreaming of the knights of old.  He despairs his current situation, weeping he was ever born.  He lives fully in this dreamscape past, which only exists in his mind:  “When swords were bright and steeds were prancing,” as Robinson characterizes it.  He clings to the “vision of the warrior bold,” even while he timidly approaches his real life, one far less colorful and exciting.  He does not want to put the effort in to change; he just wants everything to be as it was, but what it was consisted of a fantasy.  A Neverland.

He also traps himself in thought.  He mulls over in his brain the dearth of heroism, the “gold he sought,” and his misery without it.  He is the classic negative version of the man of thought, a person who spends so much time dreaming that real life in the present leaves him in the dust.  The poem ends with a taut summation:

Miniver Cheevy, born too late, / Scratched his head and kept on thinking; / Miniver coughed, and called it fate, / And kept on drinking.

Don Quixote also dreams of a past that never existed.  He longs for chivalry and the knight hero who vanquishes his enemies.  Cervantes was genius enough to devise a new genre in literature, the novel.  But his true gift to the canon is Don Quixote himself, a classic character, so much a part of literature and culture that his name has become a touchstone.  Quixote is a fool, a dreamer, an anachronism.  He refuses to see the world as it is, and instead, constructs a world of fantasy and imagination.  Of course, everyone is familiar with the classic phrase “tilting at windmills.”  In Quixote’s mind, those windmills must be challenged.  Quixote’s idealism must be protected and nurtured, even though it is misplaced in time and truth.

Don Quixote ends his life with an epiphany—his magical world does not, could not, exist.  We learn that a life of make-believe is no life at all.  This makes Cervantes’ work not a comedy, but a tragedy.  Quixote is both a sad figure, broken and disappointed by the end, and a painfully comic figure, a misguided nincompoop exposed by his fallacies and the wit of his sidekick, Sancho Panza.  The windmills are unvanquished, as enemies often are in real life.  We must live with our disappointments, our dreams, our Sturm und Drang of daily life.  The struggle continues.

Why was I dreaming of these two characters from literature?  It is easy to romanticize the past.  “The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” another poet, William Wordsworth, wrote.  We look around us and see the dark clouds on the horizon, the coming eclipse at noon.  We fear the shadowlands, the islands of our desperation.  Why can’t the world be the way we want it?  Why are we so afflicted?  We see ourselves as the biblical figure of Job, a righteous man tortured by Satan until he curses God for his misfortune.  Like Miniver Cheevy, Job rues the day he was born into this valley of tears.

Yet, this is life.  Good or bad, reality or dream, the past is past.  We are here, now, and only in this moment can we act.  Many people refuse to believe any action in the moment can alter what is to come.  But that is our fate as finite beings, to “rage against the dying of the light.”  We cannot “make America great again.”  Historians will define the nature of epochs.  We see the past as some perfect land, and we cannot help ourselves but want to get back to it.  The past of our dreams does not correspond to history.  And it is irrelevant anyway because it is gone.

I do not want to be Miniver Cheevy or Don Quixote.  There are enough dragons and windmills to go around these days, and they are real.  We must fight in the moment for what is sacred to us, what we want to happen in the now.  If chivalry and honor return, it is because we have made it so.  If we have the future of our choosing, then we have acted in the present tense.  That is all we can do.  To those who are like Job, no one ever said this would be easy.  No life is free from sorrow and angst.

I do not want my life to be caught in the web of the past, afraid to confront the present and what is to come. 

From Edgar Lee Masters and The Spoon River Anthology, come the words of his character, George Gray:  

 I have studied many times / The marble which was chiseled for me— / A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor. / In truth it pictures not my destination / But my life… / To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness, / But life without meaning is the torture / Of restlessness and vague desire— / It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

This is truth.  The only response to it is to act now.