Happy birthday, Mr. Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov was born in 1899 on this day. The author of Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada was a perennial exile, first in Berlin where he wrote novels and poetry in Russian, then in America, where he refashioned himself as an English-prose writer, translator, college professor, and lepidopterist, and finally in Montreaux, Switzerland. One recalls the fantastic word play, the formal experimentation, the convoluted plots of his novels, if not the sheer notoriety of just one of them. He affirmed the generative power of his exile. A "hypertrophied sense of lost childhood," it was a yearning for a home to which he could no longer return, but also a condition for seeking. In his art, Nabokov showed that this sense of exile is common to us all, but that it need not be debilitating. Turning one's estrangement into a mode of perception, a manner of seeing the all too familiar with a new, ever startled gaze, is to deepen the mystery of one's life. And the beauty of it. Happy birthday, Mr. Nabokov.      

John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

Steinbeck's swan song, The Winter of Our Discontent, is a morality tale of post-war America, set in a coastal town on Long Island. We are far removed from the Salinas Valley in which Steinbeck staked his claim to American literature. It may be no accident that he marked out the same region F. Scott Fitzgerald had for Gatsby as a beacon from which to examine the moral zeitgest of America at a critical historical juncture, the period beginning in 1960.

Ethan Allen Hawley is the impoverished scion of an old New England family. A war hero and well-educated, he is reduced to being a clerk in his father's grocery store, now owned by a Sicilian immigrant. By turns cynical and jovial, Ethan exasperates his friends and family with his keen sense of irony, which masks his insecurity about his fortunes, while it mocks the shallow pursuit of money. But money, in this day and age, is there for the taking. On Good Friday, Ethan is thrice tempted by figures who promise either adventure or quick prosperity. Though he is the most honor-bound character in the novel, Ethan is not impervious to these temptations, for they seem to answer his call for redemption.

I don't know how believable Ethan's undoing is, but it does illustrate Steinbeck's concern (common among American authors) with the fall of good men to the allurements of modernity -- easy money, shady investments, consumerism, and of course, a glittering future. That the story is set during Easter week in 1960, in the light of a dawning era, suggests the evanescence of Ethan Allen Hawley as a model of the good American and the succession of one who has not yet been tested.

Heaven?

Something which perplexes and infuriates many atheists about their adversaries, the legions of faithful, is their ability (and right) to revise the tenets of their religion. What many religionists don't get, however, is the fact that you cannot argue your way out of every theological dispute with an ad hoc, undebatable solution. Jon Meacham's recent article in Time magazine, "Rethinking Heaven," describes a new development in Christian thought that is neither ad hoc, nor perplexing, though it may rankle with those who think differently. The new proposition: heaven is not a place where one goes after death, but a culmination of human love and effort to restore the material world--heaven as a resurrected earth.

This new idea has gained currency in certain Christian circles, amounting to a real paradigm shift with startling implications. Call it a downgrading, but a radical one. If heaven is no longer a celestial paradise, a utopian otherworld in which suffering has been banished and all creation lives in harmony with God, then man's earthly existence assumes new meaning. What was once considered an elaborate way station en route to the Great Beyond, or "just passing through," becomes the real ground and field for fulfillment.

Young people today seem to understand this point without actually acknowledging it. Members of an activist generation, they live out this new theology in their concerted effort to make the earth a better place for everyone. And the internet has become their prime vehicle for social justice, enabling sites like Change.org and public information campaigns on YouTube and social networking services to inspire mass movements. Witness the galvanizing effect of an online petition for justice in the Trayvon Martin case, or the power of Twitter and Facebook in launching the Arab Spring a year earlier.

Although the new vision of heaven is a welcome change, signifying Christians' willingness to rethink fundamentals in light of modern-day circumstances and advanced knowledge, it suffers from a case of false hope. Is it really possible to redress all the social ills of the world? A cynic and an optimist will each answer differently, but one answer will probably be more realistic than the other. How can the multiplicity of human interests, desires, and preoccupations converge on a future without strife? It would seem to require some tremendous feat of social engineering, or mass delusion--or, and this is the likeliest answer, an unthinkable evolutionary advance.

In the end, as with other verdicts on utopian visions, the new conception of heaven calls into question our conception of humanity. Man, as an existent among existents, may not have the special talent to fully overcome his selfishness, his meanness, his darker nature. But he can certainly imagine it. It is a curiosity of human existence that, in rethinking where one is going, one must first rethink who one is, and why.