The American Relationship to Transience

Once, when trying to describe Hawthorne’s attitude to my friend Chris, I set this scene: Imagine a woman, sitting in a rocking chair hearth-side; her face blank with serenity. You would guess that, if she spoke (and she really needn’t because all seems resolved in this scene) she would draw attention to her tranquility by commenting on her surroundings or some other source of her comfort. Perhaps she would point out how perfectly stoked the fire is, or cuddle deeper within her throw with a remark on how soft its threads, or maybe she’d refer back some particularly satisfying aspect of dinner, such as the gravy being “just-so.” But, when this woman speaks, she says none of that. Instead, with a luxurious sigh befitting a memory of a lover, she says with absolute pleasure and absolute confidence: “All the paradoxes to come!” And then, before you can ask what exactly she’s referring to and, more pointedly, why any upcoming paradox would please her so, she closes her eyes leaving you only her faint, twitching smile to consider. Better to witness such a strange reverie rather than grill her on its source, you think, and remain the observer.

Hawthorne is the only author who can greet something like paradox as if it were a creature comfort. Paradox, irony, terrible tensions of the moral and the aesthetic--none of these abstractions should ever be “cozy.” Don’t they involve too much rigorous thought? Aren’t they, ultimately, unsettling? Not for Hawthorne and not for me. There is a serenity borne of their permanence. Unlike a certainty, or a purity, or a pole of thought, paradox has staying power. It can be used to describe almost any situation, and there’s always eternity in what can be forever applied. Still, there is one particular paradox that I don’t feel like just basking in: The American attitude towards transience.

Months ago, I was leafing through the New York Times entertainment pages and noticed a large picture of two hands--one male and one female--just barely touching on the edge of a park bench. It was part of a movie ad, but I didn’t bother to catch which movie. Obviously, this picture was meant to indicate the first innocent foray into love and romance and ultimately a physical relationship between two people. Oh the beauty--the ad seemed to be saying--of the first tentative touch! Of the stilted straining towards one another! Of the newborn passion, inflamed by a mere touch of hands! Oh the tingling, oh the anticipation..! But that first touch between would-be lovers is transience itself. The “firsts” of love end. They must.

So much of American media is courting, courting, courting and no payoff or aftermath. The first moments of love, immortalized in some bullshit romantic comedy, are presented as if they possess some larger truth, something we should all strain towards. But what? And how? And, as numerous feminist critics have pointed out, youth is also exalted in the media and beyond. We love our prodigies. We love the precocious young. We love the virginal, the unspoilt, the innocence and idiocy and of youth itself. Kids say the darndest things!

Youth gains its magic from the pure fact it ends, as does the early stages of romance. We know that the hands barely touching will progress into kissing, into sex, into arguments, into marriage, into kids, into domestic squabbles, into boredom with sex, into pathetic attempted “rekindling” of passion, into apathy, into…you know. Love always begins with “such promise” but that promise is transient. Early love is enchanted because it ends. Likewise, if we remained children forever childhood wouldn’t have such appeal. Youth is enthralling because it is fleeting. The child appeals to us because of the sheer wonder: when will this creature alter forever into one of us? What will alter it? A child has such presence, such potency, that it is a pure bafflement that childhood doesn’t endure. The mystery of childhood is that it can exist so powerfully, and disappear so subtly.

You’d think, in a society that reveres youth and “firsts”, that transience itself would become appealing. You’d think that the transience of life would be better appreciated. Death should be exalted, because it guarantees the enchantment of life. Life, like childhood, like “the first time,” ends. Therefore, the elderly, being closest to death should fascinate us. The two hands, barely touching, appeal to us because they are on the brink--they represent the last chaste moment and the first passionate one all at once. An elderly person is also on the brink--they live, but their death is obviously immanent. Yet Americans find death horrifying, and old people dull and dismissible. The American transience-paradox is this: we love the little lives and deaths of children (by “dying” I mean changing into adults) and we love the brief life of fresh attraction, but the larger life and death that love and youth typify, we fear. We are attracted by symbolic births and deaths (such as flirtation and consummation) but repelled by death, the very thing that gives metaphoric currency to any such transience. We love the symbol, but not what is symbolized. We prefer the crucifix to the crucifixion!