Last year, I came across an essay written by 17-year-old Ruby LaRocca, winner of a Free Press essay contest. She spoke of The taut cable of high expectations and the bad consequences that occur when that cable is slackened. The essay reminded me in a passage in Antoine de St-Exupery’s novel of ideas, Citadelle, about which I had recently been thinking.
In this book (published in English under the unfortunate title Wisdom of the Sands), the protagonist is the ruler of a fictional desert kingdom. One night, he visits the prison which holds a man who has been sentenced to death in the morning is being held. He muses that the soul of this man may well contain an inward beauty of some form–perhaps his sentence should be commuted?…but decides otherwise:
For by his death I stiffen springs which must not be permitted to relax.
The particular context in which I had been thinking of this St-Exupery passage was the situation in San Francisco. Failure to enforce laws–while endlessly searching for ‘inward beauty’ in the perpetrators of a wide range of crimes–had resulted in a relaxation of those springs of which St-Exupery wrote. And not only in San Francisco.
Our society at present suffers from both the loosening of Ruby LaRocca’s ‘taut cables’…which act to pull people upward…and St-Exupery’s ‘springs’…which reduce the incidence of disastrous falls. Over the past several years, both of these (related) failure modes have become increasingly dominant. I believe that we were on a track to a very dark time…see my post Head-Heart-Stomach…but that we now have a real chance to turn things around. There really does seem to be a new feeling among a high proportion of Americans and across several dimensions of attitudes and opinions. Not all Americans, of course…but a lot. And while there are many ways things can go wrong, there is plenty of reason for hope. We’ll discuss some of the threats and challenges later (soon), but for the moment, let’s briefly relax and breathe a sigh of relief as to what has been–at least for now–avoided.
Nothing is saved forever, as Connie Willis noted in one of her novels, but in America, something very important has been saved, at least for now. It will need to be saved many more times in the future, both the near future and the far future, but for now, thankfulness and celebration are appropriate.
(I discussed the Ruby LaRocca essay and the St-Exupery passage previously, here)