The Uses of Disillusionment

There is a form of disillusionment that makes possible a passionate engagement with the world--not for the sake of any change that one might expect to result from one's actions but for the sake of the beauty of the stance.

This is not exactly Proust's gift to the world (as I understand it), for he had abandoned passionate engagement with anything but the recollection of past passions. "His theory" wrote Joseph Wood Krutch, "was that the quality of a direct experience always eluded one and that only in recollection could we grasp its real flavor." I accept his theory, but rather than abandon myself to the detached aestheticism of the spectator, put aside my desire for the "real flavor" of my own experiences and focus, instead, upon the active construction of the myths into which I seek my own immersion and, hopefully, transformation.

Such transformation enlists the aid of recollection: the remembrance of those archetypal forms one finds in heroic lives.

And so every day I decry the evils thereof and preach the coming apocalypse; at the same time, I go about my ordinary business confident in the knowledge that, as Leo Tolstoy put it, "God sees, and waits."

In this way, disillusionment leads not to despair but, paradoxically, frees one for action; for disappointment loses its sting. Realism and Romanticism are posed in a dialogical tension. One reads Morte d'Arthur and then Don Quixote in pari materia, one work of genius informing the other. This is, after all, the natural rhythm of our lives: to move from dreaming to wakefulness to dreaming once again. Privileging one state over the other results in a sort of schizophrenia. There is far too much of that going around today--not to mention the delusive expectation that if we can just elect the right people, all will be well.

Disillusionment prepares the way for the coming political revolution: when the people of this country finally accept the fact that politics as usual is the opiate of the masses and that fundamental (i.e., Constitutional) change is not only possible, but realistic and desirable. A new America is but a Constitutional Convention away. But that convention will not be convened until a moral transformation takes place; one that permits us to kick our addiction to self-defeating political habits.

Let go. Dream. Rise up.