Daydreaming
When a myth becomes a daydream it is judged, found wanting, and must be discarded. To cling to it when it has lost its creative function is to condemn oneself to mental illness. I do not say we must learn to live without myths (such an idea is dangerous self-deception: it is itself a false myth, or a daydream) but we must at least get along without evasions. A daydream is an evasion.
When a myth becomes an evasion, the society that clings to it gets into serious trouble.
What is the conventionally accepted American myth? Is this myth still alive, or has it expired and become an evasion….?
“America is the earthly paradise.”
To say that this was once a valid and creative myth, is not to say there was no basis of truth in it. On the contrary, this belief in the obvious possibilities of an immense new continent, a place fabulously endowed and blessed, had fantastic potency……
But the New-Found-Land was a world without history, therefore without sin, therefore a paradise. To this world came the victims of Europe, grown old in wickedness, with its history of arbitrary authority. To escape from history, that is to say from Europe, to escape from the burden of the past, to return to he source, to begin again a new history, starting from scratch, without original sin. This is what America offered to the oppressed, the persecuted, the unsuccessful, the disinherited–or the merely discontented. To be “baptized” by emigration, to leave one’s sins and one’s past…….
For four hundred years American horizons kept widening. There were no limits. There was always a frontier beyond which there was still paradise, even though on this side of the frontier there was now history, there was sin, and paradise has begun to close down. Yet it did not close down altogether as long as thee was a frontier. There was always a new start, over the mountains, over the plains.
……thus the word “frontier” became the symbol not only of adventure but of clear-eyed innocence–pathetic overtones, in Kennedy’s “new frontier,” when the frontiers are closed forever! Kennedy is trying to keep the frontier alive in spite of everything.
Excerpted from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton
More tomorrow…………….
