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21. The Lesson for Today
If this uncertain age in which we dwell
Were really as dark as I hear sages tell,
And I convinced that they were really sages,
I should not curse myself with it to hell,
But leaving not the chair I long have sat in,
I should betake me back ten thousand pages
To the world’s undebatably dark ages,
And getting up my medieval Latin,
Seek converse common cause and brotherhood
(By all that’s liberal—I should, I should)
With poets who could calmly take the fate
Of being born at once too early and late,
And for these reasons kept from being great.
Yet singing but Dione in the wood
And ver aspergit terram floribus
They slowly led old Latin verse to rhyme
And to forget the ancient lengths of time,
And so began the modern world for us.
I’d say, O Master of the Palace School,
You were not Charles’ nor anybody’s fool:
Tell me as pedagogue to pedagogue,
You did not know that since King Charles did rule
You had no chance but to be minor, did you?
Your light was spent perhaps as in a fog
That at once kept you burning low and hid you.
The age may very well have been to blame
For your not having won to Virgil’s fame.
But no one ever heard you make the claim.
You would not think you knew enough to judge
The age when full upon you. That’s my point.
We have today and I could call their name
Who know exactly what is out of joint
To make their verse and their excuses lame.
They’ve tried to grasp with too much social fact
Too large a situation. You and I
Would be afraid if we should comprehend
And get outside of too much bad statistics
Our muscles never could again contract:
We never could recover human shape,
But must live lives out mentally agape,
Or die of philosophical distention.
That’s how we feel—and we’re no special mystics.
pedagogue : 교육자
agape : 1.입을 딱 벌리고 2.멍하니 3.아연하여
distention : 확장
We can’t appraise the time in which we act.
But for the folly of it, let’s pretend
We know enough to know it for adverse.
One more millennium’s about to end.
Let’s celebrate the event, my distant friend,
In publicly disputing which is worse,
The present age or your age. You and I
As schoolmen of repute should qualify
To wage a fine scholastical contention
As to whose age deserves the lower mark,
Or should I say the higher one, for dark.
I can just hear the way you make it go:
There’s always something to be sorry for,
A sordid peace or an outrageous war.
Yes, yes, of course. We have the same convention.
The groundwork of all faith is human woe.
It was well worth preliminary mention.
There’s nothing but injustice to be had,
No choice is left a poet, you might add,
But how to take the curse, tragic or comic.
It was well worth preliminary mention
But let’s go on to where our cases part,
If part they do. Let me propose a start
(We’re rivals in the badness of our case,
Remember, and must keep a solemn face)
Space ails us moderns: we are sick with space.
Its contemplation makes us out as small
As a brief epidemic of microbes
That in a good glass may be seen to crawl
The patina of this the least of globes
But have we there the advantage after all?
You were belittled into vilest worms
God hardly tolerated with his feet,
Which comes to the same thing in different terms
We both are the belittled human race,
One as compared with God and one with space.
I had thought ours the more profound disgrace,
But doubtless this was only my conceit.
The cloister and the observatory saint
Take comfort in about the same complaint.
So science and religion really meet.
sordid : 1.야비한 2.더러운 3.답답한
convention : 관습
patina : 1.녹청 2.고색 3.얕고 큰 접시 4. 표면을 아름답게 덮는 얇은 것
cloister : 1.회랑 2.…을 수도원에 가두다 3.수도원 생활
I can just hear you call your Palace class:
Come learn the Latin Eheu for alas.
You may not want to use it and you may.
O paladins, the lesson for today
Is how to be unhappy yet polite.
And at the summons Roland, Olivier,
And every sheepish paladin and peer,
Being already more than proved in fight,
Sits down in school to try if he can write
Like Horace in the true Horatian vein,
Yet like a Christian disciplined to bend
His mind to thinking always of the end.
Memento mori and obey the Lord
Art and religion love the somber chord.
Earth’s a hard place in which to save the soul,
And could it be brought under state control,
So automatically we all were saved,
Its separateness from Heaven could be waived;
It might as well at once be kingdom-come.
(Perhaps it will be next millennium)
paladin : 1.Charlemagne 대제의 12용사 중의 한 사람 2.의협심이 강한 전사 3.영웅
peer : 1.(종종 one's peers) 동료 2.(영) 귀족(nobleman) 4.상원 의원 5.(능력·자격·연령 등이) 동등한 사람
vein : 맥락
memento mori : 1.죽음의 경고 2.그대는 죽음을 각오하라 3.죽음의 상징
But these are universals, not confined
To anyone time, place, or human kind.
We’re either nothing or a God’s regret.
As ever when philosophers are met,
No matter where they stoutly mean to get,
Nor what particulars they reason from,
They are philosophers, and from old habit
They end up in the universal Whole
As unoriginal as any rabbit
One age is like another for the soul.
I’m telling you. You haven’t said a thing,
Unless I put it in your mouth to say.
I’m having the whole argument my way—
But in your favor—please to tell your King—
In having granted you all ages shine
With equal darkness, yours as dark as mine.
I’m liberal. You, you aristocrat,
Won’t know exactly what I mean by that.
I mean so altruistically moral
I never take my own side in a quarrel.
I’d lay my hand on his hand on his staff,
Lean back and have my confidential laugh,
And tell him I had read his Epitaph
Epitaph : 비문
It sent me to the graves the other day.
The only other there was far away
Across the landscape with a watering pot
At his devotions in a special plot
And he was there resuscitating flowers
(Make no mistake about its being bones),
But I was only there to read the stones
To see what on the whole they had to say
About how long a man may think to live,
Which is becoming my concern of late.
And very wide the choice they seemed to give,
The ages ranging all the way from hours
To months and years and many many years.
One man had lived one hundred years and eight.
But though we all may be inclined to wait
And follow some development of state,
Or see what comes of science and invention,
There is a limit to our time extension.
We all are doomed to broken-off careers,
And so’s the nation, so’s the total race.
The earth itself is liable to the fate
Of meaninglessly being broken off.
(And hence so many literary tears
At which my inclination is to scoff.)
I may have wept that any should have died
Or missed their chance, or not have been their best,
Or been their riches, fame, or love denied;
On me as much as any is the jest.
I take my incompleteness with the rest.
God bless himself can no one else be blessed.
I hold your doctrine of Memento Mori.
And were an epitaph to be my story
I’d have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.
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오늘의 수업
만약 우리가 살아가는 불안한 이 시대가
현자(賢者)들의 말처럼 정말로 어둡고,
그들이 현자들임이 정말로 확실하다면,
나는 불안한 이 시대에 죽도록 시달리느니,
오래 동안 앉았던 의자를 떠나지 않은 채
의심의 여지없이 어두웠던 시대들로
1만 페이지의 시간을 거슬러 올라가,
나의 중세 라틴어를 일으켜 세워서,
너무 일찍 그리고 너무 늦게 태어나서,
그리고 이런 이유로 위인(偉人)이 못 된 운명을
조용히 감내할 수 있었던 시인들과 함께
(진보적인 관점으로―아무렴, 그래야지).
우리의 공동적인 이유와 형제관계를 의논할 것이다.
그들은 숲속의 디오네를 노래하고
봄은 온 땅에 꽃을 흩뿌리고 라고 읊조리며,
서서히 옛 라틴어 시에 압운(押韻)을 달게 하고,
고풍스런 박자의 길이를 잊도록 하였으니,
이렇게 우리의 현대 세계가 시작되었다.
나는 말할 것이다, 오, 궁정학교 선생님이여,
당신은 찰스 또는 그 누구의 어릿광대도 아니었습니다.
교육자 대 고육자로서 제게 밝혀주시기 바라기는,
찰스 왕이 통치한 이후에 귀하는 2류 시인이 될
가능성밖에 없다는 사실을 진정 모르고 계셨나요?
아마도 귀하의 빛이 안개 속에서 허비되었으니
귀하의 빛이 계속 약해지고 귀하의 존재가 사라졌지요.
귀하가 베르길리우스의 명성에 이르지 못한 것은
어쩌면 그 시대의 책임이 아주 크다 할 것입니다.
그러나 귀하는 그렇다고 주장한 적이 없습니다.
시대가 귀하를 전면 공격할 때 귀하는 시대를 평가할 만큼
알고 있다고 생각하지 않았지요. 그게 제 요점입니다.
우리에겐 오늘이 있고 저는 오늘 무엇이 어긋나서
그들의 시와 변명들이 절름발이가 되었는지
정확히 아는 사람들을 호명(呼名)할 수 있을 겁니다.
그들은 너무 많은 사회적 사실로 너무나 큰 상황을
포착하려고 노력했습니다. 귀하와 제가 두려워하기는
만약 우리가 사정을 이해하고
너무 나쁜 통계까지 삼켜버리면,
우리의 근육이 다시는 수축할 수 없을 거라는 겁니다.
우리는 결코 인간의 형상을 회복할 수 없을 것이고,
정신적으로 어리벙벙한 삶을 살거나
철학적 팽창으로 죽어야 할 것입니다.
그게 우리의 느낌이고―우리는 별난 신비주의자가 아닙니다.
우리는 우리가 활동하는 시대를 평가할 수 없습니다.
그러나 이 시대가 좋지 못한 시대라는 것을,
어리석은 양, 충분히 알고 있는 척 하십시다.
또 다른 천년이 이제 막을 내리려고 합니다.
나의 먼 친구여, 지금의 시대와 귀하의 시대,
어느 쪽이 더 나쁜지 공개적으로 토론하는 가운데,
한 세기의 종말(終末)을 축하합시다. 귀하와 나
명성 있는 교사로서의 합당한 자격을 갖추고
누구의 시대가 더 낮은 점수를 받을만한지,
또는 암담하다는 점에서, 더 높은 점수를 받을만한지,
스콜라 철학적인 멋진 논쟁을 벌이십시다.
귀하가 어떤 논리를 펼치실지 제 귀에 들립니다.
슬퍼할 어떤 것이 항상 존재하는 법이니,
더러운 평화나 난폭한 전쟁을 겪는 것이라고 하시겠지요.
그렇습니다, 물론 그렇습니다. 우리는 동일한 인습을 갖습니다.
모든 신앙의 기초는 인간의 고난입니다.
이것은 언급할 가치가 충분한 전제(前提)였습니다.
가질 것이 불공정(不公正)밖에 없으니,
비극적이건 희극적이건,
그 저주를 받아들이는 방법 이외에는,
시인에게 남은 선택이 없다고, 귀하는 덧붙이실 것입니다.
이것은 언급할 가치가 충분한 전제(前提)였습니다.
그러나 우리의 주장이 갈라진다 하더라도,
갈라지는 곳까지는 계속 동행하십시다, 출발을 제안합니다.
(우리는 불량한 상황의 적수(敵手)들이니,
이를 기억하시고, 엄숙한 표정을 유지하셔야 합니다.)
우주(宇宙)가 우리 현대인에게 고통을 줍니다. 우리는 우주 때문에 아픕니다.
우주를 응시하면 우리가 아주 작은 존재로서,
우리는 잠시 있다 사라지는 세균과 다르지 않고
좋은 현미경으로 보면 천체 중에서도 가장 작은
녹청(綠靑)색 지구를 기어 다니고 있을 것입니다.
그러나 결국 유리한 것은 우리인가요?
귀하는 너무 사악한 벌레로 작아졌기에
신이 그의 발로 관용을 베풀 수 없을 것 같았습니다.
다른 상황이긴 하지만 우리는 같은 운명입니다.
우리는 둘 다 작아진 인종(人種)입니다.
한쪽은 신과 비교되고 한쪽은 우주와 비교되지요.
저는 우리 쪽의 비교가 더 심한 수치라고 생각했습니다.
그러나 분명 이것은 저의 사견(私見)에 지나지 않습니다.
수도원의 성인과 천문대의 천문학자는
거의 똑같은 불만에서 위안(慰安)을 찾습니다.
그러니 과학과 종교는 사실상 상통합니다.
궁정 학급에 초대하는 귀하의 목소리가 들립니다.
영어 alas(아아) 대신 라틴어 eheu(嗚呼)를 배우러 오시오.
배워서 사용해도 좋고 사용하지 않아도 좋습니다.
오, 용사들이여, 오늘의 수업은
불행 가운데서도 예의바르게 처신하는 방법입니다.
그리고 귀하의 권고에 롤랑, 올리비에,
그리고 수줍은 용사와 전사들이 각자,
전투로 이미 능력을 입증하고도 남았기에,
이제는 수업에 참석해서 호라티우스처럼,
진정한 호라티우스의 풍자적 풍(風)으로,
그러나 항상 죽음의 생각에 전념토록 훈련된
기독교인답게 글을 쓰려고 애를 씁니다.
죽음을 각오하라 그리고 주님을 따르라.
예술과 종교는 어두운 정서를 사랑합니다.
지구는 영혼을 구원하기에 어려운 곳입니다.
그러니 그것을 국가의 통제 하에 둔다면,
우리는 모두 자동적으로 구원받을 것이고,
하늘과의 분리를 유예 받을 수 있을 것입니다.
지구는 즉시 천국(天國)이 될지도 모르지요.
(어쩌면 다음의 지복 천년(千年)이 될 것입니다.)
그러나 이런 상황들은 보편적인 것이기에,
어느 한 때, 장소, 인종에 국한된 것이 아닙니다.
우리는 무(nothing)의 존재 또는 신의 실패작입니다.
철학자들이 회동(會同)하면 언제나 그렇듯이,
그들이 당당하게 당도코자 하는 목적지가 어디든,
또는 그들이 추론하는 구체적 근거가 무엇이든,
그들은 철학자로서, 그리고 오랜 습관에서,
그들은 어느 토끼만큼도 독창적이지 않은
보편적 공허(空虛)의 결말에 이르고 맙니다.
영혼에게 한 시대는 또 다른 시대와 같습니다.
제 말만 하고 있군요. 귀하는 한 말씀도 안하시는군요.
제가 귀하가 하실 말을 대신 하지 않는 한,
모든 주장을 제 멋대로 펼치고 있습니다만―
귀하에게 유리한 것은―부디 귀하의 왕에게 전하세요―
모든 시대 즉 제 시대와 귀하의 시대의 빛이
똑같이 어둡다는 사실을 자인(自認)하는 겁니다.
저는 진보주의자입니다. 귀하, 귀하는 귀족이니,
이렇게 말하는 제 뜻을 정확히 모르실 것입니다.
제 의도는 매우 이타적으로 도덕적이기 때문에
어느 논쟁에서 제 자신의 편을 드는 적이 없습니다.
나는 지팡이 쥔 그[수도승]의 손에 내 손을 얹고,
허리를 젖히고 허물없이 크게 웃으며,
그의 묘비명(墓碑銘)을 읽었노라고 말하고 싶다.
그래서 나는 요전에 묘지에 갔다.
멀리 떨어진 외딴 곳에 묘지가 있었으니
풍경 사이에 물뿌리개를 갖추었고
특별 구역에 고인(故人)에게 봉헌한 것으로,
그곳에서 고인은 꽃들을 부활시키고 있었다.
(그것이 유골들인 것은 분명하였다).
그러나 내가 그곳에 간 것은 단지 비문들을 읽고
사람이 얼마나 오래 산다고 생각하는지에 대해
대체로 그들이 할 말이 무엇인지 보려는 것이었으니,
이것이 최근 나의 관심사였기 때문이다.
그리고 그들은 폭넓은 선택을 제공하는 듯 했다.
수명(壽命)은 시간에서 월(月) 그리고 년(年)들과
많고, 많은 년(年)들까지 아주 다양한 분포였다.
어떤 사람은 일백팔 년이니 살았다.
그러나 우리 모두가 국가의 발전을 기다리고
과학과 발명의 소산을 따르려는 성향이 있지만,
우리의 수명에는 한계가 있다.
우리의 생애는 모두 끊기는 운명이고,
국가도 그렇고, 전 인류도 그러하다.
지구 자체가 의미 없이 끊기는
운명의 제물이 되기가 쉽다.
(나는 이에 따른 수많은 문학적
눈물을 조소하는 성향이다.)
나도 사람들이 죽었거나, 기회를 놓쳤거나,
그들의 최선이 되지 못했거나, 그들의 부, 명예,
또는 사랑이 거부당한 것을 보고 울었을 것이다.
나의 조소는 나는 물론 모두에게 해당된다.
나는 다른 한계와 함께 나의 불완전을 인정한다.
다른 누구를 축복할 수 없다면 신 스스로 축복하소서.
저는 죽음을 각오하라는 귀하의 신조를 지지합니다.
그리고 비문이 저의 이야기가 된다면
저는 짧은 제 비문을 하나 준비했습니다.
저는 제 비석에 저에 대해 이렇게 쓸 것입니다.
나는 세상과 연인의 언쟁을 벌였다.
-신재실 옮김-
단상(斷想): 버몬트 주 베닝턴 시 제1연합교회(First Congregational Church)에 있는 프로스트의 묘비에는 프로스트가 그의 시「오늘의 수업」에서 선택한 “나는 세상과 연인의 언쟁을 벌였다(I had a lover's quarrel with the world).”는 비문이 새겨져 있다. 이 시는 프로스트가 1941년 6월 20일 Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard University에서 처음으로 낭독하였으니, 그는 자신의 비문을 사망(1963년 1월 29) 22년 전에 직접 작성한 셈이다.
어느 시대나 사람들은 말세론에 현혹되기 쉽다. 프로스트는 “Letter to 'The Amherst Student'”(1935)에서 “세계의 모든 시대는 나쁘다―어쨌든 천국보다는 훨씬 나쁘다.”고 말했다. 이 시에서도 프로스트는 자신의 시대가 정말로 최악의 시대인가에 대해 의문을 제기하고, 중세 시인과의 가상적 대화로, 지구는 본질적으로 “영혼을 구원하기에 어려운 곳”임을 증명한다.
“우리의 수명에는 한계가 있다./ 우리의 생애는 모두 끊기는 운명이고,/ 국가도 그렇고, 전 인류도 그러하다.” 누구나 자신의 생애가 곧 끝날 것이고, 성취하고자 했던 것을 모두 이루지 못한 아쉬움을 느낄 것이다. 묘지에 가봐라. 잠깐 살다 간 사람도 있고, 좀 오래 살다 간 사람도 있고, 백 년도 더 살다 간 사람도 있다. 그러면 “나도 사람들이 죽었거나, 기회를 놓쳤거나,/ 그들의 최선이 되지 못했거나, 그들의 부, 명예,/ 또는 사랑이 거부당한 것을 보고 울었을 것이다.”
우리의 일상은 추울 때가 많다. 만성적인 통증과 위협적인 질병 때문에 부단히 가족이나 이웃의 보살핌이 필요하기도 하고, 예기치 않게 발생하는 사건이나 사고와 맞서 사워야 할 때도 있고, 이로 인해 때로는 가족이나 친구와 언쟁을 벌일 수밖에 없다. 그리고 어떤 사람이나 가족, 또는 어떤 나라는 부당한 고통이나 시련에 봉착하는 것 같다. 그렇기에 어떤 사람은, “왜 하필 나입니까? 왜 내가 이런 시련을 당해야 합니까?”라고 무정한 신이나 세상을 원망하는 것을 이해할 수 있다.
슬프게도 우리의 인생은 항상 공평한 것이 아니다. 선량한 사람이 항상 응분의 보상을 받고, 악한 사람이 항상 응분의 벌을 받는 것은 아니다. 하지만 신은 부당한 벌과 보상에서 차별하지는 않는다. 불공평한 우연과 운명은 부자와 가난뱅이, 의로운 자와 의롭지 않은 자, 왕과 거지에게 똑같이 일어날 수 있다. 응분의 보상을 받을지, 아니면 부당한 벌을 받을지 아무도 모른다. 살아봐야 안다. 세상과 “연인의 언쟁”을 벌일 수밖에 없는 이유가 아닐까? 세상이 천국처럼 공평하다면, 그것은 천국이지 이미 세상이 아니다. 모든 종교와 “신앙의 기초는 인간의 고난” 이다. 이를 전제하지 않는 철학은 과학적 지성의 희롱일 뿐이다.
-신재실 씀-
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The Library of Congress talk did much to bring Frost into public notice as a commentator on the American political scene, a role to which he had increasingly aspired in recent years. He received further help and encouragement in that direction a few months later when President Conant invited him to stay on at Harvard for an extra year as Fellow in American Civilization—or, as the president described it, "a roving consultant in History and Literature." The annual stipend of $3,000 was half again as much as he had received in his Emerson fellowship, and the duties were no more rigorous. All he would have to do was make himself more or less regularly available in each of Harvard's seven houses, for "group discussions on American Civilization in the larger sense of the word." Frost cheerfully accepted Conant's invitation.
His first opportunity to speak on American civilization came little more than a month later. On the twentieth of June he delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard a new poem on which he had been working, irregularly, since 1935. It was called "The Lesson for Today," and in it Frost took a stand—in his half-joking, half-serious way—against those poets and prophets of doom who were suggesting that the world was, beyond question, passing through the darkest age in human history. Such people, Frost said, were off the mark. First, it was impossible for them to judge how bad the times really were, without the perspective of hundreds of years of ensuing history. Second, in their condemnation of human suffering and adversity, they failed to realize that "The groundwork of all faith is human woe." Frost was inclined to scoff at those who shed "literary tears" over the fact that they, the nation, the human race—even, the earth itself—were "doomed to broken-off careers." The epitaph that Frost would choose to be remembered by would be no more bitter than the single line: "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."
After his Harvard appearance Frost returned to Ripton, where Lillian and Prescott were spending part of the summer. With Frost's assistance and encouragement, both Lillian and her son had emerged as successfully from the dark period of Carol's death as Frost himself had done. But there was still one more duty to be performed before they could feel that the whole sad business was behind them. Carol's ashes, as well as Elinor's, were still in the possession of the Bennington undertaker where they had been since Carol's cremation. Interment had yet to take place.
Some months before, Frost had purchased a large plot in the cemetery of Old Bennington's First Congregational Church, for use as the Frost burial ground. He had also arranged for several stones to be made that would bear the names of all the Frosts, including those already buried elsewhere, and his own.
In September he learned that the stones had been delivered to the cemetery and that two recesses had been prepared, to receive the urns of Carol and his mother. He completed arrangements with the minister of the church and set a time for the interment. As they entered the churchyard at the appointed hour, they caught a glimpse of the minister talking to a parishioner. They walked on to the gravesite to await his arrival. Ten minutes passed, then twenty, then thirty. Thinking the minister was for some reason deliberately ignoring them, Frost became increasingly furious—until, at last, he decided they had waited long enough. "We don't need any help to do what we came here for," he said to Lillian and Prescott. He instructed his grandson to place Carol's urn in the space that had been prepared for it. He did the same with the long-unburied urn of his wife. As they watched, two workmen who were standing by came forward and set the stones in place. Then, the three Frosts turned and walked away.
from "Robert Frost : A Biography - Thompson Lawrance Roger"
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Space ails us modems: we are sick with space.
Its contemplation makes us out as small
As a brief epidemic of microbes
That in a good glass may be seen to crawl
The patina of this the least of globes.
"The Lesson for Today" (1942)
As Frost's poem "The Lesson for Today" (1942) suggests, the nebular hypothesis, although certainly disturbing in its own right, was only one contributing cause of a larger problem that for Frost lay at the heart of modernity itself. Convinced that the universe was "expanse and nothing else,"^^ Frost understood that the dissolution of Scholastic cosmology weakened Christianity's philosophical authority. As scientists from Copernicus to Laplace had extended the dimensions of space to indefinite and even infinite proportions, it had gradually become ab- surd to suppose that God had created the earth solely for human habitation and benefit. The modem universe was far too extensive to support the Aristotelian beliefs that the earth was the center of the universe and that heavenly bodies were inhabited by independent anima that con- trolled the direction and duration of celestial orbits. If all of the material components in the universe could be considered as ontologically equivalent, then no longer could theologians rationally envision a Dantean ascent from the dark, imperfect earth toward the illuminating perfection of the heavenly spheres. There appeared to be no definitive hierarchy, and as nineteenth-century scientists learned more and more about the true nature of physical space, it became more and more doubtful that a convincing eschatology, one that left room for divine providence and transcendent sources of value, would ever be recovered. Speaking of the shift from the "Ptolemaic geo-centric universe to the Copemican no-centric universe," Frost wrote; "It has taken me some years of my life to accept our position; but I see no way out of it. There is apparently not a soul but us alive in the whole business of rolling balls, eddying fires, and long distance rays of light. It makes any coziness in our nook here all the more heartwarming."^^
Frost may also have been deeply troubled by Proctor's discussion of the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy—the "universal cataract of death," as Frost describes it in "West-Running Brook"— which demonstrated mathematically that kinetic energy within a closed system eventually dissipates in every conversion process until it finally becomes immeasurable.^'' Originally employed practically as a means for engineers to measure the horsepower and efficiency of coal-fired machines, the second law of thermodynamics, when translated to the solar system, also predicted the inevitable exhaustion ofthe sun's fuel, the certain cooling ofthe solar system, and, as a consequence, the eventual death of all organic life on earth. Although it would be nearly four decades until modem physicists, writing in the wake of Georges Lemaître's big bang theory, would postulate the thermodynamic equilibrium of the cosmos, the so-called heat death of the universe, the entropie forecast for the cosmos was just as bleak in the 1880s as it was in the 1930s. In the aftermath of entropy it became clear that despite science's profound ability to predict and sometimes control nature, humans could never completely immunize themselves against cosmic extinction. In his own discussion of entropy Proctor offered little consolation to those who were concemed about such issues. "When we look forward to the future of this earth on which we live," he wrote, "we find, far off it may be, but still discemible, a time when all life will have perished from on"the earth's face. Then will she circle around the central sun, even as our moon circles, a dead though massive globe, an orb bearing only the records and the memories of former life, but, to our conceptions, a useless desert scene."'^^
In nearly every regard, then, except for a few tentative declarations of faith. Our Place among Lnfinities is not an optimistic book. Contrary to Thompson's depiction of it as a positive agent of Frost's spiritual and psychological recovery. Our Place among Infinities merely articulated Frost's most important philosophical problem: the growing estrangement between the human world, which emphasized moral necessity, and the natural world, which was completely indifferent to moral concems. If the Victorian version of a godless universe was accurate, then perhaps the most rational moral response available was to "amend" nature, as John Stuart Mill suggested,^* or, as Huxley asserted even more passionately, to "combat" nature so as to mitigate the traumatic consequences brought about by the death, disease, and prédation that cosmic mechanism inevitably guaranteed.^' The only other available altemative was to adopt the intuitive stance of the mystic, who, calmly accepting death and other cosmic absurdities as the essential conditions of the universe, saw no distinction between the civilized and natural worlds and so bridged the gulf between them.^^ In many respects, it was this latter position that Proctor unsuccessfully tried to adopt for himself. Yet despite his genuine effort to reconcile science and religion, his mystical belief had been so compromised by his scientific knowledge that he merely reaffirmed the problem Tennyson had found so disconcerting in the 1840s. God and nature were at strife, as Tennyson declared in In Memoriam, and the physical universe as revealed by science implied that God could not be located in the material components and mechanistic processes of nature.
Of course, had Frost been Whitman, he might have accepted Proctor's diluted romanticism with remarkable aplomb. It was Whitman, after all, who dismissed the calculations of "Leam'd Astronomers" as arrogant and then, without any vacillation, wandered "unaccountable" into the "mystical moist night-air" to "look up in perfect silence at the stars."^' Frost, however, had none of Whitman's capacity for accepting death and "all the things of the universe" as "perfect miracles,"^" nor could he consciously ignore the abundant scientific discoveries that had seemingly rendered a religious vision of the universe untenable. As an inheritor of a late Victorian moral sensibility. Frost was much more profoundly aware that the fin-de-siècle cosmos, newly expanded and mechanized by science, was now more than ever capable of reducing human aspirations and achievements to an almost total insignificance.
That the huge gulf between moral desire and natural fact had become for him one ofthe most conspicuous conflicts in his life is evident in one of his most dispiriting poems, "Desert Places" (1934). One can hardly imagine a starker contrast between Whitman's expansive, life-affirming catalogs and Frost's fear that the universe would eventu- ally consume him:
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow.
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it—it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
{CPP&P, 269)
As in the earlier poem "Stars," both winter and the heavens have con- spired to assault the poet's sensibility; he cannot "count" either as a significant human being or as a poet, who by "counting" out the met- rics of his verse might engage the imagination to amend nature and transform it into a comprehensible, less menacing place. In such a bleak moment of absent-spiritedness, the only recourse left is for Frost to engage his keen sense of detached irony; he can defiect the extemal threat only by conjuring up an equivalent intemal threat that might neutralize the other's impending danger. As a last resort, perhaps tak- ing his cue from Wallace Stevens, Frost summons "the violence from within" to protect himself "from the violence without."^'
Unfortunately, however, this strategy also fails, for contrary to the apparent bravado in "They cannot scare me with their empty spaces/ Between stars," the falling rhythms and faltering extra syllables of the last stanza betray the poet's posturing as his confidence gives way to a more comprehensive fear. Here, fear is not merely a projection of an overactive imagination but a highly rational response by one who has fiill knowledge of a world informed by science. The terrestrial and ex- traterrestrial environments are so threatening that the poet can no lon- ger mentally forge adequate protective stmctures against them. Para- lyzed by the desert places surrounding it, the mind, too, has become a desert place—notice the echo of Proctor's description of cosmic decay as "a useless desert scene"—where hope and redemption remain im- possible and the threat of annihilation seems imminent.
The idea that the extemal universe might transform the mind from a sanctuary into a source of terror is fiirther underscored by Frost's conscious revision of the famous quotation from Blaise Pascal's Pensées, "Le silence etemal de ces espaces infinis m'effraie" (The etemal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me), where Pascal describes how terror, rather than destroying his belief in God, actually leads him to ecstatic moments of religious faith.^^ As evidence of faith's rationality, Pascal offered his famous wager: If we believe in God and God does not exist, then we have lost nothing. Conversely, if we do not believe in God and God does exist, then we have committed ourselves needlessly to a lifetime of suffering. Because this argument shares strong affinities with James's belief that religious faith has a beneficial psychological component, one might assume that Frost would have welcomed Pascal's argument as an attractive complement to James. As the tone of resignation in "Desert Places" ultimately suggests, however, Pascal's wager was untenable for Frost. His fear of a barren cosmos is here so pronounced that it has crippled his ability to imagine a more secure future. Instead of leading him to religious insight, the "empty spaces between stars" lead him only to the stark realization that he is unable to reconcile the natural world's destructive processes with his own desire to preserve his ego.
While "Desert Places" suggests that hostile landscapes can transform the mind from a source of redemption into a source of terror, it would be unwise to take "Desert Places" or "Stars" as Frost's final word on the perils of astronomical phenomena. As always in Frost's poetry, discernible thematic countermovements often neutralize ideas that at first glance appear absolute. This deconstructionist propensity, which Richard Poirier has astutely identified as the "central achievement of Frost's poetry from the first volume onward,"^^ evinces itself in other poems that mediate seasonal or astronomical threats. In well- known poems such as "The Onset," "Tree at My Window," and "Take Something Like a Star," Frost stresses the idea that even though we are irreparably separated from nature by our own consciousness, it is paradoxically that same consciousness that allows us to navigate the gulf between "inner" and "outer" weather so we can "amend" nature and make it more compatible with our own needs. If nature is a destructive force that can annihilate the ego, it is also, to Frost's way of thinking, a restorative force that has paradoxically equipped us with a mind capable of creating ample protective structures. The imagination- whose volitional processes condition the mind to select the objects it wishes to perceive, to discriminate among them, to judge them good or bad, to change them for the befter, or to make among them sound, responsible choices—enables us to imagine a befter and more congenial future. The act of writing is thus for Frost not only the first step toward coming to terms with a hostile cosmos but also the first step toward erecting the saving structures of community, marriage, and religious faith.
In a 1961 interview with the novelist Mark Harris, Frost expounded his voluntarist tendencies, many of which had infiuenced his thinking since his first encounter with William James:
The most creative thing in us is to believe a thing in, in love, in all else. You believe yourself into existence. You believe your marriage into existence, you believe in each other, you believe that it's worthwhile going on, or you'd commit suicide wouldn't you? ... And the ultimate one is the belief in the future of the world. I believe the future in. It's coming in by my believing it. You might as well call that a belief in God. This word God is not an often-used word with me, but once in a while it arrives there.^^
The will to believe, the capacity to transform imaginatively the disturbing elements of one's life, including threats fostered by the natural world, became for Frost such a useful redemptive method that he argued for its validity for the rest of his life.
from "We are Sick with Space - Robert Bernard Hass"