My mother called us at the beach yesterday and remarked that it was good “to be on the edge of a continent.” She is landlocked now but spent several years living on an island on the Georgia Coast. Our best vacations growing up were also centered on the edges where water meets land.
The phrase “edge of a continent” evokes lots of images: the mouth of the Amazon, the various entry points to Africa, and of course, Manifest Destiny. Those images all have us looking from the wet edge inwards to land. If we reverse our gaze we have the Vikings, Columbus and even the Phoenicians gazing out into the unknown waters and beyond them to the farthest unknown.
My own present edge of a continent is a barrier island in the Atlantic lying on an East-West axis. Always on the beach my orientation is to the water, so my gaze is southward. This makes the unknown as I step off the edge the island of Cuba or farther along the top of South America. Neither quite as unknown as being at an edge seems to warrant or imply. And yet it always feels as though I’ve left the middle of the country behind, left the known, the discovered, the conquered. Part of that feeling is engendered I’m sure by the ocean itself.
But the question remains what to look at from this Eastern edge of a fully discovered continent, the edge from which our Westerings grew and grew and grew. Perhaps we should look to the place where those intrepid souls stepped off their known edge. Back to what the Bush people dismissed as Old Europe with its outmoded values and ideals. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity are certainly so 18th Century. But have the ideals of Manifest Destiny worked all that much better? Every time we — including the Europeans which many of us once were — have stepped past the edge of a continent someone has suffered, usually many someones. Especially since hidden within Manifest Destiny is the firm idea of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon. Admittedly America has no lock on imperialism — having gotten a late start--though the recent discovery of a treasure trove of lithium in Afghanistan gives one pause.
It may not be Europe that we look back to from the Eastern edge of this continent. Maybe it is the past itself that we look at when we gaze at the ocean, or the future.
Three of my clients are much concerned with history. The oldest, who died last year 2 months short of 90, sold newspapers on the town square during the Great Depression, and later was a major player in the reconstruction of Germany following WWII. He was a businessman, head, actually, of a Fortune 500 company. The next youngest is an attorney and was involved in much of Civil Rights history, making a fair amount of it himself. The youngest, a man in his 70s, was a history major at Yale and came to lead an enormous global concern.
When these three fine men talk about history they aren’t just wanting to remind us of Santayana’s famous adage — though all three have quoted him to me over the years. What they are concerned with is the intense and almost hysterical ahistorical nature of our times. They are concerned when they hear people enjoining the government to “get their hands off our Medicare;” concerned when Fox News commentators begin to sound like Father Coughlin and the America Firsters; and concerned when a Black Supreme Court justice acts as if the efficacy and necessity of affirmative action ended when he got into law school.
Not that any one of these men could not countenance a difference of opinion — these are educated, thoughtful, and above all tolerant individuals — much more so than me for instance. But that a willful embrace of ignorance and a disdain for, or at the least disregard, of history disturbs them all greatly. And it is disturbing. It is a denial not only of reality but of our roots and origins, and an affront to all those who trod the roads before us and who have with their own labors lifted some burdens from us.
So it may be that what we look at on the edge of a continent while we gaze at the mysterious and constant seas is where we have come from, including the other continents and the sea itself who birthed us and carried us, and where we are going. A look backwards in the form of an acknowledgement and an appraisal, and a look forward which asks the question where are we going and what will we be when we arrive. Then we can turn and thoughtfully, mindfully head back into the bustling distractions of the interior.
Coda: A friend mentioned that she would like to see more of my thoughts on Manifest Destiny. I'm not sure I have anything to add to what was meant to be a provocative meditation. Certainly I don't know the answers to the questions I pose. I only know the questions and pose them in the hopes they may spur additional questions that may someday lead to conclusions or solutions. I also think that if one were to look hard enough and think hard enough on some of these large and important topics the same few questions would continually arise and the answers would begin to take shape as the number of questions diminished. Be that as it may I do actually have something to add to this piece.
My daughter read The Great Gatsby for school last year, and didn’t much like it for a variety of reasonable reasons. I'm not sure it is the best of Fitzgerald but it is a book with its own merits and messages however blunt. In the interest of being able to defend the book I set about reading her annotated copy and could see what she didn't like about it. Too many obvious metaphors, no really sympathetic characters, people behaving badly in a shallow vapid existence etc. On the other hand I like what he was trying to do in 1925 by writing about a class of people he was attracted to and perhaps even belonged to. Brave stuff, if you haven’t read it in a while I’d suggest giving it a whirl again. I was struck by the tensions of old world/new world as well as the class issues and how that related in some ways to the questions I posed in this essay. So in an effort to raise more questions here are the closing lines of the book.
“Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning ——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
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