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PARTISAN REVIEW
He would ask me if I knew how to make God laugh. I would think
about his strange question until my eight-year-old head hurt. But noth–
ing came to mind. Satisfied that he had my attention, he unloaded the
answer: "Tell Him your plans!" This struck him as very funny, although
the eight-year-old me ended up just as perplexed as I had been before.
Only much later did I realize that we live on one time continuum and
God on another. A delayed reaction (in my case, some fifty years) is
. often the benchmark of the best Yiddish quips. Despite the brouhaha
that turning the millennial calendar kicked up in the Christian (and, yes,
non-Christian) world, my hunch is that life will go on pretty much as it
has in the months and years before
2000.
Granted, there will be new
occasions for debate-about genetic engineering, the social conse–
quences of people living well beyond one hundred, and the exploration
of outer space-but it is also true that the fundamental questions of
why and how we live, and why and how we suffer, will abide, just as the
earth and the heavens abide.
For Adams, what mattered was the source of power. He could no
more turn the clock back to ages that looked to the Virgin than he could
stop the progress represented by the dynamo. We are, I suspect, in some–
thing of the same boat. Indeed,
F.
Scott Fitzgerald, to quote him once
again, ended
The Great Gatsby
with an image of our collective Ameri–
can fate as boats beating against the current, "borne ceaselessly into the
past." But will this trope prove true as we speed through the twenty-first
century? I suspect not, even as I am sure that Americans will continue
to wrestle with the purity of Gatsby's deluded dream so long as serious
stories of our national consciousness survive. I say this because our new
century is likely to be one in which power belongs to a new generation
of dynamos-smaller, faster, and more efficient than Adams could envi–
sion. They will pump out information for the same reason that efforts
to clone human beings will continue-namely,
because they can.
Social
disapproval, even stringent laws, will prove no match for the curious
scientist/technocrat working away in a secret laboratory. He or she will
speak to the ahistorical values deeply imbedded in the American con–
sciousness, where fully understanding the Virgin's force never had a
chance. And as with much that we count as "progress," the capacity to
create will be coupled with an equal ability to kill.
If
our last century
was one of nightmare, it is possible that the new one will force us to
reevaluate the term as a new landscape of nightmare emerges.
