Rolling with the Punches: Indifference

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“In a fight between you and the world, bet on the world.”—Franz Kafka

“I don’t know. I don’t care. And it doesn’t make any difference.”—Jack Kerouac

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—9/5/11—Somerset Maugham thought that the real tragedy of love was not infidelity, divorce, or death, but the indifference illustrated by Alexander Pope’s heroine who:

…while her lover pants upon her breast,
Can mark the figures in an Indian chest.

The older I get, the less I doubt that Maugham was overstating his indictment of human affairs, for I too have seen my lover yawn; indeed, I have been guilty myself.

Human apathy, however, is no match for nature. Perhaps no one understands that better than astronomers such as Carl Sagan who observed, “We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of the universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.”

I’m not recommending cosmic indifference as a worldview but, once we learn how peripheral we are, we can comprehend how stray lumps of rock and ice crashing into the earth have helped to extinguish 98 percent of all the plant and animal species our planet has ever known.

Some argue that the figure is 99 percent, but only man is counting.

Still, having made it into the final one or two percent, if humans aren’t moved, what other species is? I cannot imagine that termites and ants are clicking their mandibles at the prospect of taking over after we primates blow the lead that once seemed insurmountable. As John Burroughs noted, “Nature does not care whether the hunter slays the beast or the beast the hunter. She will make good compost of them both, and her ends are prospered whichever succeeds.”

Biologists tell us that indifference in the animal kingdom is genetically programmed. The ailing caribou is strangely unmoved by the wolf pack loping hungrily at its heels. The tarantula waits impassively for the mortal sting of the wasp. The frog, up to its hips in the mouth of a snake, shows no more panic than the snake shows being devoured by a wild hog.

Still, if animals like the zebra wonder at all, it must have occurred to them how one-sided it is that nowhere on the African plains is there any black and white grass. Every last stalk of it during most of the sun-drenched year shares its tawny hue with the lion.

Humans may feel just as insignificant as the zebra when they are struck by cancer, lightning, or a truck on a blind curve.

Marginalized, we form a callus on the heart like the minister with $2,000 in his pocket who let his son starve because “that money belongs to Jesus.” Or the inner-city physics teacher who, after his horrified class had watched a man jump to his death, asked his students, “Assuming the man weighed 190 pounds and the ledge he jumped from was 40 feet above the sidewalk, what was his velocity on impact?” Or the Norse explorer who sailed along the New England coast about AD1,000 and did not think enough of the place to drop anchor and explore. Or the 31 percent of the American people who still approved of President Nixon after all of the Watergate revelations had been made public.

And then there’s the Creator, the Hanging Judge whom Muslims and Hindus understand better than Catholics and Protestants. As The Koran reminds us, Allah might have left the universe an uncreated void, but He didn’t.

In fact, the year the God-benighted minister, mentioned above, allowed his son to die, America enjoyed a bumper grain harvest, and tons of welfare cheese rotted in government warehouses. But, in the final analysis, as Emerson said, “Whirl is king,” for while our farmers were bringing in their crop, thousands of Africans, who worship the same creator as the rest of us, were starving. To them it must have seemed that God should, indeed, have left it all a void.

So . . . what are we to think; what is to be done?

When our son was born, we named him Shane in the vague hope that he would grow up to be another Alan Ladd. A generation later, our son is not a famous actor or the heroic character that Ladd portrayed, but neither is his father who had a 20-year head start.

What my son has become (and what I have not) are two things that I’m still learning to accept. The British say, “A contented mind is a continual feast,” but no one, regardless of his or her inheritance, is going to spend an entire life feasting. Count on it. And no one should make the mistake either of hoping for another life while missing the glories of the one we have at our feet.

Few have achieved the stoic ideal more fully than the Samurai poet, Mizuta Masahide:

Since my barn burned down,
I have a better view
of the rising moon.

Such equanimity as might be ridiculed or pitied in the West. Perhaps a more realistic ideal is found in The Wordspinner’s poem, “Drought”:

Yawning like a rain gauge,
patience on a fence,
a farmer looks up
not looking for sense.

In “Revelation,” Jesus scolds the apathetic Laodiceans: “I would thou wert cold or hot.” But for the drought-stricken farmer, who finds zeal a joke, lukewarm acceptance is a healthier alternative than red-faced rage or cold fury.

Calmly plotting irrigation schemes, the farmer on the fence is only a short step from what Albert Camus describes as laying one’s heart open to the “benign indifference of the universe.”

After accepting the liberating idea that man is just an atom in a thermonuclear furnace, it behooves us to partake of the 92 elements nature has given us. The number is finite, but the freedom and potential are unbounded.