Reading David Horowitz's "A Point in Time: The
Search for Redemption in this Life and the Next" is like taking an autumn
stroll with a gray-haired elder encountered at a family reunion. You were
expecting his usual social, political, and economic rants that sometimes
alienated you, and sometimes frightened you. Sometimes you saw some shaft of
insight in his words, an insight you defiantly resisted because his worldview
was so different from your own. You see the world through rose-colored glasses
of universal brotherhood and a brighter tomorrow. This guy insistently reminded
you of failed utopias.
Before you set out on your stroll, though, he made sure
to bring his three pooches along. The tenderness he showed the dogs gives you
pause. You realized that as different as you are in age and worldview, you both
love dogs.
As you step out into the gray light, suddenly crepuscular
so early in the afternoon, the elder speaks. You're accustomed to clipped
who-what-when-where-why-style headlines. Today the rhythm and care of poetry
shimmers just under the surface of his prose.
He's talking about death. Well, yes, that would make
sense; he is a septuagenarian. He has had a cancer scare and one of his
children has pre-deceased him.
You slow your steps and listen. His words seem, like the
moldering leaves, fading light, and the migrating geese overhead, to be arising
organically out of the autumnal scene. You'll be pondering what you hear today
for a long time.
"A Point in Time" is a meditation on death and mortality,
morality, religious faith, and the Utopian urge. Horowitz uses Marcus Aurelius'
and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's works as touchstones.
Horowitz's parents had been members of the American
Communist Party. Horowitz himself was close to the Black Panthers. In 1974
their bookkeeper, Betty Van Patter, was murdered. Horowitz was convinced that
the Panthers were responsible. In 1985, Horowitz publicly broke with the left. My
former comrades spoke of Horowitz as if he were the devil incarnate.
I went to heckle Horowitz ten years ago. He said
something that silenced me, and that I pondered repeatedly: Camden, Newark, and
Paterson have had Democratic leadership for decades. I grew up among people who
vividly remember Newark and Paterson as thriving, even enviable cities. That
they are now slums breaks many New Jerseyians hearts. Horowitz's comment was a
significant paving stone in my own turn away from the left.
Even so I did not expect a book like "A Point in
Time" from Horowitz. It is meditative, serene, and stoic. It is not a
Christian book, but it treats Christianity and its impact with respect.
Horowitz talks about death using dogs, pet ownership,
homes, and writing. Dogs live for about a decade, much shorter than the average
human lifespan. We must watch our beloved four-footed friends age and die at a
more rapid rate than our own. Homes are our carapace. We experience them almost
as extensions of ourselves, renovating them with a sense that our lives might
go on forever. Moving into, and then out of a home, also reminds us of
mortality.
Horowitz's daughter Sarah was a writer who never married.
She died relatively young, and having published relatively little. Horowitz
contemplates her one bedroom apartment, and her writings, her most significant
material legacy. Medical diagnoses, too, remind us of mortality. If we go on
living long enough, eventually we will get cancer, or diabetes, or something.
We will fight the illness as long as we can. We lose the fight in increments,
as Horowitz has in the amount of walking he can do before fatigue reels him
back home.
We turn to bookcases. Marcus Aurelius provides a stoic
model; Dostoyevsky a Christian one. Horowitz's selection of quotes from
Dostoyevsky convinces me that I need to read more of him, or at least about
him. The quotes Horowitz selects are stunningly apropos to American college
campuses today. Horowitz positions Dostoyevsky as the antidote to atheist
nihilists and Utopians.
Horowitz considers faith, but acknowledges that he is an
agnostic. He briefly describes a few unspeakable crimes from current headlines.
With a few spare sentences, he describes the kind of sadism that occurs every
day. How do we believe in God in a world in which not just children, but even
dogs, are subject to cruel and meaningless tortures? If God is omnipotent, how
do we avoid assigning responsibility to God for horrible events?
Rejection of God has been for many a sort of religion of
its own. Horowitz's father did not believe in God, but he did have a myth and a
telos. "When he read his morning paper it was not to gather tidings of
events that actually affected him – prices rising, weather brewing, wars
approaching – but to parse the script of a global drama that would one day
bring history and its miseries to an end."
Similarly, Dostoyevsky's fellow conspirator Nikolay
Speshnev said that his political hope "is also a religion only a different
one. It makes a divinity out of a new and different object, but there is
nothing new about the deification itself." The difference between
Dostoyevsky and men like Speshnev is acted out on college campuses in America
every day, and on the international stage. Dostoyevsky describes how radicals
justify "wading through blood." One need only look to the former
cradle of civilization to find examples.
The book's intimacy is typified by a lovely passage on
page 22. Horowitz lays awake at night, "haunted by reflections of
death." Kissing his wife, or petting "the small bodies curled like
furry slippers at my feet" provides him with a reprieve from "this
emptiness."
The book's cover by Bosch Fawstin depicts the scene at
Dostoyevsky's mock execution by czarist police: three erect stakes. I cannot
help but think of the anachronistic reference to Christ – "three pale
figures led forth and bound to three posts driven upright in the ground" –
in W.H. Auden's poem "Shield of Achilles." Horowitz's book, like
Auden's poem, like Marcus Aurelius, recognizes that each generation must
confront, struggle with, and then lose, "The mass and majesty of this
world, all that carries weight and always weighs the same," whether we
live under the House of Atreus, or the Pax Romana, or the reign of Obama.
Death gave us this David Horowitz. If mortality were not
knocking on his door, I don't think he would have written this book; if it were
not knocking on ours, however faint the sound, we could not resonate to it.
Death "focuses the mind" and awakens the heart. The myth of, or
perhaps the evidence for, immortality gives us the determination to apply
death's lessons.
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