Rift Gaugers

Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons is an excellent book about the changing nature of the world, particularly during the 19th century in the United States. A man reflects on his life long efforts to preserve a piece of land, and the (Cherokee) people living on it, amid a century of turmoil. In a particularly somber portion toward the end of his story he contemplates the growing gulf of disconnect between generations as the world speeds up.

The passage he quotes, from page 412 of the paperback, describes how in the old days little changed within a single lifespan — the physical world, the animals, the food, the clothes all stayed roughly as they were, so that the knowledge acquired in childhood remained in force for life, and when you approached death it was not an unrecognizable world you left. About all that changed was that a few big trees had fallen and new ones grown in their places. The narrator then asks whether overwhelming change makes what is lost sweeter in the mind, and closes with the line Jensen returns to twice: that we are mistaken to gouge such a deep rift in history that the things old men and old women know have become so useless as to be not worth passing on to grandchildren.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy writes, in his book The Christian Future, of an effort made in 1940 designed, in part, to heal this rift that we’ve gouged in our history.

Rosenstock-Huessy argues there that Christianity is essentially war in peace — that it distributes the bloody sacrifices of the battlefront as an even and perpetual spread of sacrifices through the whole fabric of life, so that world wars can be replaced by daily wars, and that the Christian soldier of the future must wage war against the indifference, indolence, coldness and barrenness of human relations in the machine age. He then describes Camp William James, founded when forty-five young men from colleges and farms moved to a Vermont town to represent the age group conspicuously absent there, because the educational system makes young people dissatisfied with remaining on the farm and drains small communities of their youth by concentrating them on college campuses. The result, he writes, was a vital process that remade both the community and its members: older people felt rejuvenated with a new vision of the town’s future where the selectmen had dropped all pretense of expecting any future at all, and the young grew to a stature remarked on by everyone who met them — they had put down roots and belonged in the chain of generations, not just as physical individuals but as proper representatives of the Spirit.

Those rifts have only gotten bigger over the last 75 years. The world is a foreign place to our elderly, those who ought to know it best. And the elderly become foreign to the world. Even the generation neighboring the up and coming generation has trouble speaking the same language together. I take this as a symptom of a systemic problem. We are doing life wrong. "We are mistaken to gouge such a deep rift in history that the things old men and old women know have become so useless as to be not worth passing on to grandchildren."