Wiser, if not more sagacious (26)

I posted all that on Friday, and I do not at all retract it, but on Saturday I read something in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance that seemed to have been placed there for me, to remind me of the other way of thinking. Blithedale is a novel inspired by Hawthorne’s experience at Brook Farm, the Transcendentalist utopian commune that he helped found in 1841 and which lasted all of six years. I’m reading it for the reason I read most things: because Tanya said I should. She picked it out—she even ordered me a copy—because she’s been reading these crumbs.

The novel opens with the narrator leaving Boston for Blithedale, the fictive stand-in for Brook Farm, “in quest of a better life.”

 

A better life! Possibly, it would hardly look so, now; it is enough if it looked so, then. The greatest obstacle to being heroic, is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt—and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

   Yet, after all, let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious, to follow out one’s day dream to its natural consummation, although, if the vision have been worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure. And what of that! Its airiest fragments, impalpable as they may be, will possess a value that lurks not in the most ponderous realities of any practicable scheme. They are not the rubbish of the mind. Whatever else I may repent of, therefore, let it be reckoned neither among my sins nor follies, that I once had faith and force enough to form generous hopes of the world’s destiny—yes!—and to do what in me lay for their accomplishment; even to the extent of quitting a warm fireside, flinging away a freshly lighted cigar, and travelling far beyond the strike of city-clocks, through a drifting snow-storm.

 

This is all true. I do not for a moment regret the four months I spent working on Occupy Wall Street, though I consider that a failed project. Yes, it had its political impact, but it failed on its own terms, failed in terms of the dreams and visions that drove the people who worked on it—failed absurdly, enormously, embarrassingly. When I bring up Occupy nowadays, if people have anything to say about it at all, it’s usually that we did it all wrong, that we should have had a vision, a strategy, a clear set of demands—but they don’t know what they’re talking about. It was much worse than they think—and much better too: much more wild a dream, much worse a reality. And I say that, of course, with a kind of pride.

 

It would be Hawthorne who reminded me of this, that great defender of failures, outcasts, sinners, lost causes. For a long time now, I have felt myself aligned with failure. I mistrust success—maybe it was admirable in the past, but nowadays it always comes with an ugly habit of self-promotion, an unwarranted self-confidence, an excited attachment to the latest trends. I mistrust the hip, the cool, the trendy. I love those who don’t know what to do with themselves in this world, who have brains and talent but can’t seem to put them to use, who would rather lose with their intellect and moral sense intact than win on the world’s terms.

 

But there is no contradiction between this and what I wrote on Friday. They are two sides of the same coin. To think practically about one’s dreams is exactly to risk failure. What remains perfect and abstract can never fail. It is only in the real attempt, in the encounter with reality, that we can meet with failure. When we fail, we know we’ve tried something.

 

To the questions in my last crumb (How can we be both radical and pragmatic? How can we radically reject and at the same time meticulously salvage?) the only possible answer begins with actually trying to make something.