Insight that Changes Outsight

(Reflections from reading a novel, The March by E. L. Doctorow; an historical look at Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene by Bart D. Ehrman.)

Now up to the sixteenth chapter of Doctorow's novel The March, I was struck by a passage in chapter XIII, last page. For a few pages, Doctorow has made us privy to the thoughts of the General whose march of destruction through the Civil War South is the basis of the novel, William Tecumseh Sherman. He has calmed down after exulting in the bravery of his men assaulting a fort outside Savannah, and he's sitting up watching men asleep besides corpses, and he's been thinking Hamlet-ty thoughts about the dreams we might have if death doesn't turn out to be "mere oblivion." For a general, death is merely a "numerical disadvantage," he thinks.

From this, he thinks of a particularly gruesome and stupid death - a laborer decapitated by an enemy cannon ball -- on the bounce. Sherman concludes that nothing so grand as "fate" was involved there, just dumb bad luck.

As Doctorow delineates this internal monologue, Sherman is growing morose, until he reaches bottom:

In this war among the states, why should the reason for the fighting count for anything? For if death doesn't matter, why should life matter?

But of course I can't believe this or I will lose my mind. Willie, my son Willie, oh my son, my son, shall I say his life didn't matter to me?

By an act of "will" (pun unintended, but fun), he reverses the trend in his thinking. Fear of death motivates the search for immortality - in children, in glory.

Now we come to the remarkable sentence: "And so the world in its beliefs snaps back into place. Yes."

I've had that feeling of the world's "snapping back into place" when internal monologues of my own have brought me to desolate places. It never seems to be a matter of feeling, but of definite linear thought. I talk myself into a constrictive or oppressive worldview, and I talk myself out.

I was going to say that this particular kind of moment is something I've not seen before in literature, but how could I have forgotten...?

• the epiphanies that totally redirect lives (and sometimes reverse again) in the works of philosopher-novelist Iris Murdoch (click on the name to read my essay about her)
• The moment that I spent a year of my life explicating in an honor's thesis, when the protagonist of Henry James's The Ambassadors, idly enjoying a picture-perfect afternoon on a river, suddenly recognizes the truth in what he's seeing, and in that flash of insight, everything he has come to believe falls apart. Same thing in The Golden Bowl or my favorite story, "The Beast in the Jungle"
  
• The moments from King Lear to which Doctorow alludes in this passage, when the blind king is talking himself into a new, scary vision of the world, and he recoils, saying, "No more - that way madness lies."

It so happens that I've also just reached a scholar's explication of the earth-shaping moment when Paul the Jewish persecutor of Christians had a vision of Jesus. From that moment, he had to "think backwards" over everything he thought he believed. Instead of giving it up, he re-assessed it, finding clues in the Hebrew Scriptures that God must have intended the Messiah to be humiliated and tortured all along.

So, once again, a piece "snaps" into place, and suddenly the whole puzzle-picture becomes clear.