If you are one of the fortunate people who know the writings of Isak Dinesen you have come to appreciate her wry (or is it pixie?) way of looking at love and life. She has a way of getting inside things that the rest of us miss until she shows us the way.
There is, for example, that wonderful analysis of a bullfight in which she looks at it from the viewpoint of the bull. Having been pampered all his life he is suddenly rushed out into the ring, surrounded by a howling mob, subjected to many indignities and severe pain. Given a chance to take a breather he muses to himself, “What a run of bad luck.” Surely, the bull believes, God can’t let a thing like this go on and so will shortly intervene. God does not. The end of the matter is death in the afternoon, and the program continues with another bull, as if the first bull had never existed. It is, willy-nilly, a bullfight, and that is the way a bullfight is, and that is the way a bullfight ends.
One gets the impression sometimes these days that we are having “a run of bad luck,” that we have been caught in a series of painful circumstances for which we have no clue, that the end of the matter could be death—and that the show will go on whether we like it or not.
What a run of bad luck those Olympics were; there was enough irony abroad to give a Greek classicist material for a lifetime. There was an air of strangeness about the way sprint men could miss a heat, a marvelous miler and a marvelous man could just plain fall down, the sweetest little girl in the world could come out of nowhere in Russia and win the hearts of friends or enemies of Russia all over the world (what kind of a society produces a girl like that?), and a basketball game could end in panic and protest.
In a way I could hardly stand the Olympics. Sports mean a lot to me—it’s disturbing to see them treated carelessly, or politically, or, as it developed, tragically. All the strange twists compounded finally in the death of the Israeli athletes, not to forget the deaths as well of the terrorists. And in and around it all, as millions watched, there was the hopeless feeling that the whole thing couldn’t be salvaged: you can’t rerun the film and change the plot. All things ought to work out well in the end, but we know that they don’t have to—and in fact, they often don’t. As Isak Dinesen remarked regarding the bullfight and the poor old bull, “Lo, a bullfight.” That, in short, is the way things are. There is something awry in the basic structure.
“It is given to man once to die,” and lest I be accused of insensitivity or hardness of heart, may I digress to quote a few words from C. S. Lewis in the preface to The Problem of Pain: “No one can say ‘He jests at scars who never felt a wound,’ for I have never for one moment been in a state of mind to which even the imagination of serious pain was less than intolerable.” The idea of death is to me intolerable, primarily, I think, as I try to think about it, because I can’t think of life going on without me (what egotism). By this I really mean, I guess, that I cannot think of life at all without my being alive. And I suspect that however a man makes a deal with the fact of death, he never quite releases himself from the horror of what may be the manner of his death, fast or slow, conscious pain, lingering horror, paralysis, fright, the darkness—write your own script; I know you’ve thought about it in the lonely night watches.
One of our worst ideas is the belief that somehow there is some way to get even, to pay back in kind for what has happened to us. The way to get back at the Black September gang is for the Israelis to run on up into Lebanon and kill sixty people and push some houses around. That hardly evens the score, however you keep score (almost as bad as judging points in an Olympic boxing match), and it leaves unanswered the fact that on the same day gunmen stepped into a club in St. Croix and gunned down eight people for no reason at all. How can one get even for that by shooting down an equal number of the enemy?
The question is, who is the enemy? Are the Israelis of a mind to believe that they can get even by shooting all the Arabs, about two and a half million Israelis evening the score with a hundred and twenty million Arabs? And which Arabs? And just how does one go about such a program? One gathers that it will have to be done by pulling in billions of Americans, Russians, and Chinese. Meanwhile over a million people have been killed in the Sudan (the press has hardly touched that one), and both the Arabs and the Israelis were in that one on one side or the other. If an American gang (call them what you will) should shoot up a lot of people in Persia, for example, just how would the Persians go about getting even—and with which one of us—for that? The whole Arab world is so amorphous, the statistical odds so uneven, that one hardly knows where to start, even assuming his motives are pure, which they are not.
We went through the same kind of nonsense in the settling of our own country. One tribe of Indians was massacred because another tribe engaged in a massacre, and with great sadness it was all buried at Wounded Knee. If we add skyjackings, muggings, exploding letters, and death on the highways, and mix it up a little with oil rights and national pride, just what solutions do we have in mind? Not easy ones, surely.
Lo, a bullfight. This is a lost world, and redemption comes only by a cross, His cross as a starting place and undergirding all other possibilities of the crosses of discipleship we are willing to take up. But there is no such thing as a crossless Christianity, much as we would like some gimmick or utopian program to serve instead. The whole business of the cross has to do with sin, and not some lesser unfortunate matter. And the crux of the matter is that it is a warfare to the death, the death of sin or the death of this life we choose to lead. The marks of Satan are abroad: subtlety, irony, lies, cruelty, a deep irrationalism undermining all our schemes, absurdity, despair. And would you believe it—if you want a crowd to turn out on a sophisticated college campus, announce that you are going to speak on demons!
