"There, the guy who's got religion'll . . . "

September 8, 2010
Tell you if your sin's original.

“Ah my favorite nephew!” The letter from Uncle Albert begins with the usual salutation. He wishes he could have written this (what follows); he has tried to rewrite it without being guilty of wholesale theft; but he cannot. Yet, what if he did steal it? Why should that bother him at his age? Doesn’t it absolve him?

    From Christopher Isherwood’s Mr. Norris Changes Trains:

Remorse is not for the elderly. When it comes to them, it is not purging or uplifting, but merely degrading and wretched, like a bladder disease.

My conclusion [Uncle A writes] is that Norris shouldn’t be made to repent. What would be the purpose of making him do so? What good would it do him? Repentance has value for the young: it “purges”; they can come through “uplifted.” But the weight of repentance only burdens the old; it grinds us down, it makes us “wretched,” we p-diddy our pants.

    So, why should the old consider their sins – either present or past? There’s no good reason, nothing to be gained by it. But neither should we consider the sins of the young (or of the world). Here, then, is our task vis à vis sin, repentance, and judgment: we undertake to learn to live without them. What harm can our feeble sinning do (if we are not in show business or politics, pretending we are still young, convincing ourselves against all indications that our bodies be still firm* and our minds still supple)? What good is repentance if it only makes us incontinent? As for judging, what good does that do either? If it doesn’t make us wretched, it riles us up.

    Granted, this is an impossible undertaking – especially the judging part. Imagine us as so many Sisyphi, arthritic fingers rolling marbles up a slanted table, only to lose control of them before we can get them to the top. 

k

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*Uncle Albert still holds to the subjunctive for all conditions contrary to fact as he sees it.