Heaven is Empty

A farewell speech.

A year ago, almost to the day, my family dropped me off at college. At a tiny college in the middle of nowhere on a one-hundred-degree day. I had no idea what was to come.

I would meet with heat, cold, earthquakes, dunes, snakes, mountains, mice. I would face loneliness, deprivation, homesickness, lovesickness; I would be met with praise, censure, and indifference. I would come to know each of my classmates by their laugh, their handwriting, their signature shuffle down the hallway. I would cook two meals a day for fifty; I would build a chair and fire a gun and direct a play; I would read the collected works of Martin Heidegger; I would swim naked and give twelve speeches.

The weeks have been long, the days sometimes interminable, but this year has gone by in a flash. The campus looks now like it did when I arrived, and I remember that first day more clearly than most of the days in between.

I recently delivered the following speech to an audience of my peers and teachers. It is especially addressed to my “second years,” my friends who just graduated from Deep Springs. It is a eulogy, an elegy, an epyllion, a valediction.

You’d think that getting kicked out of Eden was the worst thing to ever happen to humans, the beginning of our torment, the atavistic linchpin of our urban fate. But it was designed to happen that way. For Eden has boundaries, and the offspring of Adam and Eve were to cover the earth as grains of sand. Adam and Eve don’t realize they’re in paradise until they are roughly disbarred from it, when they see the rest of the world with its subpar pomegranates. They face the searing embarrassment of their nakedness. They find that paradise hasn’t clothed or protected them, but left them more vulnerable.

In place of steady compromise, Adam and Eve (and their offspring) are always coming and going, wildly succeeding and dismally failing, operating at the extreme limit, seeking the powerful intensifier, flinging themselves from the highest highs to lowest lows, from conquest and triumph to feeling “utterly cast down,” completely and irreversibly fallen. But maybe that’s the point. What is Paradise if not a place you’re intent on getting to and desperately trying to leave?

I could also say Adam and Eve are very American. “Oh yet happiest if ye seek no happier state, and know to know no more,” the narration of Paradise Lost warns us. By ‘American’ I mean what Saul Bellow means when he characterizes Americans, devastatingly and with his usual tenderness, in terms of “their moral sensitivity, their desire for perfection, their intolerance of the defects of society, the comical boundlessness of their demands, their anxiety, their irritability, their convulsiveness, their goodness.”

Perhaps you see in Bellow’s description what I see: a portrait of Deep Springs students. Like Adam and Eve, like those early almost-American puritans, “throwing their children like cannonballs against the wilderness,” as D. H. Lawrence writes, Deep Springs graduates are always searching for Paradise, ‘seeking a happier state,’ and simultaneously dropping out of it.

I admit: when I read now, I read with Deep Springs goggles. The truth is, I am always thinking about this place and what it means to be here. I read us into books. Right now I’m reading us into Paradise Lost. I hope you’re not offended by my comparison of you, my peers, to the original sinners and apostolic angels of Milton’s epic.

“Farewell happy fields where joy forever dwells,” Satan cries from the burning lake. “Hail horrors, hail infernal world, and thou profoundest hell receive thy new possessor: one who brings a mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” Paradise is then a frame of mind, and so is hell.

You can make a heaven of Deep Springs. You can make a hell of it. It’s in the way you tell it.

Paradise is a desert while you’re there. A desert. With snakes. It’s only when you leave that you realize it was paradise. But given the chance to go back, it’s a desert again—ashes in your mouth.

“Let us…seek our own good from ourselves, and from our own live to ourselves, though in this vast recess, free, and to none accountable, preferring hard liberty before the easy yoke of servile pomp. Our greatness will appear then most conspicuous, when great things of small, useful of hurtful, prosperous of adverse we can create, and in what place soe’er thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain through labor and endurance.” An excerpt, surely, from the high-flown journaling of some idealist in one of the early classes, an elegant rewording of the credo of our founder.

Actually, it’s from a speech spoken by Mammon in Paradise Lost, prince of the fallen angels, foremost in Satan’s league. It seems our work ethic has a lot in common with these fiends’. Like all good poets, to paraphrase Blake, we’re of the Devil’s party without knowing it.

“This desert soil wants not her hidden luster, gems and gold,” he continues. “Nor want we skill or art, from whence to raise magnificence; and what can heaven show more? Our torments may in time become our elements, these piercing fires as soft as now severe, our temper changed into their temper; which must needs remove the sensible of pain.” What’s his argument? The hell into which they’ve been cast, “this desert,” is really quite bountiful. There are seams of gold in the dust. We will in time, he says, become accustomed to this treacherous place. The licking flames which blister us now will come to feel cool and gentle upon our skin.

This is the argument of Deep Springs. Trial by fire since 1917.

I’ve been confused by the growing sentiment this year that our small corner of the world is unusually oppressive, a banishment from the “real world,” a not-so-solitary confinement. But dare I say it: Satan is right—hell is what you make of it. And many of us have worked against ourselves, against our own happiness, when we’ve chosen to think of ourselves as deserted, rather than simply in the desert.

A little while ago I spent the night at the Cabin with Rebecca, who has cleverly devised a fort/da relationship with Deep Springs. She spends at least one night every term in a spot with no view of campus. We’d kicked ourselves out for the night. The winds howled around us. The sun rose; I left; Rebecca slept. Traipsing down the hill in the early morning, unobserved, climbing under barbed wire, felt like sneaking into Eden. It could’ve been the first dawn, I swear, it was so golden.

It may not feel like it now, dear second years, but your leaving is a sort of exile. You are the angels “whose exile hath emptied heaven.” And for us remaining Seraphim it will feel, for a while at least, that heaven—unnaturally, oxymoronically—is empty.

At some postexilic date, perhaps at a schmoozy Ivy League cheese-and-cracker party, or in the garret of some liberal arts college Victorian, or even on the back of a motorcycle heading south, you’ll abruptly recall where you left, where you can’t get back to, where you’ll always be.

Burnt gold and dusty Adams and Eves, spilling out seed-like into the wider, more complicated (more sophisticated, more cynical) world. Fortified and unguarded. Resilient and defenseless. Naked, and armed to the teeth.