Will a day come on which the sins of man will be forgiven and the midden of the earth returned to beauty?
I. Whether History Is One Tapestry….
The first paragraph in the conclusion to Thornton Wilder’s The Eighth Day reads as follows:
This is a history.
But there is only one history. It began with the creation of man and will come to an end when the last human consciousness is extinguished. All other beginnings and endings are arbitrary conventions—makeshifts parading as self-sufficient entities diffusing petty comfort or petty despair. The cumbrous shears of the historian cut out a few figures and brief passages of time from that enormous tapestry. Above and below the laceration, to the right and left of it, the severed threads protest against injustice, against the impostures….
This history made the pretense of a beginning: “In the early summer of 1902…. “ [1]
II. The “Prologue” and the First Twenty-Two Pages and the Pretense of a Beginning….
If Thornton Wilder’s The Eighth Day pays homage to Our Town, the narrator would be the equivalent of the Stage Manager. Wilder’s narrator in The Eighth Day is not a resident but a purveyor of philosophical perspectives, one introducing the reader to a moment in which there’s been a miscarriage of justice in a middle western town. The time is 1902.
Second are character descriptions of John Ashley and Breckenridge Lansing with contrasting differences; embedded are pieces of life in Coaltown which include the murder of Lansing by Ashley.
Third are the Lansing and Ashley families, especially the children who face ostracism.
Fourth, in time people begin to study the case and ask teasing questions about heredity and environment, destiny and chance, which for the narrator equate to questions about whether there was something in those old Greek plays in which characters are brought down by merited or unmerited punishment. I guess it depends.
For the reader, this fourth perspective appears as a series of metaphysical questions, including whether catastrophes which bring about humiliation are blessings.
More to the point: These questions propel the perspective into assertions that introduce notions of eschatology in this mundane murder story of who-done-it.
What, for example, is the reader to make of the following assertion? Is it possible that there will someday be a spiritualization of the human animal? (10).
*****
It was New Year’s Eve, 1899, the end of one century and the beginning of another. The mood for a group of people assembled in front of the courthouse waiting for the clock to strike was exalting, as though they were expecting the heavens to open. The new century would be the greatest century the world has known. Lansing spoke for the people by asking Dr. Gillies what the new century would be like.
His brief speech describes the earth before the appearance of life and then forward to the appearance of man, which he says is the ground plan for mankind to enter a new stage of evolutionary development: man of the Eighth Day. In truth he was feeling no elation. Dr. Gillies had no faith in progress. He was lying, but did not wish to quell the exaltation.
The narrator, however, was digressing in time by wondering about Greek statesmen who gave the world deliberative democracy and the Hebrew prophets and Jewish lawgivers who gave the West its legal-ethical framework. And thus there is the question of biological evolution of humanity> but shouldn’t we also ponder whether there is spiritual evolution inferring an enlargement of the breath of life and individuals who by way of providence “evolve” with the beginnings of a new life on an eighth day?
Can such an abstracted question be answered in the concrete, the rarified reified and embedded in the story of a small town in Illinois—which is like asking can anything good come out of Coaltown?
III. Thornton Wilder Spends Time on the Arizona Sonoran Desert….
Roughly 20 months before The Eighth Day, Thornton Wilder removed himself from his home in the east to live in vagabond solitude in Douglas, Arizona, a small town in Arizona’s Sulphur Springs Valley, bordering Mexico, and at one time a smelter town for the copper mines of nearby Bisbee. It’s unclear where Wilder stayed, but likely the Gadsden Hotel and then close by in a boarding house, where he established a routine of reading (refreshing his Greek) and writing. There was a bar close by, the Top Hat, and a bowling alley/restaurant. The citizens were intrigued with his accent.
He was happily astride a new novel spilling onto the page from his fountain pen, which would begin just before the new 20th century while also ranging backward in time.
These days Douglas refers to itself as a lush desert garden oasis. It’s a border crossing with Mexico described as a calm town with friendly people; the mining history intrigued Wilder. There were suspicions from the local folk who wondered if the odd duck was a communist.
As for the desert, Wilder believed the whole to be overwhelmingly beautiful, a grandeur (which is sublimely true), and as he wrote to Ruth Gordon, it was as if one had wandered back in time for “an hour into the book of Genesis.” [2] Which hour is unclear but perhaps the twenty-fifth hour of the eighth day.
He had no grand work in mind when traveling, but we know he was re-reading Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. As the new novel took shape and before the title emerged, he wrote to friends back east that he thought of it (facetiously) as if Little Women was being mulled over by Dostoevsky.
“Mulled over” is a good phrase, as such is the case with the The Eighth Day narrator who “mulls” at will (about more in a bit), although it’s unclear whether Alcott or Dostoevsky would agree with the analogy, the “mulling.” Those familiar with Wilder should enjoy the “mulling.”
The book was published in 1967, became a best seller, and won the National Book Award. It’s been described as Wilder’s finest… or as a rambling array and failing to have any story line at all… or—and my favorite—too much a “mulling” mystical descent on the part of the narrator.
I favor the latter but disagree as to whether it’s “too much.”
And if not too audacious might be helped with a reader’s guide.
And so:
It is in truth a difficult read (as is Finnegan’s Wake) but worth the effort for anyone wishing to undertake the 500-plus pages, which by analogy, and over its span, own the quality of a tapestry’s warpings and weavings while maintaining—to add to the metaphor—the yarn elongation at a uniform level.
And like the character of John Ashley in the novel, the whole deserves to be redeemed: a great novel, a masterpiece.
IV. Muttering or Mustering a Few Words on the Title….
In his signature work, the City of God, Augustine remarks that the Sabbath is brought to a close not by an evening but by the Lord’s day as an eighth eternal day, consecrated by the Incarnation and the Resurrection of Christ, pre-figuring the eternal repose of the spirit and body.
Thus the eighth day will have eternal blessedness but is also the eschatological first day of the week, which promises to bring greater grace, a sort of beatitude in our hearts, removed from the laboring and the groaning.
It could also be the day of judgment for the quick and the dead and a final destiny. One should remark that eschatology is seldom found in modern historical theory since it promotes mystery, a far remove from progressive or scientific or Marxist or evolutionary views of history. [3]
Apart from that, Section 349 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church reads as follows: “The eighth day: But for us a new day has dawned: the day of Christ’s Resurrection. The seventh day completes the first creation. The eighth begins the new creation. Thus, the work of creation culminates in the greater work of redemption. The first creation finds its meaning and its summit in the new creation in Christ, the splendor of which surpasses the first creation.”
Of course the Catechism is arguing for the way things are supposed to be, which when we study history is often not so. The question that augurs is whether one can “believe” that history is a gradual unfolding of revelation in which people—albeit a remnant—can be returned from exile and from the standpoint of eschatology redeemed.
Wilder’s novel suggests as much.
What’s between the seventh day and the eighth day is history from the exile of Adam and Eve and the murder story of Cain and Abel, followed by a good deal of problematic history to that glorious Easter sunrise, and with that eighth day a new understanding about which the Gospels state is divine vindication of a different purpose in history. With this different purpose we are given an unquenchable hope to cling to through every trial and tribulation.
The challenge is to think that a week does not round itself with seven days any more than a day rounds itself with 24 hours but presumes a 25th hour, each additional day and each additional hour offering the possibility of renewal owing nothing to molecular biology.
V. The Plot, so to Speak….
Which brings Wilder’s reader to this point and notes on the “Plot” summarized:
There’s a peaceful Sunday afternoon interlude in history. Two families are gathered for a socializing time in Coaltown, Illinois. Breckenridge Lansing and John Ashley are at their usual sport, target shooting, during which Lansing is murdered, shot in the back of the head. Ashley is arrested, charged, tried and found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to death by electrocution.
On the day of his execution, shackled and with his head shaved, he’s rescued.
All of this in 1902.
The second paragraph of the “Prologue,” adds that “five years later, 1907, the State Attorney’s office in Springfield announced that fresh evidence had been uncovered establishing Ashley’s innocence” (3).
There had been a miscarriage of justice in an unimportant case in a small Middlewestern town.
The arrangement of the narrative on that first page suggests bookends: In one paragraph the crime, trial, sentence and rescue (by unknown persons); in the following paragraph evidence establishing Ashley’s innocence and the miscarriage of justice.
What’s between the two bookends becomes the fictional “stuff” of The Eighth Day. That “stuff” is Wilder’s understanding that history involves the question of man in history, which in turn involves the problem of eschatology, which assumes a meaning in history that is tragic but which is also preparation for grace… unless life is not a preparation for a heavenly home but an existential consciousness arguing that freedom is a confrontation with radical nihilism. [4]
Here it’s interesting to note the close proximity in time between Wilder’s work and that of Sartre, especially his No Exit and the idea that life is damned near hell since the proximity of other people renders life a hell. Wilder’s response was to refer to his own The Eighth Day: that life is not an image for hell. [5] His conviction was that life and history were elements of a vast tapestry in the process of creatively being woven, which illustrates a hope for the future… each thread of consciousness a symbol for creative, evolutionary development imbued by divine love.
Such would seem to be faith in eschatology, which in its view of man is the history of a human person who encounters events and the decisions made in those events. Such a person “creatively evolves” before God, whose life is then confirmed by God, while noting that a non-evolving life is the life confounded by God. [6] It’s important to note, however, that “confounded” should not be confused with “predestination.”
So and again in terms of the plot, the murder and the escape “trigger” a trauma that is metaphorically the beginning of an eighth day for both families and the realities with which they must now live: privation and small town hostility for the Ashley family and shattered dreams for the Lansing family. Wilder’s story traverses with miraculous ease through time and space while weaving with equal ease the historical lives forward in time of two families, wives and children, which is equally the story of John Ashley’s struggle for redemption over the span of the eighth day and the eventual discovery of the person who actually is the real “who done it.”
With Ashley’s rescue, it’s an eighth day for him.
VI. A Rather Curious Thing: Wilder’s Narrator as Philosophical-if-not-Socratic-Muse….
Gertrude Stein opens her Narration: Four Lectures with the phrase, “It’s a rather curious thing.” [7] We know her to be gifted with humor and strong opinions. Stein was at the University of Chicago to deliver four lectures at the behest of Wilder, who was teaching at the university. It’s a curious thing to cogitate since the two team-taught some classes together and since Stein was traveling with Toklas, a more interesting cogitation with Alice seated in the back row.
One might add that during Stein’s residency she clashed with Adler, the architect of the Great Books Program. Hutchinson, too, had concerns but, advised by his wife, encouraged Stein’s visit.
She stayed with Wilder for three weeks enjoying the crowds at Marshal Fields for book signings, jam-packing the third floor.
The two became friends; the consequence was Wilder’s introduction, which has enough commentary to argue that for Wilder the narrator is the most important character in the story and different from the usual point of view as defined in the literary handbooks. But the point here is less what one defines as omniscience but with comparisons with Socrates as he appears in those Platonic tracts. Consequently when considering narration and narrators the discussion leads into psychology, philosophy, metaphysics and a different theory of time suggestive of the vitalizing character of Miss Stein’s ideas with the following provision:
“Miss” Stein’s attitude toward narrative structures was changing in ways to reflect new narrative forms… regarding more openness toward the usual beginning and middle and ending.” In other words, the openness, especially with regard to “time” and “incident and place,” was undergoing dynamic development in Twentieth Century Literature, and depending upon the novelist, was more or less idiosyncratic. [8]
There’s a sidebar to this because reading “Miss” Stein’s lectures is an exercise that aims to embody “existing,” a sense of all things as present, unfinished and immediate.
But gathered by whom?
Noting for the moment that a novel exists in time, rather than understanding time as a succession of changes, first this, then that, and then another that in chronological time, Henri Bergson developed a concept of time as pure duration, in which changes evolve into and permeate one another without precise outlines. This led to a desire to talk about time not as a succession of hours and days and weeks, say, watches, calendars and airline time tables, but digressions such that a novel might begin in the final hours of 1899, leap forward to 1903, but with digressions to years prior to 1899… during which John and Beata Ashley are part of a process that will come to be realized but which Bergson saw as the endurance of a vital impulse continually developing and generating new forms: creative and not mechanistic.
To illustrate, the novel is divided into the following chapters, albeit without the usual notion of a chapter; better to say “vignettes” or “books” to use Wilder’s term, and obviously a very curious thing in relation to time with which Wilder takes liberties:
Prologue
I. “The Elms” 1885-1905
II. Illinois to Chili 1902-1905
III. Chicago 1902-1905
IV. Hoboken, New Jersey 1883
V. “St. Kitts” 1880-1905
VI. Coaltown, Illinois, Christmas 1905
That’s a rudimentary structure pinpointed with times, but questions emerge when we understand that the narrator is not placing the narrative in sequential time, but if “books” II and III exist simultaneously in time the result is a “curious thing.”
Unless in the course of the novel the reader becomes aware of some “curious” strategy informing the novel.
There’s little doubt that in the “Prologue” he’s indignant at the miscarriage of justice when he notes the jury sent Ashley to his death “firmly and unanimously [and with] what a Chicago paper called ‘shameless calm’” (94), but how the verdict came about also had no foundation other than gossip which had solidified into prejudice and self-evident truth.
So, there’s a critical mind at work here by the narrator who is in disagreement with the verdict… but also a philosophical mind attempting to understand some things about the grand logic of history which perplexes more so since Ashley was neither dark nor light, neither tall not short, neither fat nor thin, neither bright nor dull, agreeable enough but not enough to attract a second glance or to become the “hero.”
Another curious thing….
Dramatically we know that in Greek drama the prologue (a speaking before) involved the opening scene of the drama usually spoken by a single actor who might be playing a god and therefore different from a preface or an introduction or a visual exposition but rarely used in traditional novels where it would be awkward to have a “curtain-raiser.”
But how better to address the question of why such unmerited suffering for such an unremarkable man? [9]
Wilder runs a risk with this prologue by laying out what appear to be the facts and themes to the point of spoiling the plot when baldly stating that Ashley was tried and convicted of shooting Lansing in the back of the head, but within a few sentences he reveals that later evidence brought proof of his innocence.
Which is small in comparison to the narrator’s additional commentary to larger questions attached to the Lansing murder while wondering if history will again produce geniuses like those of Athens and Palestine, geysers in the sand affecting all who live on the earth.
How can an uninteresting small town murder become interesting when then narrator deepens the story with his own provoking thoughts, albeit disciplined in his digressions which one can itemize by metaphysical statements:
How do we understand the human capacity for good and evil, for establishing order and/or spreading havoc, and what is the answer given to us by history?
Is sin noetic, an epistemological category?
And is God incarnate, or is that a kind of blasphemy?
It’s a curious meander through the first 22 pages that conclude with a smallish nod to the effects of time that washed over Coaltown, which no longer is the county seat that has been transferred… and no longer is there a post office there, but the mail is rather distributed from a grocery store.
Why read on?
Merely to describe the narrator as omniscient would miss the point. The Eighth Day is philosophical; the novel is used as a vehicle for exploring philosophical questions among which are good examples including Kafka’s The Trial or Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, two novels in which the narrator questions aggressively.
VII. Spiritus Valet And The Word “Catalytic”….
Penelope Niven in her biography of Thornton Wilder writes in chapter eleven, “Heroes,” that in 1918 when still a student at Yale, Wilder won the John Hubbard Curtis Prize for his short story “Spiritus Valet.” Niven goes on that the story is an “early example of a catalytic encounter between the writer’s rich imagination and his copious reading.” [10] The suggestion is that Wilder’s literary probings reveal a faithful representation of the facts of American life and an underlying structure commensurate with the spirit of religious humanism still alive in America in 1918.
Perhaps so….
Niven’s point is that Wilder was unabashed in referring to his influences,which acted as catalysts for his “rich imagination.”
In the same year that he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder in 1928 wrote The Angel That Troubled the Waters, a “three minute play” which he also regarded as a literary apprenticeship; in the preface he argues the following:
The training for literature must be acquired by the artist alone, through the passionate assimilation of a few master pieces written from a spirit somewhat like his own, and of a few not at all like his own, I read all of Newman and then I read Swift. [11]
The suggestion is that Wilder is offering an homage to Newman for his humanism and to Swift for the comic spirit, but using the word assimilation rather than catalytic.
VIII. Wilder’s Catalytic Encounter With Pierre Teilhard de Chardin….
Which brings us again to Wilder’s late novel The Eighth Day, a tour de force.
And the question as to what was Wilder’s philosophical narrator “assimilating,” which leads me to note, “Hold on to your hats.”
The Eighth Day is an unusual novel in that it “catalytically” owes a large debt to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit priest/scientist/philosopher/theologian best known for his The Phenomenon of Man and what he called the “Omega Point,” a future event in which the entirety of the universe evolves toward a final point of unification.
Niven makes the argument that Wilder acknowledges the Teilhard debt in a letter to Robert Penn Warren, who had responded warmly to The Eighth Day. Wilder responded in turn by revealing what he calls the novel’s structures and sources which included Kierkegaard, Mann,“And Teilhard de Chardin.” [12]
Omega is an interesting choice of words but assumes an Alpha, and without disambiguation, Christian mysticism. In brief, Teilahrd (if that can ever be the case) argues that each individual man experiences himself from within as a conscious being. He adds that consciousness is directly identifiable as “spiritual energy.” Greater developments would also be in store given the convergence of disparate cultures and forms of consciousness.
He is, of course, pointing to a future moment in time in which all human cultures evolve into a single world culture. The result would be a terminal phase of evolution, i.e., Omega, which he is careful to point out is not God but is God Who determines the direction and the goal of cosmic history.
It is equally an expression of a mystical vision and pantheistic in certain formulations. Omega, however, can only be achieved through love, which we understand as the spirit of Christ at work. The whole which is found in the prose poetry of The Phenomenon of Man stirred Wilder’s imagination, even though it’s unclear whether he gave the whole of his assent. [13]
It’s an interesting theory, but a word of caution… what with the word “evolves” and its Darwinian natural selection, “survival of the fittest” and nature “red in tooth and claw.”
But we know that Wilder had something of Teilhard in mind before and during writing The Eighth Day, suggesting there is something in human experience that points to spiritual experience, and although such may be mere fragments, might point to a world that may come to being, a world being pulled toward the Omega Point.
Such is suggestively introduced in the Prologue and substantively in the later books, which illustrate the fourth step of evolution, the ongoing evolution of consciousness. Niven writes that Wilder’s novel features a case of unfinished human beings, whose lives are unfolding. But not all. Some believe their lives are pre-ordained; others that they possess free will and choice, and others who have no opinion at all, so absorbed are they in lives overwhelmed. [14]
But again care must be given, since evolutionary theory ordinarily has a bleak outlook on life and is opposed to Christian belief that history is going somewhere and that what we do here and now matters. In more orthodox eschatological reasoning, historical moments, say, in the Old Testament and the mythologized figure of man in the Garden of Eden, evolve in time to the figure of the Davidic king but then evolve again with the Messiah… the point being that history moves along in steps with each step an eschatological sign. [15]
Thus although Teilhard does not use the term “eschatology,” his Omega Point argues that in life there is a future path that all of life will or should prefer and that life will also have the power to make it happen, without which all of life would be built upon despair. Teilhard’s argument rebuts that existential notion of pure despair, and scientific explanation, with the spiritual belief that life moves toward a final point of divine unification with the Christian Logos, namely Christ, Who draws all things unto Himself through love.
That’s cosmological and a complexity that Wilder uses to underlie his novel, its form, a novel born from Wilder’s solitude among the cacti.
IX. Our Town Becomes Coaltown and Sophia’s Choice….
Wilder is on record commenting that Our Town is not a bucolic New Hampshire village or a speculation on life after death. His analogy is Dante’s “Purgatory,” that allegorical place with joys and griefs abounding, but sustained by faith and hope and to adopt Teilhard’s language of spiritual evolution toward unity with an Omega Point.
If we take Wilder on face value, what we read in The Eighth Day is by analogy a kind of purgatory. Can lives, in other words, pulled from their moorings retrieve lost hopes?
With that in mind, the novel is again the story of two households, one living on one end of Coaltown and the other living on the opposite end in the family home, “The Elms.” Once again the narrator’s role is that of a character in his own right acting as a bridge for communication, offering his own views and opinions on life’s vagaries and mysteries, while placing Coaltown in a symbolic spotlight, much like that bridge in a place called San Luis Rey or the strawberry soda dispensary in Our Town.
The difference is the scale, which for The Eighth Day is international, stretching from Illinois down the Mississippi to New Orleans and from there to Mexico and eventually the dray copper mine regions of Chili.
Coaltown itself is in decline, the mines scraping by with minimal profit. The town lies in a notch-like valley, which suggests a shadowy existence. Coal dust also settles on the town, adding to the grimness of and a dis-spiriting atmosphere.
After the novel’s prologue, Book I, “The Elms 1885-1905,” introduces the reader to the Ashley family background, and then the murder is told again in the early summer of 1902, when John Barrington Ashley was tried for the murder of Breckenridge Lansing. The trial was confused since there was no known motive with the exception of the speculations advanced by the prosecution, none of which were convincing. The better sort of Coaltown folk convicted Ashley with shameless calm since rumor alone suggested that Ashley was in love with Lansing’s wife. The phrase “better sort” suggests a virtuosity never exercised.
The narrator begins to concentrate on the difficulties suffered by the Ashley family, including the possibility of having to move to a poor farm referred to as “going to Goshen.” Many in the town had turned their faces to Beata Ashley; her situation had become acute since it appeared that “God had turned his face away from [Beata]” (46). The only defense would come from her children.
“Sophia,” the narrator notes, “went to work at once.” Wilder’s point arises from his catalytic interest in Teilhard, adapting his theory of evolution to an understanding of a forward movement in human consciousness in the accomplishment of spiritual transcendence.
Book I largely concerns the story of Sophia, who opts to push a little cart down to the railroad station and with two signs sells lemonade and books on one day and on the second day enlarges the items she has for sale, but not without disruption by group of boys. Tenaciously she stands her ground, aided by a stranger who put a stop to the boys’ antics with curt, unanswerable authority. To whom Sophia responds as a lady to a gentleman, “Thank you, sir” (47).
This smallish scene in the novel is radiant with mystery inasmuch as a stranger fosters Sophia at a very important moment in her “conscious” development, not to be glossed over. One might suggest that the stranger’s interference is in the name of God’s love, which when offered to Sophia aids in fulfilling her potential to save her family. It’s the kind of love Teilhard believed provides the motivational force driving evolutionary forces toward their spiritual fulfillment, attracting and bringing things together. [16]
There are more examples in the chapter when Sophia responds with “thank you,” as a lady to gentleman. Here’s the narrator commenting: “Sophia saved the Ashley family through the exercise of hope. ‘Saved’ was her brother’s and sisters’ word for what she had accomplished” (57).
To which the narrator adds that hope is not a sporadic cry rung from an extremity, but a climate of the mind and an organ of apprehension. For Sophia, her hope was grounded in faith, although she may have not known it as faith, but it was one of those manifestations of creativity which must sustain itself with an impulse informed by love. And according to Teilhard that love is the most powerful force in the world.
Is such subject to black hours?
For Sophia at times had to draw herself inward and patiently wait, and even though there were no religious exercises in the home, the Ashleys attended church, where Sophia’s petitions were modest. She asked only that she be given some “good ideas” on the morrow and that her mind be “bright” (58).
This first book introduces the reader to a manifestation of the kind of creativity emblematic of Teilhard’s notion of spiritual evolution and which has given catalytic emphasis to Wilder’s imagination.
“The Elms” becomes a boarding house which is not a church but a place emblematic of a reality, drawing the family and boarders into a creative unity, or as Teilhard would say, an ever-deepening union. Teilhard likened his deep spirituality to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. Sophia raised chickens, cared for dogs and cats, and fledgings fallen from their nests.
The Wilder-Teilhard issue here is the insight into the exercise of deep-grounded hope and faith, which is not buried, but is that energy which creatively draws one forward into that spiritual evolution, and that eighth day, which signals a new and richer and happier life for the Ashley family, without which the family would have become fossilized.
The name Sophia itself means wisdom, even love of wisdom, with feminine features and a kind royalty
X. Book II, Illinois to Chili 1902-1905….
Book II takes the reader on an odyssey, Illinois to Chili, 1902-1905, after John Ashley’s rescue.
He has assumed a new identity and changed his looks while living in New Orleans. His name is now James Tolland, and he claims to be a Canadian. But for the first time in the novel, the narrator introduces the reader to this notion: “John Ashley was a man of faith” (106), What kind of faith? Well, he adds, “we are more likely to find [his kind of faith] in an old woman on her knees scrubbing floors of a public building than in a bishop on his throne.” He goes on to suggest that such of the faithful have their eyes on the future and if an evil hour does come, they hold fast; More so, they have faith in life without loudly expatiating on it; they have faith in the meaning of life, in God, in humanity, and always without “whipped words, those twisted signposts, the borrowed finery, all that of a traitor’s eloquence” (107).
And in a passage that could have been drawn from Teilhard, the narrator comments that “faith is an ever-widening pool of clarity, fed from springs beyond the margins of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know” (124).
It took John Ashely a year and two weeks to reach Chili, where he meets Maria Icaza, a midwife and teller of fortunes. Ashley is suffering from dreams and not sleeping. Maria says, “I will tell you your dreams. You are having the dreams of the universal nothingness.”
John, she says, is confronting nada, and this is nothingness, and this nada laughs, but the laugh is like teeth striking together. The experience is trembling, but she says, interestingly, “God in His goodness sends them to you…. He does not want you to be ignorant any longer. God she says will give Ashley his greatest gifts because he always merited them. She strikes his hand sharply: “Idiot, imbecile; if God plans to give you His greatest gifts it is because you always merited them” (134).
And then with the kind of voluminousness of her character, Maria reaches into a bulging pocket and hands John a small crucifix rudely carved from Thornwood.
Untidily along the way, John Ashley, then, meets a variety of characters, all of whom play a role in his”assent.” The narrator writes that Ashley had tried to form himself to be the opposite of his father, but the consequence was a kind impoverishment which, he wondered, led to misshapen children by parents… and such was the endless chain of the generations.
Ashely’s moment of growth, of spiritual evolution, is detailed in the reception room of one Mrs. Wickesham. He sat down in a high-backed chair. Looking about, his eyes rested on the exhausted and submissive head on the wall before him. Ashley saw the crucifix as an argument that the world was a place of suffering and cruelty, but the crucifix was also beautiful, and such beauty he realized could surmount despair by making beautiful things, emulating the first creations.
Mrs. Wickersham becomes the person to supply Ashley with papers for his new life She asked if he had heard of the English poet Keats. He said he had. She said that Keats wrote that life is a vale of soul-making.
Ashley left for the north,
He was drowned at sea.
He was slow to mature, but during his three years of freedom he learned to push against the impediments of spiritual evolution. As a man of faith, he worked to increase the living conditions of the native mine workers, and he encouraged the mine owners and administrators to hire a priest and build a church.
Ashley may have been slow to action and never expounds in words upon his faith. It seems true, however, that his eighth day is a work of creation with faith and hope. And yet in time he was largely still unremarkable, except for his life, which Teilhard celebrates as a stitch in the tapestry or part of an ancient stone path, where during his life he broke and placed a few stones.
In doing so, he evolves especially in the way he related to other people, from treating others as objects to treating them as persons with a degree of reverence. Ashley owned the physical energy to do work, but in learning to love, he evolved the spiritual energy to care for the needs of others, which means commitment to not only the love of beauty but the love of humanity.
Teilhard refers to this process as the need for each us to develop our humanity to its fullness and maturity, which includes compassion for others and accepting responsibility for the welfare of others, a willingness also to contribute to the betterment of the community.
And with his possession of the crucifix, one should note, Ashley’s nada nightmares were no more.
It needs to be said, however, that Ashley’s faith is dissociated from any particular religion. One might argue that Wilder is offering a phenomenological description fitting glove to hand with Teilhard’s phenomenon of man in which humans [of any religion] evolve toward a convergence with the Divine.
Which may answer the question as to why a drowning at sea unless such is Ashley’s baptism and the final union with the Divine.
XI. Book III, Chicago, 1902-1905, and Book VI, Coaltown, Illinois, Christmas, 1905, and the Denouement….
For the reader coming upon Book III after finishing Book II, John Ashley’s sojourn to Chili, it’s a curious thing to note that Book II and Book III occur simultaneously in time. Equally curious, then is to arrive at Book VI, the novel’s denouement… and note Books II, III, and VI, all conclude in 1905.
One answer to the curiosity is to note that five of the books conclude in 1905, and the final book one might argue is an epilogue to the prologue.
One more answer is to suggest that the novel really never ends, which suggests an homage to Finnegan’s Wake, since if one is to reference Teilhard, his whole sense is that all that happens in time is the slow work of God frustrating those who are impatient with everything and would like to skip the intermediate stages that make up our living—which are more often than not stages of instability. Ideas mature gradually, but for Teilhard the point would be to let the mind’s bright ideas mature gradually as part of an evolving spirit. For Teilhard there was no other way to explore Ignatian spirituality.
Book VI, the Epilogue, will make this clear arriving as it does at Christmas.
****
The Ashleys had four children, three girls and son Roger; of the three girls, kindly remember that Sophia is busily saving the family from becoming destitute. As one might expect, Roger’s role is that of a surrogate father, but to help the family he leaves his provincial home for Chicago as does his older sister, Lily, who also ventures to pursue a career in singing. Part of the puzzle is that the siblings are in Chicago but unaware of each other’s presence at the beginning.
Both take a few steps forward and a few steps backward, but even so ascend a rung, and then another rung, on the ladder of spiritual evolution, of human transformation. The changes are notable in the whole of the Book, but unlike previous books the conflict in Book III is about greedy possessive passion, the little whirlpools of destruction one might find, say, in Chicago, where because of self-centeredness matters could become bleak.
When Roger and Lily discover both are in Chicago, they spend Sundays together and naturally discuss their parents and their marriage, only to arrive at an understanding that they do not know their parents’ full stories.
Given the novel’s title and what we know as the meaning of the eighth day, these discussions suggest that Roger and Lily are living in Chicago but on the cusp of their own eighth day.
But how?
Lily is brilliant and remarkably successful with her singing career; she’s unmarried with one child but proposes to have more children, but without marriage. She has her reasons, the larger being her jaundiced attitude toward her parents or what she knows about her parents, but with large gaps concerning their own history prior to becoming a family.
Roger asks Lily one Sunday to imagine their parents, especially their mother, what she was like before she was their mother or even before she was married to their father.
His point?
Such imaginings are empathetic rather than judgmental because in the evening of our lives we will be judged on love alone.
Roger is empathetic; Lily is judgmental.
Here’s Teilhard on a similar topic: “[L]ove is a scared reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.” [17]
In what manner of thinking, however, are Sophia, Roger, and Lily children of the eighth day without suggesting that their family is some kind of Messiah-bearing family. Or is it possible that on the eighth day some other spiritual creature will rise from the muck of human existence… or even elected as the Calvinists might say… but into what: into some kind of cosmic lift-off?
Nothing of the sort happens in the novel.
What does happen in the novel can briefly summarized in preparation for the final book, the denouement. Roger explains to Lily that he intends to return to Coaltown for Christmas. She refuses.
The final chapter then, the epilogue, begins after Roger’s long train ride home, the hours marking the slow dawn of another eighth day after taking the reader backwards and forwards in time. The anticipation of Christmas suggests the promise of man’s spiritual evolution and rebirth and perhaps a promise that the two families can also be reborn.
On the same train, Roger encounters Felicité, Breckenridge Lansing’s daughter. She approaches Roger and dramatically asks him to a meet with her, a meeting which will provide the reader not only with the solution to the murder mystery but also Roger’s exclamation that he will marry that “girl.”
Lansing, we will learn, was murdered by his son George, who did so to protect his own mother from a history of abuse. We also learn that Sophia’s genius, her faculty of hope, has run down.
Having noted that, the epilogue begins with a “curious thing” on the part of the narrator:
“This is a history” (395).
Curiously he begins to ask the reader whether he could see a wreck off Cost Rica, or a funeral in Washington in 1930, or two old ladies sitting down to lunch in Los Angeles? History is a tapestry and only God can compass the breadth of it. Did you know that there were once a million people in Babylon?
The return of unity between the two families begins with Roger’s visit to the Lansing home. It continues with a climactic visit to Herkomer’s Knob and a visit with the Deacon of the Covenant Church—covenant the watchword. Roger learns that his father came to the Church when it needed help and gave the elders one hundred and fifty dollars to rebuild their simple country church. The Deacon says to Roger that the money had a special meaning. Ashley was not only a kind man, he was a religious man.
It was the Deacon and some of his fellow elders who rescued Ashley.
They walk through the graveyard with no markers. The Deacon explains that the dead are given new names in heaven, whereas in this life names and bodies decay and are forgotten.
They walk into the simple church and on a board on the wall is an inscription reading, “This building is the gift of John Barrington Ashley, April 12, 1896.” The Deacon also has a letter written by Ashley four days before he was to be executed, in which he asks the Deacon and the community to show guidance to his son, to Roger. He adds a prayer that has been in his mind, learned from his own grandmother, that our lives are to be used in the unfolding of God’s plan for the world and that he trusts he, Ashley, has not totally failed.
Back in the Deacon’s home, they sit in quiet comfort. There’s a large woven rug on the floor. The Deacon asks Roger to lift the rug and turn it over. Underneath the rug are the threads and knots of human life, some of which do not carry on the generations of hope and faith but walk in despair. But imagine the possibility of one thread carrying on through generations like an ocean wave gathering strength, making straight a highway for our God.
It’s Teihard again, and the epilogue’s answer to the question in the prologue: Will there be some day a new evolutionary stage of spiritual development and leap forward for the children of the eighth day? Or will there be more days and hours humiliation and despair?
Will a day come on which the sins of man will be forgiven and the midden of the earth returned to beauty?
Back home Roger walks with his other sister, Constance, who places her arms around him and declares her love, grateful for his return. Roger responds by saying that they would love one another for a long time.
Felicité approaches from the shadows of a yew tree, from which we know the branches were part of the custom of Palm Sunday.
The two sit with each other in warm comfort.
And the narrator who has offered many curious things, offers his final words.
There is much talk of a design in the arras. Some are certain they see it. Some see what they have been told to see. Some remember that they saw it once but have lost it. Some are strengthened by seeing a pattern wherein the oppressed and exploited of the earth are gradually emerging from their bondage. Some find strength in the conviction that there is nothing to see. Some. (435)
Teilhard notes that wine comes from crushed grapes. Some people will be harmed in accidents today. Some will lose their jobs. Some will get sick and stay home and some will stop going to work and stay home with a sick child. Some will go hungry and some will be rejected and some will be lonely and some will try their best and fail.
Some.
Even so God consecrates every day as an eighth day and every moment of every eighth day… not just for some but for All.
This essay is dedicated to John Willson, my partner in books.
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Notes:
[1] Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day, p. 395. All subsequent citations are by page number.
[2] This would be Ruth Gordon, the American actress for whom Wilder updated Ibsen’s A Doll House.
[3] A good secondary source here is Rudolf Bultmann’s Gifford Lectures from 1955, published as History and Eschatology.
[4] See Bultmann on this, Chapter One, “History and Eschatology,” p. 6.
[5] Penelope Niven, Thornton Wilder: A Life, p. 664.
[6] Bultmann, History and Eschatology, Chapter Three, “The Understanding of History from the Standpoint of Eschatology,” p. 31.
[7] Gertrude Stein, Narration, F,our Lectures, University of Chicago Press, 2010 , p. 1. Wilder’s introduction makes the point that in the lectures the audience is not about to hear a lecture on narration “from the point of view that rhetorics usually discuss the subject. We hear nothing of the proportion of exposition narrative or where to place a climax, or how to heighten vividness through the use illustrative details.” Rather, the point is to return to first principles. Narration is what anybody has to say in any way about anything that can happen, that has happened, or will happen in any way.
[8] See Wilder’s introduction to Narration.
[9] It’s not an unusual philosophical pursuit for Wilder who questions much the same in his earlier The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
[10] Niven, Thornton Wilder: A Life, p 324.
[11] See The Angel That Troubled The Waters in Thornton Wilder, Collected Plays & Writings, The Library of America, pp. 54-56. It’s a remarkable short piece in which the angel explains that the “water offers [joy] and fulfillment, completion; contented rest and release have been promised.” But for a newcomer, the angel argues that healing is not for him.who has not done love’s service. The angel adds that no angel can persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living.
[12] Thornton Wilder: a life, chapter 36, “Tapestry,” pp. 668-669.
[13] A good secondary source is Teilhard de Chardin On Love: Evolving Human Relationships, a compendium of Teilhard’s expansive thought/philosophy on love, edited with commentary buy Louis M. Savary and Patricia H. Berne.
[14] Niven, p. 670.
[15] See Bultmann’s History and Eschatology.
[16] Teihard de Chardin On Love, p. 33.
[17] See “The Spirit of the Earth” in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Human Energy, p. 32.
The featured image is “Descent of the miners into the shaft” (circa 1882) by Constantin Meunier, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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