April: the Cruellest Month

This morning I was taken by the freshness of a late April morning. The mourning doves called. Chickadees chattered in the trees. A tufted titmouse sang from somewhere I could not see. The grass was wet with dew. The pugs snuffled in the rhododendrons. The sky was bright with the new sun.

T. S. Eliot called April, “the cruellest month.” In upstate New York, April is a bridge month. There is the freshness of spring, and there is still the possibility of unexpected chill. Our magnificent magnolia tree blossomed for a day. Then came a frost. During a morning’s writing, I watched the blossoms change from vibrant pink and white to dull brown. The magnolia now looks like a tree in late fall rather than early spring, its blossom imitating dead leaves.

Eliot’s line is often quoted alone, but the opening of The Waste Land is richer and stranger than the single phrase suggests:

“April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.”

Spring is not cruel because it is lifeless. It is cruel because it awakens life. It stirs memory and desire. It calls dull roots back into movement. April unsettles what winter allowed to sleep. If St. Patrick had lived in upstate New York, he might have intoned, “I bind unto myself today fragility of blossom, resilience of trees.”

This morning, for the briefest of moments, I felt all I can say was “wonder.”

In a recent conversation, a confident young materialist told me that he had no need of G*d or mystery. Science explains the physical world, and that is enough. Wonder, mystery, the sacred: these are leftovers from more primitive ways of thinking. Honest and serious people, he told me, leave them behind. I felt sorry for him.

Science tells us many truths, but it does not exhaust truth. To explain the morning is not the same as experiencing it. To know what dew is does not prevent the grass from shining. To identify the birds by name does not silence their call.

Max Weber saw something like this in modernity. He called it the “disenchantment of the world.” By this he did not mean simply that people stopped believing in G*d. He meant that the modern world has increasingly come to be understood through rationalization, calculation, prediction, and control. In Science as a Vocation, Weber suggested that modern people increasingly believe there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but that “one can, in principle, master all things by calculation.” That, he said, means “the world is disenchanted.”

That is a powerful insight. Science explains. Technology controls. Bureaucracy organizes. The modern mind calculates. I have no doubt that much good has come from this.

Yet something is lost when explanation becomes reduction. A bird is no less wonderful because I know its name. Dew is no less beautiful because I understand condensation. Spring is no less astonishing because biology can describe growth. The mistake is not science. The mistake is believing that scientific description is the whole of reality.

C. S. Lewis wrote in The Four Loves: “Say your prayers in a garden early, ignoring steadfastly the dew, the birds and the flowers, and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy; go there in order to be overwhelmed and after a certain age, nine times out of ten nothing will happen.”

I appreciate his insight. Searching desperately for mystical experience is a fool’s errand. It is like grasping the wind. The moments of wonder in my life have not come because I summoned them. They have arrived unannounced. It is as though they have found me.

This morning, wonder found me in the dew, the birds, the pugs, the rhododendrons, the bright April sky, and also in the fragility of blossom and the resilience of trees. Recently, I am finding a renewed reenchantment of the world. Not a rejection of science, and certainly not a retreat into superstition. I am willing to let the world be more than a mechanism. I am willing to be surprised. A willingness, perhaps, to be found by wonder.

+Ab. Andy