I went to Wal-Mart today, with the goal of buying a pair of earbuds and a bottle of lemon-juice.
Wal-Mart is, in its essence, a deeply unpleasant thing for a human being to come into contact with; huge space unbounded by any human scale, order, or decoration, white ceilings and omnipresent flourescent lights, like an asylum or prison, looking down upon every type of evanescent merchandise capable of being manufactured by slaves in Malaysia and China, piled haphazardly on shelves or lying forgotten on the floor, everywhere surmounted by careless images and placards declaring low prices, and everywhere ignored by the underpaid, bored employees wandering vaguely about like inmates in purgatory, never busy, but never available for help or conversation either.
At the height of its power, when it advanced by leaps and bounds from coast to coast and across the sea, singlehandedly gobbling up and annihilating the economies of entire towns and regions, Wal-Mart was, no doubt, a terrifying thing; now, though, the institution has fallen on harder times, and evokes pity more than terror. Faced with competition from Amazon and other online retailers, the company is closing stores at a terrible rate; and even the open stores are often understocked. As I walked gaily through the electronics section, searching for my desideratum, at least half the shelves I passed were simply empty, with no sign of what was supposed to go on them. There were not too many customers, either, for such a day, and those that were there were poorer, older, minorities. The wealthier customers, I knew, were no doubt shopping at the newer, cleaner Target down the road--Target, that so well exemplifies the preferred consumerism of the middle class American of today, no less oppressive, no less ugly, no less fundamentally alienated an institution and an experience than Wal-Mart, but nonetheless painted red and ostentatiously supportive of LGBTQ rights.
I, however, was not shopping at Target and basking in the barest suggestion of an aesthetic and a social consciousness; I was walking through a Wal-Mart visibly in decline, and musing on time and decay and the beauty that is found it. That day, I found Wal-Mart, for the first time, lovely.
This really should not seem so strange; for things much more fundamentally ugly and evil than Wal-Mart have been rendered beautiful and nostalgic by the passage of time. Some have been rendered so fundamentally harmless and frivolous that they have become, not even poetry, but Internet and convention aesthetics. Thousands of "steampunk" enthusiasts every year elaborately dress up in and criticize clothing based on the deliberately ugly and practical garb of British industrialists and colonial administrators of the 19th century, rulers of the world's first capitalist Empire. The very appearances of the machines to which men were chained, and by which they were chewed up and worn out by the tens of thousands, the machines for whose sake boys of 10 were given stiff drinks of whiskey at the beginning of each workday, to dull the pain, have become, for most people, little more than a quaint aesthetic of a bygone age.
This kind of nostalgism, this kind of romanticization of the past, however objectionable some of its results may be, represents, in itself, a fundamentally sound instinct of humanity. It is hard to really appreciate a tiger while it is alive and threatening to eat you; for real aesthetic appreciation, for real poetic inspiration, it is better to wait until the beast has been turned into a rug, and then weep over it. The Antebellum South was, in most ways that matter, a fundamentally wicked society, that deserved to be smashed into powder; it was only once it was gone with the wind that it could be a romantic temple of vanished beauty. No one would really want to see the Colosseum when it was actually the Colosseum, a vulgar monument to spectacle in service to an overpowering state; now, though, centuries of rain have washed it clean of its bloodstains, and left nothing but the quiet majesty of stone.
These were the things I thought of in Wal-Mart today, and this is what I felt; Wal-Mart, the white walls and the vast, cavernous space and the empty shelves and the bored employees, fading away into the night, a sign and emblem of the whole society in which it thrived, the American Empire of cheap merchandise stacked haphazardly on shelves and then thrown away and endless armies of men bound to machines producing garbage. It all seemed, suddenly and overwhelmingly, as ephemeral and as sad and as beautiful as anything I had ever seen: seemed, indeed, already vanished from the earth, and in that vanishing to be lovely, like the monuments of Rome and Athens and the British Empire before it.
I drove out of the vast parking lot, ugly asphalt and careless yellow lines, and onto the freeway that already seemed to be falling to pieces around me. I wondered: what would we do with these vast, overwhelming buildings, these vast empty spaces, once all this had passed away? The Catholics of Rome had, with unerring common sense, turned the Pantheon into a Church, and put a statue of St. Peter atop the Column of Trajan. Perhaps, I thought, one day this huge, bare white cavern would be re-consecrated as a Cathedral, like the Parthenon; and I remembered, not without amusement, that in California the Crystal Cathedral, that great monument to the excesses of capitalist religiousity, had already been bought from its bankrupt owners and turned into a real Cathedral of the Catholic Church. I laughed at this, and in my heart I entirely approved it. Yes; just like Rome, the glories of this faded civilization should belong to God and his Church. Perhaps one day we would put statues of St. Peter or the Virgin on top of the shells left by abandoned McDonalds.
These thoughts were not entirely undirected; for I was driving to a little Adoration chapel at a Catholic Church, not far away, where I found a little room, smaller than that in which I am now sitting, in which there were a few middle-aged people and statues of Joseph and Mary and a few candles and God Almighty under the appearance of a piece of bread. And sitting in this room, reflecting on what I had just seen and done, I realized rather abruptly what it is that divides me, and has always divided me, from so many other people, from so many Catholics of past generations and my own: that for me, it was simply obvious that Wal-Mart, and the great Empire and society it represented, was fading away and falling into ruin before my eyes, and the Church was permanent and would outlast it--and for them it was not.
This, I reflected, was not at all due simply to lack of faith on the part of such people; for they lived at times when America and the American Empire of economic power and cultural production and military might seemed natural and large and permanent as the world itself, while the Church seemed ever smaller and older and destined to vanish like the mists at dawn, while I lived at a time when everyone, even the most piously American and secular, despaired of the future of the American Empire, and recognized the signs of its dissolution.
I realized that while for me, the overwhelming vision was of the world fading and falling into ruins and the Church remaining strong and upright, for so many Catholics, for so many Catholics far better and more faithful and holier than I, the vision, the overwhelming vision which they could not help but see, with and against which they fought all their lives, was of the Church falling into ruins and vanishing beyond recovery, and above her the world looming ever more permanent and powerful and unquestionable. I realized how much of the work and efforts and ideologies of both progressive and conservative Catholics over the past one hundred years and more had really been, at its base, responses to this vision: some good, some evil, and some merely foolish. I realized, too, that there was another vision which I lacked as well, one that possesses and frightens and drives many people not so much older than me, or even younger, to do and say and fight many things: a vision of growing up in a Church already little more than ruins, beautiful but obsolete and forgotten. I realized that I lacked this vision, too, that I have never for even one instant felt the Church to be in ruins, never felt the Church to be weak and failing or already failed, never in any real sense feared for the Church, its present, or its future. I realized that this is really what divides me from many Catholics far better and holier than I, and that this is no glory to me.
Sitting in that Chapel, though, I tried, for a little while, to see my surroundings in the light of these visions, thinking in a new light of the oldness of the few assigned adorers, the smallness and shabbiness of the room, the apostasy of so many young people from the Faith, the overwhelming force of the world in so many forms over and against human souls and the Church. As I came out from the Chapel, I got in my car, and drove through a tunnel, and when I came out there was a Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market where there had not been one before, and I saw, for a moment, how all this could still seem powerful, inevitable, could still seem to have a future, while the Church did not.
As soon as I saw that, though, even as I saw it, I saw also very clearly that, in the end, these fortunes of history made no difference at all; that both while waxing and waning, Wal-Mart was nothing but an empty shell, ugly and meaningless and powerless and without a future, while in that little Chapel there was God himself, in the form of a weak and vanishing bit of bread, and souls whose virtue and fidelity were glorious and unconquerable even through the age and fading strength of their bodies.
When I saw this, I saw simply the world, in which God was made Incarnate; a world both of passing things, and of eternal things, of time and decay and resurrection.
Even when the Colosseum was full of gladiators and revelers, it was still empty; even when the Plantation House was full of ladies in gowns and the fields of groaning slaves, it was still an ugly and meaningless sham; and even when the Church has been at its weakest and most corrupt, in every place and time where it has seemed to fade away beneath the triumphant forces of this world, it has been strong with the strength of the Cross, and glorious with the glory of God, and possessed of an eternal future.
I came away from this experience, then, both saddened and comforted. I do not know whether America will endure for a year or a decade; but it will not endure. I do not know whether the Church in this place or time will conquer, or be conquered; but it will live forever. That is, really, all I need to know.
Anyway, I did get the earbuds and the lemon juice, and that was nice too.
