Real but
forgotten
Stuart
McAllister
In one of the early scenes of The Matrix,
the character Trinity meets Neo in a club and she tells him, "It's the question
that drives us." Later Neo meets Morpheus, who describes this inherent curiosity
as a "splinter in the mind."
We are born into a world that is
populated with stories, pregnant with multiple meanings. From our very entrance
into the cosmos until death, the reality and presence of story envelops our
lives. Like the deep-seated quest of Socrates to discover what, in fact, was the
good life, we find ourselves asking questions and wanting answers. These
questions are not mere curiosity, or intellectual pursuits; they carry enormous
existential significance and importance. These questions haunt us.
Consider the following words from Lee
Iacocca in Straight Talk: "Here I am in the twilight years of my life, still
wondering what it’s all about… I can tell you this, fame and fortune is for the
birds." Our minds are splintered—or made numb—with pressing inquiry: What is the
point of it all? What gives our lives meaning? Novelist William H. Gass
expresses a similar nagging reality. "Life is itself exile," he writes, "and its
inevitability does not lessen our grief or alter the fact." Journalist Malcolm
Muggeridge notes further, "The first thing I remember about the world—and I pray
it may be the last—is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling which everyone
has in some degree, and which is at once the glory and desolation of
homosapiens, provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my
life." Why are we here? Where are we going? Why do we find ourselves as
strangers in exile? Is there a greater story we are a part of, but ignoring?
In the Western world, we are
progressively abandoning the metanarratives that for centuries served to define
our society and our individual lives. Indeed, the very idea of a "defining
story" is considered offensive, imperialistic, sexist, or worse. The individual
is left alone before a mind-boggling array of options and both the
responsibility and the authority to reach a conclusion are totally rooted in the
self. Yet, despite brave predictions of the demise of God or the eventual waning
of belief under Modern conditions, the questions have not gone away. If
anything, they are more at the forefront than we would have expected, given the
nature and shape of progress.
In the opening pages of the Lord of the
Rings, the narrator tells us of the process whereby history became legend and
legend became myth and slowly it was all forgotten. Tolkien's brilliant insight
into what he deems our "real but forgotten" past is a telling representation of
our current state of affairs. If the world and our life is the product of the
Creator God, then though ignored or unknown, the echoes of our distant past and
essential nature still call out to us. And they are calling.
"For since the creation of the world
God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly
seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse"
(Romans 1:20). The heavens are yet declaring the glory of God; the skies are yet
proclaiming the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night
after night they display knowledge.