Last summer, on vacation in Maine, my wife and I stopped at the original L.L. Bean store in Freeport. There I purchased what may be the emblematic baby boomer product: “Polarized Performance Bifocals.” We baby boomers need our reading glasses these days and now we can have them built into our “performance” sunglasses. We apparently will not purchase “bifocal sunglasses” since that sounds like something old people wear. We must have “Polarized Performance Bifocals” as, presumably, worn by Olympic athletes who are also over 50.
Nonetheless, these are a useful item. As the product description says, “These innovative polarized sunglasses have a built-in bifocal magnifier to help you read maps, GPS units, cell phones or change a fly on the stream.” I have attempted to change a fly without my reading glasses and it is not a pretty sight.
They also help if you read novels on vacation. And wearing my performance bifocals took on an additional irony as I read Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
As Thomas Hibbs points out in a review of the movie version of Brideshead:
As the narrator in the book, Charles Ryder says quite explicitly at one point, “My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me”—one of the book’s many allusions to Augustine’s Confessions. The human capacity to remember provides a sense of individual and communal identity, even as it provokes longing for the past, for an innocence and youthful happiness now vanished.
Charles remembers while he is a soldier in World War II stationed at an old English estate. It is Brideshead, ancestral home of the Flytes, a wealthy and influential Roman Catholic family with whom he has been acquainted—or rather entangled—since college. Recognizing where he is begins the reminiscence that comprises most of the book.
Charles recalls his friendship at Oxford with Sebastian Flyte, the family’s youngest son. Sebastian at college still had his Teddy bear, Aloysius, and paid visits to Brideshead to see his nanny in the old nursery. “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy,” he declares to Charles, “and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.”
Sebastian comforts himself over his lost youth with alcohol, resisting all attempts to free him from his addictive drinking. Over time, Charles slumps into an internal numbness, a lack of feeling, as he finds the things he desires and loves—Sebastian; Sebastian’s sister, Julia; his art; his children; and the army—result in frustration as he equates loss of youth with loss of happiness.
As Hibbs notes, “The desire to arrest time, to hold onto the present as if it could be preserved from age, is a powerful human motive.” Powerful, but ultimately it is futile. Time passes and we age. The innocence and pleasures of youth give way to the passing years. We can bring them to mind and even experience the same emotions, but we can never return, dig them up, and possess them again in the same way. This is what burdens not only baby boomers, but all of us.
“I have seen the burden God has laid on men,” wrote the Preacher in Ecclesiastes 3:10-11. It is a two-fold burden. First, “He has made everything beautiful in its time.” No pleasure or experience in this world lasts forever. Beauty has already been, is yet to come, or is right now.
Second, “He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” With eternity in our hearts, we can remember what is past and project what is to come. But we can only enjoy whatever is beautiful in the present, a rapidly passing knife edge of time. Lost youth is simply lost.
Waugh, a Christian novelist, was not pessimistic about age or even death. In the preface, he wrote that the book’s theme is “the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters.” Grace is never pessimistic.
Hibbs comments that Waugh had a “thoroughly Augustinian theology of faith and providence—of the way grace operates through the moments of time.” Aging and death are subject to the operation of divine grace, something that needs to be remembered in the days of lost youth and performance bifocals.
Over the course of the book, Waugh shows us the interplay of sin and grace. Sebastian sinks into alcoholism, but ends up as a lay brother at a monastery in North Africa, a peculiar but holy man. Julia, with whom Charles has an affair, refuses to marry him after they are both divorced. Sinning is one thing, she tells him, but “living in sin” is quite another. She cannot commit herself to living in sin and gives herself to volunteer service instead.
Lord Marshmain, the patriarch of the Flyte family who has been living in sin for decades with a mistress in Venice, unexpectedly returns home to Brideshead to die. Just as unexpectedly, the long-time apostate repents and turns back to God before he breathes his last.
Even Charles is not immune to the operation of divine grace. After his reminiscence about bygone days, Charles, who has been an atheist throughout the story, admits to a fellow soldier, “I’m homeless, childless, middle-aged, loveless.” Then he walks to the chapel in the Brideshead mansion.
The chapel, a gift from Lord Marshmain to his wife when they were wed, had been decommissioned. No services were held there for years, but when Charles arrives it is again a living church. The flame of the candle, in its “beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design,” burns again. “I said a prayer,” reports Charles, “an ancient, newly learned form of words.”
The work of those workmen who built the chapel, he muses, as well as the work of “the fierce little human tragedy in which I played” were not for nothing. Grace means that faith takes hold despite our lack of faithfulness and that the past—all of our past as well as all of the Past—is transformed.
My performance bifocals are a reminder that I, too, am an aging baby boomer who is none too happy about losing youth. But reading Waugh’s masterful story through the polarized reading lenses has reflected back a new perspective on being human, being temporal, and being subject to the marvelous operations of divine grace.
Copyright 2008 James Tonkowich. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. This article was published at BreakPoint.org, October 14, 2008.
