I The heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man is to tell him he is at the end of his nature. W.G. Sebald All my life I have pondered my failure to live up to the romance of transformation. I have been born only once. I studied mystics but saw no visions. I read about voices but heard none. When I made changes, they turned out to be only revisions and modifications. I have been engulfed by certain experiences, but their effects were left on the old substance. There was the night, many decades ago in a dark room in a sixteenth-century manor house in Oxford, when I heard, for the first time, on a rickety gramophone next to my bed, Beethoven’s fifteenth string quartet Op.132, and the third movement, the celestial one “in the Lydian mode,” lifted me up, and terrified me with its demands — but when the music was over I was low again, the elevation was ephemeral. I felt that I had disappointed the music, and to this day I stay away from it unless I have made some spiritual preparation for it. In my religious life I envied converts: choosing is a greater achievement than inheriting; but since I myself have never found a reason to convert — or looked for one, since I am once and for all honored by my grand and taxing inheritance — the best I could do in this regard was to make myself into an advocate of welcome, so that those who acted on their dissatisfaction with their own données would know that there is safety on the other side. There is nothing I comprehend less about Christianity than its concept of grace, which is of a kind of coup from on high, or a monotheist’s karma, and I regard miracles merely as the name we give to improbable events for which we are stupendously grateful. I mostly respect other people’s new beginnings, though some transitions arouse my suspicions, but I have no talent for new beginnings, no matter how weary I become of myself. Who has not performed the old exercise of clarifying one’s principles by imagining what party he would have chosen in moments of truth gone by? One of those moments of truth that my mind visits often is America in the 1850s, and I long ago grasped that I would not have been a radical abolitionist but a moderate one. (On the other hand, there are villains in history whom I would have unhesitatingly shot dead, or so I would like to think.) In my writing, especially about history and politics, I have been the one who grimly endeavors to be sober about metamorphosis, who wishes to spoil the giddy celebrations of discontinuity and direct the attention of the celebrants to the continuities that are hidden in the revolutions, who is afraid of the millennium, every millennium, and wary of the disruptiveness of progress that I myself support, who refuses to toy and tamper with institutions and ideas that will not easily come again after they are destroyed. (The next Jewish millennium will arrive in 2240 and I am glad that I will miss it.) I am a hawkish dove, a conservative progressive, a late adopter. Of course there are sufferings in the world that explode this rueful patience, and sometimes I have violated the rule of my temperament to go slow and demanded instead that power be used immediately against evil. There are historical actions that cannot wait. We are all selective about the consequences that trouble us. I have always been a little embarrassed about my willingness to watch justice come slowly — why would you defer the dawn? Yet I do not trust speed, because it is so heedless of what is to its right and to its left, and I do not trust efficiency, because it flattens reality and deludes us about our powers, and I do not trust unprecedentedness, because it is almost always an exaggeration and usually inculcates a thoughtless antinomianism, and I do not trust wholeness, because it represents the end of possibility. In the realm of historical action, in sum, I do not trust transformation. And in the realm of the self, when I hear the ubiquitous praises of transformation (or, in the American vernacular, of redemption and closure), my back goes up, because this almost recreational Proteanism promises an end of meaning, or more precisely, an end of the meaning for which I have been searching, or even more precisely, an end of the search. I do not wish to be told to shut down and start over. The questions were the right ones. The arena was the appropriate one. I was getting somewhere. Transformation looks to me like quitting. Many years ago I published a book about my mourning for my father, in equal parts scholarship and reflection, a spiritual diary of a year of sorrow in which I investigated the mourner’s customs that I was practicing with insufficient understanding. A review of the book by Harold Bloom appeared in the New York Times Book Review, enthusiastic and sloppy in Bloom’s way, and amid its flattering remarks it made an objection that rankled me. Bloom complained that in the course of my narrative the narrator did not change. An epic, he said, requires a hero’s transformation. Whether or not I was a hero, he was correct. I did not conform to the canonical plot. I was not transformed by my year of spiritual intensification. Enriched, but not transformed. This was a matter of fact: I was reporting on events in my mind and my heart, and relying less on my imagination. Perhaps it was evidence of my limitations that I was never bathed in light. But the important point is that I did not hunger for transformation, or for a new philosophical framework, or for a new mode of perception. Transformation is a sort of obliteration, however salvific. But my beliefs about
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