“I’vE STRUGGLED TO KEEP UP,” an aging professor in John Hersey’s new novel says to the protagonist, a student whose dissidence is scarcely distinguishable from abject laziness. “The closest I can come to a suggestion is this: I think your best bet lies with following someone like Epictetus. You boys fancy yourselves as Diogenean—barefoot friars who despise so-called good things, and for whom the essence of virtue is independence—but cynic means dog-like, Fist, cynicism really comes down to snarling, when it’s vulgarized the way you campus philosophers do vulgarize everything. And part of the time you seem to think Epicurus has it for you —cut out all learning that doesn’t do anything for you; simple pleasures; freedom from fear, especially from fear of Hell.” Here, we are told, the protagonist moved a step away.
John Fist moves back because the old professor has touched the tenderest spot in his Liberal soul, a spot he doesn’t know is there, and which is so well kept a secret that John Hersey, always a shrewd and compassionate writer, should go down in the history of ideas for having seen it. What he has seen is that the current protest of youth in the name of freedom and the whole Christmas- stocking list of desiderata is simply America’s first voice of all, the Puritan. The darkest cranny of the Puritan mind is that it found sin intolerable in others, while all too frequently it found cause to taste a little itself, on the sly. Sin emits its headiest flavor in a virtuous community, for one can always fool oneself into taking the responsibility for an infraction here and there. But one must be assured that everybody else is following the code. That is, that they are being good for you, and in your stead.
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