When I first read the question, my immediate response was, "Yes, sure..." I was thinking of my beloved wife and sons, the friends and colleagues whom I admire and from whom I learn, the students with whom I feel privileged to interact. For those individuals, for my being able to live with and among them, I feel unreservedly grateful.
But there's a wider context to one's life, isn't there? And somehow the word satisfied just doesn't really work there. For one thing, you can't reach middle-age without coming to a certain realism about how the world works. Not when you've had friends die, both from "natural" causes and by means to which we would never apply that adjective. Not after illness has struck very close within one's family.
And there's more. All my life, I've loved the idea of the United States. Not at the expense of the rest of the world. But America as a place where certain propositions could be set forth, where--to borrow a phrase from Albert Camus (and yes I am quoting a French existentialist)--"words are more powerful than munitions." I mean Madison arguing for religious liberty, Lincoln at Gettysburg, Roosevelt explaining the "Four Freedoms," King writing from the Birmingham Jail and speaking on the Mall.
But it's 2007 now, isn't it? And the day this question about satisfaction was offered, my local newspaper ran a front-page story about four soldiers from a military base two hours north of here who have just gone missing in Iraq. Here's how it begins: "The families of four Fort Drum soldiers are stuck in a hellish limbo. They don't know if the men are dead or alive." There's an accompanying photo of one of the men's wives hugging her mother; they look frightened.
I have no words of my own to use in response. So I look elsewhere, in this case, to W.H. Auden, who wrote in his poem September 1, 1939:
"Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame."
Amen.
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