Festina Lente

Yesterday, eager to leave South Bend for a while, I undertook an excursion to Chicago. The first parts of the trip — the Cathedral District, Giordano's, the Art Institute — were successful, but a visit out to Bucktown provoked in me a terrible fit of melancholia. It may have been partly the rain, which was cold and constant, but moreso it was the idea that people who live in such a neighborhood — educated liberated young professionals of comfortable means, not beholden to anybody — can still manage to be so unhappy. How unutterably dreary a life of material satisfaction and nothing else! Even when free of the obligations and petty bigotries and irritating stupidities of small-town life, how wretched existence can be!

What I am saying, here, is that a life of real freedom is not An Easy Thing. It's not so simple as merely removing societal constraints and then hoping for a flourishing of aesthetic, philosophical, spiritual awareness. Housewives in the suburbs with three children and an SUV in the four-car garage are unfortunate. But even worse is the young bohemian who has cast off the shackles of the bourgeois life, only to find himself further enchained; what liberation is there to be had from this second, self-imposed imprisonment?

For a while now the phrase "Festina lente" has been running through my mind. "Make haste slowly", yes. But towards what?