Desire and Its Discontents

Rod Serling ends the episode thus:

Street scene, night. Traffic accident. Victim named Fred Renard, gentleman with a sour face to whom contentment came with difficulty. Fred Renard, who took all that was needed – in The Twilight Zone. (IMDb)

One can look at this little piece of television in many ways. Pedott could be God. Renard could be an allegory for a greedy man. But what I propose is that Renard is each and every one of us. He is human desire.

What are his qualities? Discontentment, a lack of peace, a burning feeling that things ought to be going his way even though they aren’t. Renard doesn’t use the old man’s gifts as a step on the road to satisfaction; rather, he can only see the possibility of more, that is, of more desiring. Human desire wants to go on wanting; it’s really that simple. Think of St. Augustine’s “grant me chastity and continency, but not yet.” On the one hand, he does want to stop, but if he wanted to stop (in the strongest sense), he would. His profligacy must be giving him something or he wouldn’t keep returning to it. St. Paul says effectively the same thing:

Did the good, then, become death for me? Of course not! Sin, in order that it might be shown to be sin, worked death in me through the good, so that sin might become sinful beyond measure through the commandment. We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold into slavery to sin.  What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I concur that the law is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh. The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want. Now if [I] do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. So, then, I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand. For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self, but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Miserable one that I am! Who will deliver me from this mortal body? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Therefore, I myself, with my mind, serve the law of God but, with my flesh, the law of sin. (Romans 7:13-25)

The spiritual-carnal divide is strong in this passage, and, from what I’ve seen, it’s often read in this way—the war within us for supremacy between the fleshly and the Godly. But that’s not all. If we look closely, Paul is contemplating how he can do what he does not seem to want to do. When he wishes to do good, evil is still present. This is not just to say that good intentions are not enough. Something more fundamental seems to be at work. He doesn’t say that when he does good things, evil is a consequence; rather, “[t]his willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want.”

What’s he’s talking about here is desire, human desire. We say we are willing to do what we think is right, but we do not. This must be, because, at some level, we want to do what we think is “bad.” One could take more mundane examples. I hate waking up late, but many nights I sit up doing virtually nothing, so late, in fact, that I can’t help but sleep in. I may tell myself that I want to be up early, and at some level that’s true, but something keeps drawing me back to my phone and my laptop late into the night. To say I don’t want to do that flies in the face of what I actually do all the time.

This is the sense in which desire wants to go on desiring. If satisfaction means getting up early for me, or doing the good for St. Paul, or being chaste for St. Augustine (my saintliness is really on display here), why don’t we chase satisfaction? We don’t because our desire doesn’t want to be satisfied. Of course, on one level it does; we all want peace. But, on another, it does not. It wants to go on desiring, to keep being unfilled, hungry, that is, desirous.