F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have said “There are no second acts in American lives.” I rummaged around the web and found numerous references to this quote, most noting, if not as eloquently as in an Esquire article from 1999: “This half aphorism, found in notes for a never-finished novel, (is) perhaps the most oft quoted of Fitzgerald‘s work, largely because it is trenchant and almost perfectly wrong.” Like many lovely lines that in one context or another catch the imagination, it sounds good but ultimately it rings hollow.
For both good and ill, our human lives are uniquely marked by second acts. And it really doesn’t matter whether for Americans or any other kinds of humans. For instance, on this day in 1815, Napoleon made his brief, tragic for so many, but at that moment triumphal return from Elba. There was a second act. Well, maybe more a coda. But, I still think it supports my thesis.
The point of this rumination is how our perhaps uniquely human condition is our ability to change. Quickly, I’m not making a claim we humans are of a completely different category from other animals. It seems rather obvious every characteristic we possess is part of a continuum shared in greater or lesser degree with the rest of the living web on this planet. But our brains, mouths and hands have taken things in a direction that even our nearest relatives the other great apes seem not to have gone.
We have language. And fast upon that we have been given by the world, evolution, or if you rather, God, a way to store experience and retrieve it, which allows us the possibility to modify our behaviors in a way that appears to transcend even the other apes. Again continuum. Sure, other animals make decisions and in varying degree can modify them. I recently watched a television program showing Orangutans using foliage as an umbrella. And there are the intriguing stories of chimpanzees and gorillas learning sign language. But we are at the far end of that continuum and our possibility of change is so magical it produces such terms as “free will.”
Frankly, I believe the free will option is small. Everything exists in causal relationships. And from a distance it looks rather like most choices, maybe in one sense or another, all choices are determined.
But there also seems to me, on occasion, to be glorious disruptions to the flow. There are moments of discovery and from that discovery of change. In actions and in deeper ways still…
As we pay attention to what is going on and most importantly, to ourselves, a certain freedom appears.
Of course that freedom is constrained, by biology and circumstance.
But like a sonnet or a haiku, constrained circumstances can provide moments of illumination.
Although like with a sonnet or a haiku, it also takes discipline, practice, and back to my perennial theme, attention.
To shift the metaphor, such things as discipline, practice and attention, I’ve found, take us to the edge of the map, to that place marked “here be dragons.”
And if you think a second chance isn’t a dragon, well, I suggest you’ve probably not been paying attention…
But also, I want to hold up the possibility. Learn the way of the spiritual haiku. Take off on the path toward dragons.
You only have one life. Or, so it seems to me.
Use it.
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