Esolen’s Out of the Ashes, a Short Review

Stacks of Books and a Beautiful House. That’s what I try to blog about on Saturday. Did I manage to read anything off the highways and byways of the internet? Or clean anything at all? Or cook anything besides chili on Tuesday, baked chicken on Wednesday, weird soup on Thursday, leftovers on Friday? Usually the answer no. So then I make something up. I fudge. I pretend. I paint a picture, for myself, of me in my house reading and cleaning and cooking that doesn’t really exist but sounds really rosy, at least to me.

Except that I do sort of do those things. It’s not a complete lie. I do read and clean and cook, I just don’t do it shrouded in the golden rays of nostalgia. The fudged description of my Saturday trinity renders a semblance of the truth. I do actually do all those things, but not happily and beautifully, but with frustration and often times rage. I want to remember myself as much more interesting and good than I really am. To say it in the usual way, I want to put a Valencia filter on my life, and get likes, and like it myself. This was my essential thought about Anthony Esolen’s Out of the Ashes.

Like everyone last year, I joined in the national rush to read apocalyptic books about the downfall of western civilization, in which genre Esolen’s book must certainly be included. But I didn’t really feel like reading the Benedict Option. In general, if everyone is reading something–Harry Potter, that book about Mars, anything that’s a best seller–my desire to read the book descends into Sheol and never beats its way back out again. So, having never heard of Anthony Esolen, and happening to read a review that praised his prose to the skies, I used a valuable audible credit and dove in. The praise was certainly merited. He paints glorious pictures with words, pictures I very much wish were true about my own life and self, and almost even, America.

I mean, for heaven’s sake, Esolen made, on the one hand, his grandmother–impoverished mother of 12, wife of an impoverished coal miner, person of many sorrows–sound like the happiest and best off person in the world. And on the other hand, both ancient Sparta and Athens sound like dream vacations. It all sounded alluring, golden, perfect. But once the voice of the reader fell silent, I found myself wishing I could know what his grandmother really thought and felt, and what the women who delivered up their sons to a Spartan education really believed about was happening. The point is, I don’t know, but I don’t imagine in either case it was a dream come true. Maybe it was. But I don’t think a nostalgia historical gaze would ever help me to find out.

It’s true that we are in a mess. Something essential is broken in the way that we conceive of ourselves and think about what life should be like. Institutions, habits, assumptions about the nature of God and reality that once supported and blessed ordinary people, now often stand in the way and make life into a drudgery, a moral confusion, a source of psychological trauma. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that other generations before ours maybe had it better, but we ought to be clear headed enough to admit that others certainly had it worse. Every generation, as I read somewhere this week, thinks it’s standing on a precipice.

I don’t think that Esolen properly identifies the mess that we’re in now, because I don’t think he sees the past in any kind of realistic way. And that being so, I don’t think he offers a real solution. Women now are not going to really want to embrace the difficult life of his grandmother. Nor are they going to agree to give up the vote, even if they were miraculously convinced that the idea of a family with a father (that would be the patriarchy) as the fundamental unit of society was good and true. The question for me continues to be not where do we wish we were, but where are we really? We can’t go anywhere until we answer that question.