Upward Journey: A Look at Life Through the Lens of Essay

By George Tomezsko

It is a question everyone embarking upon his or her journey through life must face, namely, how
can I live a happy life in the face of a world indiff erent at best and sometimes hostile?
In this brilliant new book, Upward Journey, George Tomezsko poses this question and proceeds
to answer it via a series of essays wherein he dares to dance the tide and defi es the forces of political
correctness with a smile on his face, resolve in his heart, and clarity of mind. This veritable feast
of ideas is a real treat for a soul looking to go beyond contemporary and fashionable opinions in
search of real comfort, hope and inspiration. As such, it serves as a nice introduction to the fi eld of
philosophy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479721320

George Tomezsko

George Tomezsko is a writer, essayist and historian with several previous books to his credit. His major interest in history is the War Between the States. The war in the Shenandoah attracted his attention when he wrote an earlier book, An Afternoon in May, that told the story of the Corps of Cadets from the Virginia Military Institute at the Battle of New Market in 1864. He wrote the present book to ensure the real significance of the military drama then being played out in the Shenandoah Valley is not forgotten.

Book preview

Prelude

T hese here pages, dear reader, were written in blood.

No, not the kind that flows from wounds or cuts, but from somewhere deeper: from the emotions wrapped within my very human heart. Make of them what you will.

The observations recorded here were written for the private benefit of my few friends. My intent was to offer some mental stimulation to amuse them and myself on our journey through life. I wrote these essays with no mundane motive, unlike most popular writers who pander to the tastes of the public for financial gain. I think each author should write one strange book. Count this one as mine. The plot here is simple: a single soul struggles to free itself from the envelopments of the world. I wrote this strange book merely to leave something of myself for posterity, a motive with a degree of vanity in it, I’ll admit, but with an admixture of charity as well: I only hope that you who read this variety of items may find some comfort and wisdom here as you live your life through. The art of living a truly happy life requires a keen judgment, and by placing before you many diverse opinions, like the numerous notes and musical pieces that make up a concert, it is my intention that you may test your judgment against them and make it sharper so that, like a young musician being readied for a truly grand concert, your skill at living may well become ever sharper and remain always in excellent tune.

As smooth as the melodies of music which harpers awaken (Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 2, 412).

But if you belong to the multitudes of men who seek only entertainment from their authors, or one who panders to vulgar desires, you will labor in vain here; look elsewhere. A really worthwhile author attempts to give an honest account of things, a task which requires not an entertainer, who presents to the public as many faces and talents as he thinks will draw him applause and a dollar, but nothing more than an honest man. The public has its own opinions concerning what pleases and what offends it; many an author wishing to place himself before the great court of public opinion has become dishonest or had no principles to start with to obtain a favorable ruling: a true poverty of talent.

We should not, like sheep, follow the lead of the throng (Seneca, On The Happy Life, i, 4).

I write hoping to preserve my integrity and hoping to accord only as much respect to the opinions of the public as those opinions deserve.

I offer no new insights into the things of this world or of God, for both are knowable and the voice of novelty is merely the voice of vanity. Employ your mind and scour off the layers of convention and false opinion that too easily take hold of us; once done, life becomes a joyous discovery of what always has been. I am no prophet; I leave that role to those who can find no better employment. I want no followers; I desire to command no army. I would be happy, at the end of my life, to be able to say I shepherded but a single soul well through life, my own.

To be lived successfully, life must be understood as a bridge between our first day and our last over which we must walk. This is life’s direction; it goes that way no matter how we hope to live it or what we desire to accomplish. It has its own series of stages, and each stage ought to be marked by a birthday; it is really a brand new beginning, a new part of the bridge to cross. And if each new stage be an improvement over what went before for you, count that as profit!

But most of us miss this underlying linearity of life because we live moving as it were back and forth between longing for what we do not have to achieving it, and back again to longing for more. Think of a dog chasing its tail: that is exactly how longing and fulfillment chase each other through our lives.

An individual starting out on life really has two choices as to the kind of life to live. He or she can become engrossed in the world, can become what Seneca the foremost Stoic called "occupati," to the detriment of peace of mind and a real and genuine happiness (though he wrote long ago, Seneca had it right (On the Shortness of Life, vii, 1); when reading him I always feel as if he is talking to me as a very wise father might to his son), or he or she can remain apart from the world. It is this latter class I really admire. If you choose to become an occupati, you are immediately subject to the entropy of the soul such a life brings with it, a steady but insidious deterioration that saps our vital powers and ultimately makes us weary of life. This unholy power can even bring about the slow decline of families, states, and nations.

I can show you an example from my own family.

My mother was descended from a family of German nobility that dated to at least 1514, but a family in decline since. Nobility is marked by superior and extraordinary virtue, but I know not what exceptional feat of bravery my ancestor had completed, nor even know in what battle, or what other outstanding service he had rendered to his country and king to merit a noble title. But with this had come great wealth, access to advanced education for his children, and influence; but the von Bronsfelds of 1900, when compared to a familial generation of a century and half before, could not measure up on any of these scores. The transplanted branch of the von Bronsfeld tree even proved unable to grow in America, because it produced only one generation in the New World. I attribute this to the sterile and democratic soil of America, within which nothing noble takes root. After my grandfather on that side, this branch of the family produced only that one generation, and will produce no more. Of my mother’s three brothers, one never married, and the two who did had no children. One sister never married; my mother and her other sisters, and their children, all took the surnames of their husbands. It was as if a higher power had ordained that that family should vanish into history, at least in America.

My father and his brothers and sisters were descended from those peoples who do not dwell on the lofty heights of inherited power, wealth, position, or title. My father’s father started out in the New World as a cabinetmaker, became a farmer, but failed; he eventually became a machinist. His family flourished over here, at least in terms of numbers of descendants: to date the Tomezsko side has produced three generations in the New World. To continue its journey through time, a family needs children, of course, who must in turn survive and reproduce and these must be male because of the current custom at marriage whereby the bride takes the groom’s surname as her own. But the survival of a family is neither certain nor likely for more than a few generations. Such is the course of mortal life. Even those who produce ideas as if they were children know that, even though these are easier to produce and can be made in great quantities, most do not survive.

Nor should they.

The truly worthwhile ideas require a thoughtfulness not found in the everyday ebb and flow of opinion. But the written word, when well used, is a pointer in the right direction.

When I left college long ago, I had no clear understanding of what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go in life. That must be a very common problem, and those times, heady with romantic revolutionary visions and in which the emphasis was on living just for the day, did nothing to help. I suppose a good many of my classmates merely drifted into whatever job or career they took up in later years. I had studied politics in school, a subject taken so seriously by the academic world that it was actually given the status of a science, political science, as if the surprises and passions of political life have a mathematical regularity. According to the temper of those times, government was thought of as the prime instrument that would lead humanity to a perfect earthly paradise; that is, government in the right hands could do this. With that understanding, my motive for studying that erstwhile science was clear: I wanted to be among those right hands who would lead the way to utopia.

In plainer English, I had caught the fever that moves a revolutionary to act.

But that dream died with maturity, and those days I do not want back. We spend too much of life searching for what we think will make us happy. I needed a new dream, and so, little by little, I made myself into a writer; I cobbled together what talent and skill I could, and set out upon that sea, hoping to make my mark there. Whether I am a good writer or a bad one is a judgment I must leave to the small circle who will read me; personal vanity is too quick to prejudge the issue. During my life I practiced no less than ten trades: machinist, proofreader, systems designer, technical writer, journalist, computer programmer, manager, college professor, editor, thinker. I can sum them up as follows: I was good at some, but master of none. So went the course of my working life.

I wish my self-confidence came in constant, even doses. It is instead strong one minute, weak the next, non-existent the one after that, then goes back to strong. If I had a constant confidence and a more abundant supply, I would rule the world. But as it is, it has led me here to this literary path for, I think, a positive purpose. And so, under the influence of this inspiration, I hereby set out upon my life’s real work, to render in written service the hope that my thousand pages may profit those suffering from despair, anxiety and doubt.

Earlier writers labored to bring some light into the world, which they claimed took the form of modern ideas. But from this vantage point of history the task must now be to bring in some wisdom in the face of their ideas: relativism, hedonism, internationalism, radical egalitarianism: all the bitter fruits of the Enlightenment. That these enlighteners may have needed enlightenment themselves seems never to cross modern minds. Their ideas, in practical application, alienate us from one another and from our very selves. They dwarf the individual; in point of fact, under their political expression, in the name of freedom our individual lives and deaths have no meaning. A modern man, soaked in this manner of thinking, must vacillate between hope and despair without ever arriving at the balance point between them, which is the seedbed of a genuine religious faith and a true and keen understanding of life. I speak to the faint but unerring, true, and steady stirrings of the human heart; the exponents of these modern ideas appeal only to the weaknesses which our fallible reason combined with ungoverned desires create within us. You can be sure that the more obfuscating an idea the less true it is. Such complexity, especially when applied to sexual issues, is intended to deny the need for virtue and strengthen the hand of the immoralist and increase his numbers.

At this point you may think I ought to be a public speaker or maybe a preacher. Neither role suits me.

I don’t like speaking because I generally make one of two mistakes when doing it, and sometimes both at once. I sometimes become so excited, so wrought up, when trying to make a point my mind races so far ahead of my speaking mechanism that my mouth slips out of gear and I end up stumbling all over my words. Or I make the mistake of thinking that what I have to say is as important to my audience as it is to me; this has cost me much embarrassment.

For example, I was once attracted to a woman to whom I wanted to tell all my ideas and feelings. She was a sort of free spirit, willing to question all rules, authority, values, ideals; she came from a working class section of Philadelphia, been married at sixteen and left a single mother with three children not very long after that. All of this had given her an earthy demeanor that I found oddly appealing. We had many discussions on various subjects, and since I felt so strongly toward her, I assumed she felt just as strongly toward me. Eventually, we went out to dinner; she had invited me. It did not go well; I learned that not only was she not interested in me in any romantic sense; she also found my ideas boring. My vanity wounded, I soon retreated from her, the incident making me more cautious when sharing my dreams with others. Dreams, if told, can sometimes arouse resentment toward the dreamer, especially if those dreams contradict or undermine the dreams of others.

Writing offers a way in which dreamers can hide themselves, to be found out only by those patient souls willing to probe. My writing will probably appear, from the standpoint of the public, as all depth and no surface, lacking a veneer to attract much attention, a nut too hard to crack easily, and not worth the effort. This misjudgment always occurs whenever souls seek only surface. These types seldom understand souls who have no surface for their depth. This is why I write; it provides my surface. Hence the title of this book; the passion needed to take the upward path toward what is truly worthwhile in life must be awoken, and I the awakener.

I

The Problem Stated

G reater European man, and by greater European I mean the Caucasian inhabitants of Europe and the Western Hemisphere, lives today under the spell of science and its political children, scientific liberalism and scientific socialism. These offspring ma y therefore be called timely ideas and are so because they are the cornerstones upon which anyone calling himself modern stands. Here in this shallow era, these ideas have become our new gods. And we all thought polytheism was dead!

I call these gods timely because that implies duration, that their influence had a definite beginning and will (thank God) have a definite end. All great souls can see through these gods because they are hollow; whether they shall be dethroned and replaced with what can be called untimely ideas (the natural rights of the individual, a healthy regard for virtue, and the strength of character needed to rule oneself) is a process that may require whole ages. Nevertheless, these ideas have no time; they are valid currency everywhere. Modernity and modern ideas began when men in their arrogance rebelled against the heritage of the ancient world and the discipline of our Faith; and thus dawned the age of ideology.

And both scientific liberalism and scientific socialism have each tried to replace the ancient trinity of reason, virtue, and happiness with the modern trinity of submission or subservience to will, feeling, or inclination (in place of reason), equality (in place of virtue), and hedonism (mistaking this for happiness). And modern men call this, in one word, progress. The terms progress and progressive may be thought of as shorthand for these ideas whenever employed in public discourse nowadays. But these new gods rob life of meaning, of happiness, of a sense of purpose.

I know, you are skeptical and want proof on this score.

Well then, consider that the literati of today boast of their faith in all things progressive. By this, and I state without any real fear of contradiction, they mean how sophisticated and irreligious they are. You want more proof? The terms thinker and Christian, when used nowadays in normal discourse, mean different and even contradictory things, thanks to the unrelenting secularism of fashionable opinion since the eighteenth century.

And despite the most valiant efforts of church authorities, these modern gods grew strong because the faithful masses, when confronted with them, did not respond to these threats to priestly power (and, it must be noted, to the real happiness of men as well) with the same degree of fervor that the clergy did. Instead, the many merely shrugged their apathetic shoulders, looked the other way, and went on with living; their concerns were more immediate: the mundane humdrum of daily life. And so, to triumph, the exponents of these ideas had only to convert those whose natures dispose them to rebel against any restraints, the breeding ground of progressivism. European man consequently became ever more scientific and social in his outlook (the word social here meaning that he became ever more ready to view himself as the product of social or historic forces as opposed to being his own actor and responsible as such) under the ministrations of these new priests.

Is it, therefore, any wonder that few truly noble types exist among us Europeans today? By noble I mean those souls who are not easily swayed by passion, desire, or flattery, who are cognizant of their difference from the many on this score, who stand on the height of virtue and who, because of their virtue, rule themselves, and desire to rule all others by their example and with their thoughts. In days long ago, these souls were held out as models for emulation.

In classical times the Stoics felt that the very greatest of men were those who, because they had formed in their minds a picture of the most beautiful life and the most beautiful state, legislated laws for the entire human race.

And with what thought does the wise man retire into leisure? In the knowledge that there also he will be doing something that will benefit posterity, (Seneca, On Leisure, vi, 4).

The next greatest were those who, due to uncommon strength of character and mind, founded a state encompassing a particular race of people. The next after that were the nobility who ruled or framed laws for a particular state, so that it would survive and prosper; the next in turn were the priests who taught the people obedience to the law. Today this hierarchy lies in ruin, a largely forgotten memory, kept alive only by scholars still interested in the classical past; men of wisdom are few and silent; the other such men are held in low regard, their places of honor now taken, respectively, by the politician (the slave to voters and the need to pander), the businessman (the slave to money) the libertine (the slave to pleasure), the entertainer (the slave to flattery). And nowadays, the entertainer is yielding to the celebrators of vulgarity, a steady decline come to its logical conclusion: the natural consequence of the belief there is an equality of each and every human condition. And modern life grows ever shallower, more sterile: the price paid when large masses of political men want to be on what fashionable opinion calls the right side of historical progress.

But how precisely is it that we Europeans have come to view the natural leaders of humanity in such bad light? This bad light is the belief that no one has the right to exercise authority over another, not even we over our own selves, for freedom, in modern eyes, means that feeling, inclination, and desire be allowed to roam; the exponents of this modern notion of freedom now refuse to rest until all checks upon behavior are gone. You who are young and just starting out in life would do well to learn not to read by that light. And those who think that all those who want to rule are absolutely corrupt must implicitly agree that those who do not are absolutely good.

I leave the following question for all democrats and progressives to ponder: what if the precise opposite is true?

Modern European man is no longer a nationalist because he no longer sees himself as part of a people but as an agent of an idealistic internationalism (though arguably only reluctantly and very probably only because fashionable opinion expects him to play such a role). This internationalism is the modern democratic principle taken to extreme because it seeks, in the name of equality and equal rights, to create ever larger governments and assume ever larger numbers of people into combinations of nations, whole regions, continents, and will not rest until it embraces all of mankind within a single state. He therefore loves neither fatherland nor even himself, or at the very best, only himself. He is simply a collection of atomized spirits who find it hard to resist these cosmopolitan forces.

The most common type of world citizen, perhaps the only type left in the world today who has any influence, is the businessman, the man whose chief interest is the movement of cash and consumer goods across international borders. He has stolen this title from the philosopher and the priest, both types of stateless men who seek wisdom from eternal sources and who bring it to others, whose way of life points them above the mere here and now; these sorts are world citizens in the purest sense of the phrase. In ages past, if only in the Western world, the priest previously held center stage in popular eyes, a role he took from the philosopher after Christianity brought the ancient world to a close. But these commercial souls view the entire material resources of the world only as a source of profit, and when these supreme materialists come to power, as they now have throughout the world generally, national boundaries become transparent or are discarded altogether to serve profit. And in this manner, the ancient notion that a border is a means by which a people claims its homeland is obscured. And as the businessman links others of his class together across national boundaries by economic ties, he also divides the people of every nation along economic lines. I see only one people among us who alone have the capacity, but not yet the will, to resist these developments. I am speaking of the Germans, whose desire to remain apart and unique, muffled and only spoken of among themselves in private in dull-half-tones and whispers, may yet give the more enlightened among us reason to take heart. Their national spirit lies only asleep, hidden beneath a phony layer of conformity imposed by those sorts angered by recent German history. In other European hearts, a truly national spirit is now three-quarters forgotten.

National development and economic development do not go hand in hand; each has its own dynamic, its own forceful inner logic. Patriotism springs up from the heart; economics out of the need to serve bodily wants and comfort, a need as universal as the needs ministered to by philosophers, priests, poets, artists, and musicians. Cosmopolitan souls are always hedonists and egalitarians to the extent that they, confusing equality with sameness, seek to blur even the natural distinctions between the sexes and even combine the elements of both sexes within their personae. Thus they appear effete and effeminate: our modern priests of Cybele.

The case is like that of a strong man dressed up in a woman’s garb (Seneca, On the Happy Life, xiii, 3).

Such souls have nothing of their own, preferring to borrow something from all foreign customs, religions, or arts, and as their horizons expand, their depth of soul necessarily decreases. If they become any shallower, they are in danger of disappearing into the wider horizon. Cosmopolitanism, in the sense of mixing people from different national stocks within a national border, is caused by the desire for prosperity and unrestrained sexual pleasure. In this case, workers and capital must be imported because the demands of continuous economic expansion require more laborers and more businessmen than are usually available from that nation’s own stock. And the libertine actively supports this mixing of peoples to further his sexual interests; by exposing a given social population to a diversity of manners, mores and morals, all restraints are questioned and weakened. As a result, nations soon dissolve into larger economic associations enclosed within a new border, that of trade, wherein public life is marked mainly by the exchange of cash. And pleasure becomes the highest goal of cultural or social life.

Consequently, in the world at large, two great and contradictory cross-currents are today at work: the belief in internationalism (motivated mainly by the desire for economic profit and to a smaller extent by ideological beliefs in the equality of all men), and national self-expression.

But cosmopolitanism is a sign or a symptom of a society in which economic development has taken precedence over all else, a society whose very soul has been buried under the desire for cash and consumer goods. If one examines the climate of fashionable or liberal opinion in the states of the Western world, that is, those of Europe and North America, that climate is distinctly internationalist in temperature. I place the blame for