“Good sense, innocence …”

San Joaquin Valley

As a young person coming of age in the 1960’s, I thoroughly absorbed the beat ethos which suggested that beneath the antiseptic mainstream culture was the living indigenous excitement of jazz, hyperbolic literature and kinds of consciousness known only to those who had the guts to step outside the typical treadmill of school, work, and family. I recall, at 22, lying on the living room floor of my parents’ home, enthralled by an audiobook of Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, set in San Francisco. 

That year, the ulcerated cornea in one of my eyes prevented me from working. I was not very happy about it, living in the basement of my parents’ house, and wearing dark glasses to shield my younger brother and sisters from my pain and tears. My Dad helped me get audiobooks, and I took to studying literature, as I have ever since. A cornea transplant fixed my eye after a year, and I headed to San Francisco, where my sister was living.

By that time, beat culture had bloomed into the full-on counter-culture movement well-documented today. Strawberry Alarm Clock, a briefly visible rock band, proclaimed that “Good sense, innocence cripple mankind.” We firmly believed it. We thought we could handle the worst sorts of knowledge, about ourselves and the world. It turned out not to be true.

I was the oldest of eight kids, which seemed to fall into the groups, “big kids” and “little kids.” As a big kid, I protected my little brother and sisters from bad words, pop songs and my underground dreams. My parents in turn protected their kids from what they knew of trouble in our small town. As a result, I was pretty innocent of real problems when I left home.

A good example of the desire to protect your family is to be found in an early Hitchcock film, Shadow of a Doubt. Partially written by Thornton Wilder, it is set in 1942 in the ordinary town of Santa Rosa, California. The movie portrays a lively family with innocent pursuits and mid-century middle class manners. When actual evil comes into the town, only the daughter of the family recognizes it. At some risk to herself, she protects her mother and young siblings from this knowledge. In this case, it is successful, though we do not know to what extent her knowledge mars the rest of her young life.

By the time I got to San Francisco, I was a grownup and quite certain of my ability to take on the world. Not in terms of a career, however, which I never took very seriously. Although I worked for almost 50 years, and had increasing understanding of technical administration and management, mostly in architectural offices, I took much more seriously the business of living.

In San Francisco, this meant participation in all aspects of high and low culture, everything from ballet tickets and high tea at venerable old hotels to raucous music at clubs and spaghetti at informal Italian cafes in North Beach. The gorgeous views in every direction and carefully preserved neighborhoods made us feel we were surrounded by art and history. A remarkably diverse and generally egalitarian playing field gave us all the feeling we could become whole people.

With my stable background, I did find trouble to get myself into. My first husband, who had probably been marred by fetal alcohol syndrome, spent all of his time trying to feel better, using all the drugs available and eventually alcohol. This did not make for much of a family life, but gave me some insight into the kinds of evil to be found in the world. It led to divorce and childlessness, in my case, and homelessness in his.

I learned from all of this that it is necessary to understand, as a grownup, what lack of a wholesome life can lead to, how innocence is corrupted by early knowledge of raw pain and violence. It can happen through real life situations or over-exposure to cultural violence. And it is probably quite true, as Alec Ryrie says here in “The End of the Age of Hitler,” that since World War II, “the man with the toothbrush mustache has dominated our moral imaginations … we have replaced positive exemplars with a negative one.” Our movies and books are so saturated with evil by this time that good is often seen, if at all, as “cringe.”

We need both innocence and experience, and we are lucky if they come to us at the right times. An innocent childhood allows us the ability to wonder, to freely expect love and goodness from those around us, and to know that despite the snakes in the grass, we can grow up and contribute to the work of the world. We need experience to know what we are up against, to know where to place our trust, and how to have a story of our own. 

Far from crippling us, our good sense will get us out of the cultural trough we have fallen into and back to a grounded sense of reality and peaceful relationships to the world and each other.