Becoming a Roux

In the very first week of my attendance at Luther College in 1963, freshmen were treated to a screening of The Seventh Seal, a movie made by Ingmar Bergman in which the character Death plays chess with a medieval knight during the time of the plague. The screening was meant to introduce us to the intellectual life at the college we were entering.

That year an ambitious and energetic group of young professors had laid out a course they called Paideia, a core course tying together surveys of history, literature and religion/philosophy. Paideia referred to an educational idea of wholeness, since these disciplines were studied as they happened in time, resulting in a comprehensive look at the history of Western civilization as it arose from Judeo-Christian and Greek sources. The college motto was Mens Sana in Corpore Sano, which means “a sound mind in a sound body,” after all.

I made little or nothing of theThe Seventh Seal. A more clueless and innocent 17-year-old freshman could hardly have been found at the time. And I loved the survey courses, though I was generally overwhelmed and often skimmed the relevant texts only to the extent I needed to pass tests. Thus it was only recently that I read Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, by Henry Adams (assigned as a freshman), to my great enjoyment. I probably won’t revisit The Seventh Seal.

What I did have was an open and capacious mind in which I squirreled away knowledge for future use, without much judgment. I believe I got this capacity from my mother, who had also attended Luther College in the 1940’s. My mother didn’t put much stock in her own capacious intellect, using it in the service of her family. She later taught in high schools, also to help all of her eight kids to get college education. I have been the beneficiary of her excellent judgment and wide open heart all of my days.

As I write today, my mind is in quite a different condition than that of a naive 17-year-old. I am about to enter my eighth decade, and it is surely time for contemplation, looking back and looking into the questions in my own life. I believe I still have the capacious mind, open to the world and its happenings, but readers of this blog know that by this time I have constructed a firm mental foundation by which to live.

It is probably typical that as one ages, we become simpler, distilling down into ourselves, taking on our purest form. Don describes it as condensing, thickening, transforming all that has happened to you into an essence, a roux. It may feel like reduction, being less open to possibility, shrinking. But it also feels like doubling down on your life. Yes, that is who I am, I admit. So there.

One aspect of this is accepting my essential Scandinavian-ness. When I was younger, we were often told “you’re not the only pebble on the beach, you know.” When I spent a school year in Denmark, I heard that in Scandinavia, “no tree may be higher than any other tree.” That is, you may be gifted, as we all are in some way, but it doesn’t make you more important than anyone else. No one really needs more money than their neighbors either. That is, essentially, the root of Scandinavian socialism, and I certainly find that this informs my own political stance.

While working, I learned that my intellect could embrace the forest and the trees. I could size up the general situation, but then get down and deal with details, usually. I do like flying at 5,000 feet and ignoring, or forgetting the worst things below me. I believe my mother was a little like this as well.

But, looking at the roux I have now become, there are many things I no longer want to put up with, beginning with dark, crusty bread, processed food and leading toward scatology, violent movies and sophistry! Yes, it does make for a smaller, perhaps more isolated life, but it also makes space for intense relationships, nature and beauty. I often repeat to myself Oscar Wilde’s mantra, which he wrote in De Profundis after he had spent two years in prison: “With freedom, flowers, books and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?”

I offer this meditation on my own mind as anecdotal evidence of one person out of the eight billion now living on earth, suspecting that others will recognize themselves in it. From the outside, we look in awe at the people we are and have become. Dynamic systems theory provides “a framework that views development and behavior as emergent properties of complex, self-organizing systems that change over time.” (I quote from Google AI’s definition.) It is how I view myself in the abstract.

This is not something I got from my mother. The fact is that, though not the only one, I am a pebble on the beach, with all the accompanying sensuality, the color, weight and heft of that rock. And so are you, Dear Reader, and we get to move in, examine ourselves and taste the roux that we are becoming, without shame, always remembering our context.