Our next door neighbor, a Frenchman named Roland,
has moved. There is nobody home, nobody
there. There are trash bags in the front
yard and a pile of trash in the garage; both the result of the efforts of a lackluster
real estate agent. Wandering from room
to room there is nothing there but dust and cobwebs. It is no longer a home, just an empty house.
The philosopher Pascal says, “We are not satisfied
with the life we have in our own being.
We want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others, and so we try
to make an impression.” [i] On this Peter Kreeft remarks, “Why? Most of
all, deep down, we fear damnation.
Damnation is the loss of your soul, true self, image of God, real ‘I’. In this life, perhaps the closest we come to
that is emptiness, hollowness, ‘nobody there,’ ‘nobody home.’ We fear we are
really insubstantial ghosts, deep down.”[ii]
It
is the lament of T. S. Eliot,
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas![iii]
Kreeft goes on to say, “To prove we are real, we
make splashes in other’s pools.
Especially by the two things no ghost can do: sex and violence.”[iv]
We live in a world of hollow men, empty men, living
in fear of being discovered. What
if? What if, like the invisible man,
they take of their outer clothes and wrappings and no one can see them? What if?
What if they strip of the external shell of their lives and there is actually
nothing there? What if they are all on
the surface? What is there is nobody
home, nobody there?
What if all the world can see that they are hollow,
that they have no soul, they have no being, no self; that, if after all, they
are insubstantial ghosts?
[i] Peter Kreeft, Christianity for
Modern Pagans, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), p. 79
[ii] Ibid
[iii] T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” The
Complete Poems and Plays, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965). P. 56
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