Meditation on Free Will to Choose Human Decency / "Delta Autumn" / Ms. Bucher
Meditation on free will to choose human decency // Bucher
At dinner, Isaac said to the group, “There are good men everywhere, at all times. Most men are. Some are just unlucky, because most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be. And I have known men even the circumstances column’s stop.” At that, Roth answers (shockingly harshly), “So you lived almost eighty years... And that’s what you finally learned about the other animals you lived among. I suppose the question to ask you is, where have you been all the time you were dead?” And then Isaac answers “but if being what you call alive would have learned me any different, I reckon I’m satisfied, wherever I’ve been” (329).
What are each of the men actually saying to each other?
I think that Isaac is reflecting on a truth about human nature, even the laws of nature. That is, that given a choice to make, most people will try to land on the side of decency, of goodness, and even of some element of virtue. I think he is saying that we all make tough decisions in excruciating circumstances, that life deals us impossible hands sometimes, and that we do our best, even if we fail. And that some people can press through their misfortune and still live a life that doesn’t warp or damage them from hope or seeing beauty or being true to one’s sense of moral direction.
Roth is bitter, about his life, although we don’t know exactly why yet; we only discover at the end of the story that he has become romantically involved with a cousin on the Beauchamp (black) side of the McClaslin lineage, and has had a child, who he cannot recognize because of the South’s cultural racism. But his anger and disappointment are reflected in the sarcastic ‘dead’ statement, as if to translate that only fools or dead people wouldn’t recognize how ugly, unfair, or destructive men (and life) is… as if Isaac is living a Pollyanna vision of human reality. Men are monsters, and not capable of self-management, virtue, or living an upstanding life, in such vicissitudes.
Isaac, then, states essentially that if he had had a chance to hold a more negative, jaded, or cynical world view through his life (the “living”), he wouldn't have wanted such a way of living. His own view was satisfying.
In fact, the entire story is about such choices between alternatives. Do you hunt down the does or leave them alone to assure sustainability of the natural order? Do you follow your heart or stay away from the taboos of a mixed marriage? Do you behave in the forest and hunt/act responsibly because the authorities might catch you doing wrong or because it is the right thing to do? Do you cut the forest down to make money or tend it as the precious resource it is? Are you consistently kind and generous, or wary and angry? What is your moral code, irregardless?
I think that “Autumn Delta” is about the strength of our moral purpose and our free will to decide on how to manage ourselves. As Epictetus states, “We must make the best of what is under our control and take the rest as its nature is” (Discourses, 1.1: 11) and “Who then is the invincible man? He whom nothing that is outside the sphere of his moral purpose can dismay” (Discourses, 1.18: 125).
And so we all inch forward into the light -- for what alternative is there? Roth's cynicism seems to be the flip side of unreasonable idealism: he so badly wishes for thoroughgoing transformation that when it doesn't come his default position is angry hopelessness. Isaac, for all his flaws, has accepted human nature and is content with becoming slightly better; for Roth, the idealist, this isn't good enough.
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