Today Dr. Jerry L. Martin and Dr. Abigail L. Rosenthal (author of Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column) carry forward last week’s discussion of her new book, Confessions of a Young Philosopher. Let’s see how their discussion continues.

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Jerry: You just believed in seeking your passion or something like that—finding out, living sincerely, what you desire and believe. Well, there’s another quote that addresses some of the things we’ve just been talking about. You say, “I did feel obligated, as a Jewish girl who was not stupid, to situate my life on the larger map of human striving in a world that was wide, not narrow. I wanted to know where I was and not just in the realm of personal options. I sought to get my bearings and location in human history itself. I just wanted to know how to find me in the bigger story.”

That always struck me because it never occurred to me myself in life to try to find my place in history. You know, where am I? There’s a big map, you know. I mean, I would have answered, “Oh, I’m a 21st-century American.” That would have been about it—middle class or whatever. But you’re asking a deeper question than, “Are you a 21st-century American?” You want to find “me,” and that word is again emphasized in the text. “I wanted to find me in the larger story.”

Abigail: I guess you can’t quite catapult yourself back into the body and the mind that you had when you were 21. So I can only tell you what comes to mind now, but I believe it’s accurate as a memory. And it’s a funny thing, what comes to mind now is the Jewish picture. That the people I knew were lineal descendants of the patriarchs. So the span of time—which for me represented and stood in for human time, which is really hundreds of thousands of years—was about 3,000 years. The people I knew seemed to be silhouetted or given more emphatic contours by their relation, which wasn’t a clear one in my own mind, their relation to the biblical prototypes. My grandfather, with his white beard, could have been any patriarch. My mother, her name was Rachel—Rachelle—seemed to me a good stand-in for the biblical original.

I don’t know whether this is typical of children or typical of Jewish children. An anthropologist could go digging. But in my imagination, the people of now had a connection to these prototypes. When I meant history, I didn’t merely mean chronology. I meant meaningful history, with consequential personalities, who carried some of the freight of the past, by means of which they supported legitimate projects that touched the future. Human beings stood between a meaningful, consequential past and a meaningful, consequential future. And what they did had to be in line with that lineage of meaningfulness, that lineage of significance.

Jerry: Yes and that sounds like the kind of history lived out—precisely the way you were trying to live life—in a way that’s sincere, where you live your ideas. You don’t just parade them as ornaments but you live them. And it sounds like that kind of history has that character, that it’s what you call meaningful, and meaningful in the sense that we call a life meaningful. You know, not meaningful in the sense that I can decipher it, but in that richer sense in which we said, ah, Thoreau had a very meaningful life. You know, didn’t just write well, but lived meaningfully. And so did Lincoln and various other people. Joan of Arc comes to mind and I’ve written about her. You know, there are all these people who do populate history and make it meaningful.

Abigail: Yes, and I don’t recall thinking that I needed to be one of those great ones. Meaningful for me did not mean famous. It did not mean grabbing a headline. It meant getting aligned with a consequential life purpose that was inherently, intrinsically, naturally one’s own. It was there to be found. You didn’t make it up. By contrast people got into theatricality, habits of being “interesting” in an eccentric and artificial way. Theatricality struck me as definitely Plan B or Plan C.

Jerry: It’s not a pose, an artistic stance, or a theatrical stance. It’s not even trying to, as young people often say, “make a difference.” Even that is an external standard. As we know, I could do something—maybe march on something that it’s good to be against—and make a difference. Those may be very good things to do, but not closely related to the question you raised earlier in this preface: what are your deepest desires? You know, what is it you really desire, and you need to be sincere about that. You’ve said that basically people desire true love, and they need to be sincere about that, which means try to live that out.

Abigail: And, of course, in the life stories of the biblical archetypes, each one is a man who has to find the right woman if he is to go forward with his God project. The project is to start something that puts God here on terra firma. On the earth. In the historical time-bound place where we all have to live. Let’s get that down here. It’s interesting that none of the patriarchs are robbed of their heart’s desires. They’re not unlucky in love. They’re lucky in love. So I think I put it together. I’m not good at chemistry, but I think I put the formula together: oh I see, they’re carrying forward God’s plan and it seems to require the right woman. That they be there as a couple, that they be happy erotically, naturally, on the plane of real life and not just instead of real life! 

Jerry: In these cases at least—and maybe you think more broadly about this—loving the person you love doesn’t put you in competition with God’s plan. It’s not as though your true love and God are rivals or at cross purposes with one another. Your view seems to be more like the opposite of that. 

Abigail: Yes. And, with all due deference to the truths in the New Testament, Jesus seems to represent a more ascetic vocation: “leave your father and mother; leave your earthly obligations; you have a higher calling; follow me.”

And some biblical critics who pondered that suggest there was a general expectation that Jesus shared—that the world was about to end—and therefore normal family life should be suspended. Because something was imminent that would trump all that. But since I wasn’t raised in that New Testament climate of opinion, my prototypes were in the Hebrew scriptures. They did not support an otherworldly life plan.

All that, plus personal watching the grown-ups, led me to think that finding true love had to be Plan A. Otherwise, you were compensating for the loss of true love.

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