Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection — Awareness in Two Epiphanies

Jack Owicki
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Palo Alto, CA

Saint Paul had his epiphany on the road to Damascus. He has me beaten in quality, but I’ve one-upped him in quantity. I’ve had two epiphanies on the road, the first en route to Niles, Michigan, the second on the way to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

During my seventeenth summer, I was returning home to Michigan from visiting relatives in upstate New York. I was changing buses in Buffalo, with ten hours to go and nothing to read. I walked over to the book display in the bus station and saw a paperback by somebody named Ayn Rand. The blurb on the cover was intriguing, and I bought the book.

Ayn Rand was some kind of combination of novelist and philosopher. Deeply scarred by her childhood experiences in Russia during the Bolshevik revolution, she became a radical libertarian. My background didn’t have much in common with Rand’s, but something in me was very receptive to her message.

Her book awoke me from the sleepiness of a small Midwest town in 1963, and for that I’m indebted to her. I wonder how many of you can remember a similar awakening, and how it felt. For me it was hard to beat the righteous emotional high that came from believing that I’d found the Truth with a capital T. If nothing else, having once had that experience has helped me understand true believers of all stripes whom I’ve subsequently met.

Seven summers later, I was on the road again. In the intervening time, experience with life’s complexities had dimmed my enthusiasm for Ayn Rand. I had met and married Susan and had been drafted out of graduate school during the Vietnam War. We had just spent ten months in Mississippi, where I was receiving advanced Air Force training and Susan had found a job writing computer programs at a NASA test site.

Now that my training was over, we were leaving Mississippi. I was driving to Pittsburgh with Susan to visit her father, on the way to my first real Air Force assignment. The epiphany happened as we crossed from Kentucky into Ohio, when we crossed the Mason-Dixon Line^*. I felt a huge sense of relief, of a burden lifted. This experience was important mostly because it was so unexpected. I hadn’t been aware of the full weight of the burden until it was gone.

What had happened there? When we arrived in Mississippi in 1969, I experienced a culture shock. Mississippi was really different from all the northern places in which I had lived until then. In some ways it was good. There were incredible numbers of interesting insects and reptiles. People whom I met casually showed me friendliness that was way beyond what I was used to in the Midwest, and more genuine, I might add, than I would later experience in California.

But in other ways Mississippi was difficult. Politically and socially, it was very conservative. In the 1968 presidential election, the segregationist candidate George Wallace had received 63% of the vote in Mississippi, and white people who voted for Richard Nixon were considered suspiciously left-leaning. Racism was much more open there than in the north. As for attitudes toward women, sometime you should ask Susan about how a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Cornell prepared her to type and make coffee (at least in some people’s minds).

The strange thing was that, by the time we drove out of Mississippi, I had adjusted to these difficulties to the extent that I no longer was very aware of the emotional toll that they exacted. The real epiphany that I experienced at the Mason-Dixon Line was realizing the extent to which people can adapt to their surroundings.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn said this much better than I, in his short novel, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” The protagonist is a prisoner in Stalin’s Gulag, where life is unbearably harsh. And yet at the end of the objectively awful day recounted in the book, Ivan Denisovich “went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day: They hadn’t put him in the cells… he’d bought that tobacco. And he hadn’t fallen ill… A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.” Clearly, this kind of adaptation can help you retain your sanity in difficult circumstances.

Both of my epiphanies involved becoming aware — or being unaware. You can try to question everything, be aware of everything, but you just can’t live like that in the long term. Or you can unreflectively accept whatever comes your way, but there’s some truth in the adage that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. The difficult problem, with which I’m still wrestling, is to find the balance between these extremes.

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^* After the service, a visitor came up to correct my usage of “Mason-Dixon Line,” a term that, she said, applies only to the parts of the Pennsylvania/Maryland and Maryland/Delaware borders that Mason and Dixon surveyed. I had wondered about this while composing the reflection, and the source that I consulted said that the term came to be applied more generally to include the Ohio River as it separated the slave and free states.