9 - HOLMES' HOUSE DIVIDED: house-keeping and house-breaking

Summary

The process is like that of respiration … New ideas act upon society as oxygen does on the body, attacking its errors, which pass away from the lists of human beliefs, and strengthening the new truth which is building in its place.

Holmes, “Autobiographical Notes”

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life' unresting sea.

Holmes, “The Chambered Nautilus”

Thought about the church brings out some of Holmes' deepest ambivalences – as we have just seen in the Autocrat passage about the interwoven flights of crow and kingbird. And as we turn to other passages throughout his writings, we find that the same polarities which emerge in external relations to make a sermon seem to develop as a symbiotic household dialogue between speaker and listener can also operate internally, so that the process of all thought can be described as a dynamically unstable “marriage” between light and grave voices, and any possibility for personal change or growth – in the intellect, the emotions, or even in the bodily system – can only be imagined as emerging out of dialogical interrelations between light, airy, kingbird-like wingbeats and the solid, fixed, framing walls of the church or family home.