My family and I spend a lot of time on the trails of a beautiful state park called the Mines of Spain. The short lane that takes us from our house into the park runs between the headquarters of the Tschiggfrie Excavating Company, on one side, and the municipal sewage plant, on the other. The plant only smells on certain days.

The excavating company is a few pole barns on a big gravel lot full of construction vehicles. Most of the time, no one’s there. During “the pandemic,” I’d take our son Jack over to Tschiggfrie, and we’d walk through the rows of hulking backhoes and bulldozers. He was three years old at the time, and took his rightful delight in these house-sized monsters that can dig through mountains and push over trees. Sometimes we’d come on a day when the sewage plant across the way was burning off gas, and we’d watch a plume of blue flame shooting out the top of a tall silver pipe. It would have been fun to go over and walk around the big concrete vats that hold the stuff of our lives, but I figured we’d get in trouble.

You don’t have to walk too deep into the Mines of Spain before it becomes possible to forget about construction vehicles and sewage plants and pretend the world is all woods and swamps and bluffs and meadows and continent-spanning rivers (the park is on the edge of the Mississippi). Granted, the pretense is a bit harder to sustain at the Mines than in other forests; it’s called the *mines *for a reason. Dubuque got its start as a lead mining center. The Fox Indians were digging for the stuff long before the Europeans got here and started doing the same. On some of the trails you can still see the old pits.

There’s a certain type of mind that has trouble when things get mixed up like this. More than anything, this type of mind wants things to be beautiful. Sewage plants are not beautiful, and construction vehicles are not beautiful. Old trees and bright flowers are beautiful. To place the latter next to the former is to ruin the view. What this kind of mind hates above all is pollution, litter, and any careless failure to appreciate that makes the world ugly. Its personal hell is a strip mall.

I was more of this mind when I was younger. I often had the feeling—maybe you know it—that I was surrounded by philistines. The worst thing for me was to get ensconced in something quiet and beautiful and then to get interrupted by the kind of mind that thinks you need a boombox at the beach. But having kids changes you, and this is one of the ways I’m being changed. Kids are the great interruptors, created by God to make sure you can’t get anything done. We tell ourselves this is a good thing, and it is, because once we have kids we’re forced to “just be,” to let go of our red-blooded American need to accomplish seven impossible things before breakfast. But kids also upend our received notion that “just being” is all about quietly contemplating the wonders of the universe. Because kids interrupt that, too. In grad school one of my professors, recently become a father himself, used to warn us that “family is the enemy of knowledge.” He wasn’t wrong.

Part of what makes children so chaotic is that a child’s mind doesn’t make ready distinctions between what’s beautiful and what’s ugly. Kids have to learn to do that, and it seems vital that they do. When they don’t, they grow up to build strip malls and call it “progress.” I’m sympathetic to the idea that the most revealing thing about our time is its abject ugliness, and that “beauty will save the world” if anything will. People need beauty like they need to breathe, and it’s a mark of our indifference that so many are suffocating.

And yet—“unless ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” A child mixes up the ugly with the beautiful all the time. If we’re called to be childlike, are we called in some sense to blur all the lines? What kind of mind are we supposed to have when we finally grow up and get over ourselves? Have residents of the kingdom moved past ugliness and beauty, like Nietzsche’s ubermenchen have moved beyond good and evil? Maybe what suffocates us is not the absence of beauty but the illusion that we need it. Maybe the idea of “beauty” is just a rationale for prejudice against whatever we call “ugly.”

Maybe. I think, though, that if a child mixes up the beautiful with the ugly, it’s not because he doesn’t need real beauty. It’s because he recognizes real beauty more easily than adults do. The more discriminating we become, the better we get at appreciating this and what’s missing from that, the harder it is to recover the child’s ability to see what’s present even in that. Father Zossima says in The Brothers Karamozov that “life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but refuse to see it, if we would, we should have heaven on earth the next day.” Children are more willing to see it, just as they’re also more willing to see hell in spilled milk and skinned knees. We’re creatures of extremes; growing up means evening them out. But the danger in getting even is that everything turns flat. Life gets comfortable, neither a heaven nor a hell, which is its own kind of hell. “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”

The trick—or the gift of the same grace that gives us children, and that gives to children their child’s mind—is to see that this is a false dichotomy. We feel stuck: either make your peace with the way things are by closing your eyes to what’s wrong, or live with open eyes but a closed heart that can’t enjoy the simple things because you’re always complicating them with “critique.”

When we’re trapped in the dichotomy and take option one, we look at a bulldozer and see nothing but a cool machine that does cool things and looks pretty fun to drive. That’s how a three-year-old boy sees it. Yet the boy will then go into the woods and see nothing but cool rocks and cool trees that look pretty fun to climb. For the little boy, paradise includes both places. When we’re trapped in the dichotomy and take option two, we look at a bulldozer and see nothing but the distilled essence of a civilization that’s destroying the planet. That’s how an overeducated grown-up sees it, because he knows that the bulldozer is what they use to turn paradise into a parking lot for bulldozers.

Maybe you have to go through that in order to grow up, but you do have to go through it. To enter the kingdom, you have to get de-educated. You have to become like the boy you once were. Like him, not the same as him, since you can never go back. You’ve learned to make distinctions between the good, the bad, and the ugly, and that’s a gift, too. But if you refuse to see that a bulldozer is indeed pretty cool, you won’t be able to revel in it with your son, who is right to do so. You have to be able to revel. You have to see as much as you can without going blind to the larger whole that makes it possible for even the ugliest things to be made to “work together for good for them that love God.” You have to be able to see in this whole-hog sort of way if you’re going to have any chance of “saving the world” by leaving it just a little more beautiful than you found it.

The thing about this “we are all in paradise” idea is that it doesn’t really tell you what to do about anything in particular. Should you join an anti-bulldozer club, on the theory that there are no bulldozers in paradise? Probably not; that seems weird. More reasonably, should you support efforts to protect paradise, and generally work to reduce our reliance on destructive tools like bulldozers? By all means. Wendell Berry has an essay (“A Forest Conversation”) where he talks to a forester who uses horses instead of skidders for precisely this reason. Yet Berry is careful to praise not the forester’s idealism but his prudence. The forester isn’t trying to build paradise; he’s trying to make a living, same as the guys who drive bulldozers. Should those guys not be driving bulldozers? Maybe not. Should they instead go to college and read books about The Environment? Maybe. But these days it doesn’t sound very prudent.

Father Zossima’s idea doesn’t tell us what to do, and that’s frustrating, since we are still responsible for what we do.

You’re not going to get a moral rule out of this. Father Zossima’s idea doesn’t tell us what to do, and that’s frustrating, since we are still responsible for what we do. It’d be much easier if all we had to do was choose between the vacant complacency of the average Joe who just wants to drink his Bud Light in peace, and the equally vacant misanthropy of the sophisticate who’d sooner drink hemlock and die for the sake of good taste. “We are all in paradise” isn’t a counsel of despair poorly disguised as contentment. Zossima isn’t recommending quietism. It’s not about how we see bulldozers, it’s about how we see people. We’re all in paradise because we’re all surrounded by images of God, whether they’re driving the bulldozers into the woods or chaining themselves to the tracks for the sake of the trees.

That doesn’t mean there’s no true and false, no good and bad, no beautiful and ugly. Quite the opposite. Paradise is where those distinctions matter. Hell is where they don’t. If you love your neighbor, you’ll have to take sides. But you have to be able to see what your neighbor sees while you’re doing it, and even to revel in what they revel in. The bulldozer driver has to make a living, but he might also have fun driving a bulldozer. Maybe he was that good-natured three-year-old boy who got hooked early on the big machines and grew up to live his dream. If you’re the protestor, can you get inside that dream? Or are you stuck inside your own?

That’s the stuff of nightmares, that getting-stuck-inside-your-head. The way to wake up is not the treacly HR-style “empathy” that’s really just a rationalization for taking your own side without loving the neighbor across the way. Better to take simple joy in the sheer absurdity of the tragedy. Better to revel in it all than to take a pinched pleasure in being on the right side of history. Better to remember that however beautiful the future might be, the stuff of life will still be there.

Image Credit: Photograph by Tudor Washington Collins (1898-1970) via Wikimedia.