Will Hoyt: Wayfarer in a New World

There are so many lovely and lapidary things to be found in Will Hoyt’s latest book (Fear & Trembling in Las Vegas, Front Porch Republic Books, 2026) that even the most resourceful reviewer will scarcely know where to start. That said, let me begin with the following, which is that it could not have been a matter of pure happenstance that the two bookends chosen by the author, between which a hundred or so pages are set down, are testimonies to the central and decisive event of human history, without which our lives would be less than zero. I mean, of course, the dramatic descent of the Incarnate God into the flesh of our fallen humanity in order to redeem all that we have lost through sin. 

Not an idea, mind you, or supposition about the good, and the true, and the beautiful; rather, an event, a happening that actually took place more than two millennia ago, the sheer impact of which changes everything. Including, especially, the world we take in with our senses, which becomes the necessary setting for the stories we tell, the essays we write, the analyses we do. The coming together, therefore, of two utterly disparate things, bringing about the most amazing confluence of all, that of Logos and Sarx, meaning and matter. “The ineradicable positivity of the Christian message,” is how Joseph Ratzinger memorably put it in Introduction to Christianity. Nothing less than the infinite God inserting Himself into the finite human estate, which has become the centerpiece of Christian belief and the organizing principle of the universe itself.

It happens, also, to be the golden thread running through every page of this wonderful book—the pivot, as it were, on which the whole argument turns. It is the fact that everything is underwritten by the Word. The Word not only there at the beginning as the eternal self-utterance of God but that same Word whose embodiment in flesh, blood, and matter becomes the animating principle behind everything in the universe He made. The very instress, as it were, accounting for all the inscapes scattered about the universe, to use the language of Fr. Hopkins, S.J. 

In a wonderful chapter on Thoreau, for instance—“our one, absolutely indispensable American man of letters”—the thing that most interests him, says Hoyt, is “the stunning reality of extant things—of being.” As Thoreau himself will put it: “Daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with it—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks. The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense. Contact! Contact!”

There is a solid bottom everywhere. And, to be sure, it is God who alone may account for the maintenance of that bottom, which is both solid and everywhere.

So, what are these two blessed bookends between which Will Hoyt has laid out the lines of his argument? The first is a piece of plainchant composed in the late 12th century by Pérotin Magnus, music director at Notre Dame in Paris, which, if you can imagine, Hoyt found himself humming one fine day while navigating a few terminals at Heathrow Airport in London. The notes he was hearing in his head came from Psalm 98, which the angels sang on that first magical night while shepherds kept watch with their sheep. Pérotin, it seems, had turned it all into music, of which the relevant passage runs as follows:

All the ends of the earth have seen
the salvation of our God.
Rejoice in the Lord, all lands.
The Lord has made known his salvation;
in the sight of the heathen
he has revealed his righteousness.

Here is “the epiphanic event,” insists Hoyt, long foreshadowed among the Jews—the People of the Promise—as a result of whose sudden and quite unexpected eruption into time we now have, in his words, “the institution of end time, also known (in Greek) as kairos.” The appointed time, in other words, anointed and chosen before the world began, which God Himself has orchestrated for our salvation. Here is the point, “the still point of the turning world,” to use the language of T.S. Eliot, where all the polarities come together, convergent upon each other as though we and the universe were being asked to dance.   

Except for the point,
the still point,
There would be no dance,
and there is only the dance.              

And the other bookend, the one on which the meaning of the book will close, what is that? It is the Alma Redemptoris Mater, which he calls “a dimly remembered prayer,” composed in the early 11th century, addressed to she whom, as Dante reminds us in the final canto of the Paradiso, “Gave such nobility to our human nature that God himself did not disdain to become his own making.” How does it go?

O Loving Mother of Our Redeemer…gate of heaven, star of the sea,Hasten to aid thy fallen people who strive to rise once more.
Thou who brought for the holy Creator, all creation won’dring,
Yet remainest ever Virgin, taking from Gabriel’s lips
That joyful “Hail!”: be merciful to us sinners.

All right. Those being the two bookends, what is the argument that falls between? It can be stated as follows, that a civilization no longer annealed to, nor even believing in, that central datum of our history, is bound, sooner or later, to implode. It will be a world not only without God and His sacramental presence in our midst, but a de-natured world, increasingly stripped of any sense of its own reality. Indeed, a world waiting to be replaced by a soulless technology that, unless we choose otherwise, will envelop everything, leaving us like so many helpless cogs in a machine we no longer wish to unplug.

Robbed of the real world, a world “wrapped in cellophane,” as Aldous Huxley years ago warned, can it not be a good thing to try and peel the cellophane away? Or, putting it in terms of the present moment, why would anyone want to live in a cybernetic coffin sealed permanently shut?

“Ought it to surprise us, then,” he asks in a chapter called “City Lights, Receding,” arguably the best chapter in the book, “that incarnational life is receding?” Live long enough in “a digitalized world in which embodiment simply does not figure at all…nature replaced by computerized images,” and this is what you get. And yet, for increasing numbers of people, “living like an angel” has become a habit they do not wish to break.

Indeed, life is so good in cyberspace that most of us never even notice it’s a trap… Thanks to fiber optics and digitalized sensory immersion systems, a new (prosthetic) celestial city is under construction, and not a few of us already live on-site year around.

Hence the origin of the book’s title, Fear & Trembling in Las Vegas, a city where “simulation—as a project—has been taken to a new level,” where the end game is to produce an entirely new world, Creation itself!, packaged as the new and improved version that will soon displace the existing model given to us by God—but blessedly free of such imperfections that heretofore required a complete makeover.

Here is the choice we face, then, which can be reduced to the following binary: “the difference between living ‘inside’ the new, completely manufactured technocracy we are building, or living ‘outside’ it in a world not made by us.” The advantage in putting it so starkly in either/or terms, of course, is that it may enable us, “for at least a few more years, to deduce an integrative center…and thereby find the courage to develop the habit of looking for whatever window designers of our soon-to-be-realized Diaspar may unwittingly leave open”—and, thus, crawl safely out of doors.

Again, the good news is that there is still time to make up our minds. “We can still talk about reality for at least a few more years, seeing as how the technocracy risen in our midst does not yet control every part of us or every last one of us.” Speak of the real in terms, that is, redolent of the language our greatest artists and poets have used, towering figures from out of our shared past like Hawthorne, Melville, and Emily Dickinson, writers who were, in addition to Thoreau, argues Hoyt, thoroughly wedded to the created world, evincing both “a belief in and deference to reality.”

Resistance to the technocratic trends everywhere in the ascendant, he tells us, remains essential to anyone who wishes to stay sane. Because, finally, to live in an extra-mental world, a world steeped in the concrete, is the only thing that may lead us “to a place where entire galaxies not made by us are everywhere in view and an evening star shines brightly in the western sky.” In other words, a world made by a God who, when it all came to grief, had it remade by His only Son, who, having entered so deeply into its brokenness—indeed, plunging right to the very bottom—has thus made it shine ever more brightly than before. 

But we have got to choose to live there. Reading books like this can tell us why. And they furnish us, along the way, with enough insight and example from our shared patrimony as Americans to help arrest—and perhaps even reverse—the encroaching darkness.