this hour

Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour!

-- William Wordsworth, “Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty”

Who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

-- John Milton, Areopagitica

I have. Over and over again I have known truth put to the worse, when there is too much freedom, where there are no rules. And who am I to declare the rules? Nobody in particular. But I know that where there are no rules, lies prevail. The biggest fist then rules, and might makes right.

“Your right to swing your arm stops at my nose.” I heard this motto spoken at a small-town meeting on residential zoning. A developer had bought two of the town’s modest frame houses and torn them down to build mcmansions in their place. These intruders bullied the neighborhood, and towered over it. A woman broke into tears as she told how she no longer had sunlight in her kitchen window.

The town discovered that it had no rules against this kind of thing. Many were afraid it was a sign of things to come, that it was the end of “our town as we know it;” or that, as a realtor might say, the “special character” of the place was about to be demolished. So they wanted to make what the developer had done illegal.

The speaker, who so zealously guarded the prerogatives of his nose, was the developer. How dare you pass laws, he said, that limit my property rights? You can swing your arms, of course, provided that the arc never crosses my path – or any potential path that I might choose. Pass all the ordinances you want, as long as they have no impact on me.

But it wasn’t the developer who should have spoken these words. The words properly belonged to the woman who no longer had sunlight in her kitchen. Her nose had been smashed by his fist. She had done nothing, and the swinging of his arm had materially curtailed enjoyment of her property.

The developer was misrepresenting himself. What he said was true – none of us has a right to smack another in the face – but his utterance of it was false. When the smacker masquerades as smackee, the resulting speech acts are duplicitous. We have a right to our own opinions, but not to our own facts. When aggressors claim to be victims, they deserve no place in the discussion circle.

Those who deny the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, for instance, contradict the facts in order to continue the persecution of Jews. Because a few seconds of research demolishes their position, they create phony institutions of research, and publish ragtag “journals” in which the persecutors can quote each other, thus generating footnotes – those ensigns of scholarship that fool an ill-informed reader into thinking the author owns a place in the intellectual tradition.

Some Christians in America claim that Christians are persecuted in America – proving only that they do not know what the meaning of the word “persecution” is: disagreement is not the same thing as persecution. Christians have at times and places been persecuted for their faith (more often than not by other Christians), but not these Christians here and now. Conservative Christians have the right to offer their views, but not to be protected from exposure in delusion or dishonesty.

When I went to school in the still segregated south, family members and their friends told me (the Yankee kid) that the “Niggruhs” had their own schools, just as good, no, “even better than ours,” and they would show me some time. But they never did show me, because there weren’t any such places. The kids who a year or two later sat down at a Greensboro lunch counter had stopped talking; this matter wasn’t going to be resolved at a discussion circle. Discussion in that time and place had become too corrupt for that. We’re lucky that the ones who stopped talking weren’t carrying guns.

Some who sought power recently have said that the new health care laws include “death panels,” by which government bureaucrats will decide who lives and who dies. There are in fact bureaucrats who get to decide who of us will be treated and who will not: they work for health insurance companies. The death panel hoax was a scheme to smear government with sins of private enterprise. It worked, because those with higher ethical standards were too polite. I am a worker in palliative care. This lie is about me. I take it personally. No one will tell it in my presence without being called on it.

We didn’t call the liars out. We didn’t confront them with their professional and personal corruption. They should have been red-carded and sent off the field, but we tried to debate with them. They do not deserve debate. They deserve – depending on your philosophy of child-rearing – either a long time-out or a public spanking.

If Milton were alive today, he would know that truth can be put to the worse when the rules of discourse are violated and no one calls the fouls. Free speech isn’t utterly free. You don’t get to win by shouting louder. You don’t get to prove your lies by repeating them. You don’t get to quote movies as if they were history. You don’t get to ignore the facts. You don’t get to dispute the facts except on the basis of other facts. Above all, you don’t get to call yourself the lamb when you are the lion.

Radical theologians and philosophers have said in recent times that the rules of discourse are elitist. I do not think they are right; but if they are right, then justice requires that elites should rule the world. We don’t always have to listen to everybody. Though all are born with a place in the circle, some have disqualified themselves.

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below.

and then

The best way of tinkering with ourselves is to tinker with something else – a mechanist way of saying that only he who loses his soul will save it.

-- Richard Rorty, “Freud and Moral Reflection”*

After decades of experiment, I learn that I can’t make myself any better than I should be. I have some choice about details: I should remember to bring the milk up from its box before it spoils in the summer heat, and I mostly do so, after having tasted the consequences of delinquency. But to set myself at odds with the broad outlines of my character – with my susceptibilities and insensitivities, lusts and aversions, bursts of enthusiasm and doldrums of despondency – would be like trying to give myself an appendectomy. No surgeon would try the latter, and I should not attempt the former.

Mostly your task is to learn what you are, where your nature locates you, and what investments you were born with. As you learn this, you gain a perspective on how the world might treat you, who might see you as savior and who as mortal enemy before you even meet them, just as you come in the door bearing gifts. A colleague said “My presence precedes me,” which means she will find herself pre-cast in a drama she would not write, in a role for which she did not audition, responsible for motives she does not know as her own.

The moving finger writes, says the sage, and then moves on. The world did not begin at my birth, has scored its history on my first page, and when the last page has been turned will graft its own sequel onto my scratching.. I don’t get to say Once Upon a Time. I only get to say And Then . . .

That’s history for you, and you’re in it. “One damned thing after another.”** If you don’t know you’re in history, that’s because your back-channel, your particular tributary or delta, is far from that main stream that feeds or is fed by it and is so well covered by the media. You are swimming, or kayaking, or sailing in a current and a breeze of personal history, which we all know is also a political history,*** and yet is for the most part only personally political.

And so you swim for your life. You have to learn what the currents are. You have to know your strokes, your limits both of talent and endurance, what movements you can sustain and with what effect and for how long without drowning yourself out of sheer idealism.

The Spiritual Quest is the project of a Department of Reality. We can only recover the soul from its true location.

Heidegger said that we are geworfen, “thrown” into the world like dice. Alea iacta est. We don’t get to choose the ground on which the die stops rolling, or which side of our nature comes up first. And the kingdoms of this world, be they households or councils or empires, have little interest in teaching us that information. The powerful would just as soon we didn’t know. If we discover it, they’d like us, very politely, to keep it to ourselves. Why make the natives restless?

As you learn your terrain, those scars of landscape that are the marks of history, and as you learn your talents, then and only then do you come to know what your next act can be. The truth about your limits makes you free. And then . . .

So how do we, in fact, work on ourselves? Unitarian Universalists like to do this for whole weekends, retreating from the world to enumerate our sins and to shame the sources of our love for justice, naming our very principles offensive to God. For those of means and education, the therapeutic enterprise holds promise of enlightenment and cure. For some of the devout, confession provides an opportunity to learn the boundaries of mortality. For those of us blessed with extreme introversion, self-examination will always be alpha and omega.

And yet -- the self is an elusive thing, and a dubious prize. I find it to be a dark place, lacking illumination of its own. By ourselves or in good company, we can find in the fabled interior as much doubt, and grief, and shame as we desire. Just call on it and it’s there.

Where is the light? And where is the air? They are on the outside, in our re-commitment to the place and the time, to the living creatures whose eyes we meet, with the urges and instincts, foibles and sublimities that were given us, for those purposes that only now become apparent. Introspection, therapy, confession and the weekend workshop are not ends in themselves; expecting salvation from them is a narcissistic idolatry. The proof of these disciplines is how we live in the world. Get out of yourself. Go back to your life and save it. Love kindness, do justice, walk humbly. Speak truth. Bless what is holy. Relieve someone’s pain. Honor someone’s sacrifice. Give a name to what is nameless. Salvation isn’t feeling good but doing good at something. And we won’t feel better until we do better. And then . . .

*Essays on Heidegger and Others

**Attributed to Elbert Hubbard (1856 - 1915)


***”The personal is the political,” a phrase commonly attributed to Carol Hanisch

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below.

long gone

A long time I have lived with you
And now we must be going
Separately to be together.

-- Nancy Wood

She dreamed that they were in a boat together on a calm sea, he at one end and she at the other, under a warm sun, in a mild breeze. The boat was of gold and the sea was of blue.

Then the boat split in two. The sea poured in and both of them were sinking. The parts were still joined by two golden chains. She had golden shears, and she cut the chains with them. The two halves of the boat drifted apart, but as their tracks diverged they both were healed. Each part became a whole; each part floated safely on separate currents. His boat receded, and receded, into a region of cobalt blue. She was enveloped in orange light. She came to a dock, and disembarked. She found that she was in a crowd of people, who looked out with her into the blue – that cobalt blue where he had gone. He had gone to sea, and she had come safe to land. She was not alone in the orange light of evening. Or was it morning? Or was it mourning?

She told me her dream a few days before he died. In the telling, she was already distancing herself from it. The telling of a dream requires what Freud called a secondary revision. And by the time I tell it to you, it becomes tertiary – or maybe quaternary. I’ve already selected the elements and filtered the affect according to my own prejudice. But this, for what it’s worth, is what I see in it.

It is a brave and living dream. This was not her first time; she had loved two husbands, each for a quarter of a century. When the time comes, she will be buried between them. In losing the second, she was living the first loss again. The details came back to her, in a kind of re-presentation called abreaction. She didn’t know whether she could bear it. She asked for help. She told her story.

She didn’t cover her grief. She was doing, I think, just fine. She didn’t cling to him. She wouldn’t be drowned, or let their love be deathly. She cut the chains. The two of them would be safe only if they separated. She let him go to the place where he had to go, and she came back among us.

I’ve never seen such courage. She joyfully paid the price of love. She had broken her heart, and offered it again, and it was breaking again, and she let herself bleed.

And what, I ask, is the alternative? Never to venture from the land, never to feel the sea wind in your face, never to travel on ocean currents that exceed our plans to fix them.

There’s a fairy-tale phrase that we grow up with, but after a time we must grow out of – “they lived happily ever after.” The happy ever after is what comes after the story’s problem has resolved, after the prince and his true love have married. But as grownups know, that is just the beginning of their troubles. Even if their love is true, the course of it cannot run smooth.

I grew up with the “adventures” of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson. These were not real adventures. No Nelson ever traveled anywhere. Nothing important ever happened. Ozzie, Harriet, David and Ricky were stuck in a living death, the happy ever after. They lived to numb themselves; the pitchers of martinis were always just outside the frame. The purpose of the story was to prevent any passion, and offer reassurance to a traumatized public that it’s good enough to venture nothing.

The generation that devised these entertainments and gave them to the children was the one called “greatest,” the generation who, abused by Depression and by War, set out to make a world where adventures were forbidden. They told us their story in movies, in public monuments, and in television network documentaries narrated by war correspondents. These correspondents later became our TV anchormen. We could never match their story, because new stories were against the law – the code of grey flannel suits, of housewives who cleaned house wearing pearl necklaces, and of loyalty oaths. Because our parents had been through hell and partially survived, we were all required to be happy ever after.

Ozzie and Harriet are long gone. In kindness I hope that whichever of them lived to lose the other had a genuine grief. Some say that death is the wage of sin. But grief, I say, is the deposit and the proof of love.

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below.

half ass

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.

-- Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

So every day I try to do something imperfect, something truly half-ass.

Don’t laugh. It’s not easy.

Because if I leave a thing half done, formless, mediocre, not what it might have been, I hear the voice that says, You could have done better.

The voice doesn’t stop there. You could have done better, and you didn’t. You’re lazy, and if you go on like this you won’t amount to anything. You have limitless potential. You could do anything you want, achieve anything your heart desires. But look where you are, just getting by, just better than average, and that’s not good enough. Do you want to be a – a truck-driver when you grow up?

One could do a lot worse than grow up to be a truck-driver. Two of them in their big rig rescued my daughter in a blizzard. A truck-driver is a small businessman; he makes payments on a massive hunk of capital. Or perhaps he is a skilled employee; a corporation trusts him with that capital. Either way, he looks pretty solid. How would I, a journeyman of genteelly poor professions, look down on such a person?

Though the parable was contaminated with class prejudice, its meaning shone through. If anything went wrong, or even not quite right, it was my fault, because last week or last year I hadn’t worked hard. Good is never good enough. Don’t do the things that are easy for you, get to work on the things that are painful and difficult. Always work harder, because you never know when your slacking off will exact its penalty. Thirty years from now you’ll come a cropper because you slacked off today. And you’ll be sorry.

Don’t ever tell a kid he can do “whatever he wants.” It’s a lie. God made me for some tasks, unmade me for others, and I’m supposed to learn the difference. I cannot be a concert pianist or a shortstop, no matter how hard I might “work at it.” I am not a scholar, though I was taught to impersonate one. What was I to become? I’m still working on that question, perhaps because I fell behind in the research.

A popular personality test says I am an “Intuitive Introvert.” “Introvert” means that I know my mind before I speak, not afterwards. “Intuitive” means that I have no study skills, I get it or I don’t. For me there is no process of learning, only god willing a flash of lightning.

So “studying hard” is a kind of fakery, a self-deception and pretense, not the angel’s but the devil’s work. Ah, my wasted youth! I am not one of those who can catalogue the trees until a forest is deduced. Why did I spend so much time studying? O that I had run with the wrong crowd, skipped my classes, lost my virtue, broken hearts (theirs and mine), paid my dues in dissipation and in vice! On my deathbed I shall not wish that I had taken better notes.

In my seventh decade I’m beginning to catch on. The Calvinism of Hard Work is not a godly doctrine, but a dirty trick that Satan plays on the upwardly mobile who fear, as Barbara Ehrenreich says, to fall. Old Nick wraps damnation in a tissue of sulfurous virtue, and we are lured off the rails of our destiny to pick up this pretty bauble of drudgery. Stop the world, I’m going too far too fast, having too much fun! I should be doing heavy labor, pushing that great rock up yonder hill.

The thing that’s really hard to do, and once done leaves you tired and stupid – that’s probably not what you ought to be doing. But when you are called to a place, and you are prized for what you never thought were skills, and they are glad you’re there, doing only what is natural to you – in the heart’s silence where no complaint is heard, that is God’s voice, trying to teach you something. This is where you’re supposed to be. This is your talent, knucklehead, live with it. It’s what I fashioned you for. Enjoy. That is your mitzvah.

When the Siren of Unlimited Potential sings, stop your ears against her bourgeois ballad. We do not make ourselves. We were each of us created. For each of us, there is a place we’re supposed to be. To be in any other place, particularly if we’re proud of ourselves for being there, is impiety. “I’m really a song-writer,” you say, “but instead I make a good living lying about money.” Well then, to blazes with you.

Broadway sentiment aside, Quixote was delusional. He wasn’t really supposed to be tilting at windmills. He was supposed to be doing the work of a good man – loving kindness, acting justly, walking humbly. And I’m not supposed to do six impossible things before breakfast. If what I do easily isn’t good enough for you, then to hell with it, and with you. In this time of life, I go where I’m wanted. I do what I can. Because the thing I can do, breathing easily and without noticing my skill – that’s my talent, the gift I am supposed to pass on to you before I lose it.

I was taught to scan the horizon for the thing most painful to do, and then do that. Always getting it right is very difficult, and that’s what I was taught to do. Perfectionists have their uses: they get a lot of things right. So if you want a particular thing done exactly right – if everything depends on it – you should call up a perfectionist. But you may not want to be around while he’s working. Or afterward.

If at the end of the day I’m thinking, I really blew that off, I didn’t concentrate, I didn’t get to the essence, I didn’t finish, I didn’t wrap up all those loose ends – then I close up shop and thank the Lord that I’ve located my daily imperfection. Yes, it’s a mess, I’ll clean it up tomorrow. Or better yet, let someone else clean it up. Who died and left me the Messiah?

They’ll thank you for your imperfection. There’s no one more insufferable than the one who leaves no messes.

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below.

wise ass

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

-- Hamlet

“That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.”

-- “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Experience is over-rated. Some of life’s lessons you’d be better off forgetting. That’s what therapists are for, I suppose, and resurrections -- forgetting.

It’s a fallen world. The humble are reviled for arrogance, while the arrogant are praised for their humility. Was Socrates a humble man, or arrogant? How humble, to put his ignorance on the table! How arrogant, to think his questions worth reply! How dare you, sir, confess to ignorance! Why didn’t you make something up, like the rest of us? You make us all look bad. Hemlock for you, wise-ass.

Given where I started, I’m amazed to be here at all, doing what I do right now. If I can maintain this vector, there’s no telling what I might yet accomplish. It’s the course of my journey that predicts the future, not my inventory of wisdom and foolishness.

It’s not rocket science. Anybody could do it. I note in my heart’s ledger the ways that I can mess things up. Then I do something different. I learn responsibility by naming the thing I shall not do again. That’s what introspection, examination of life, therapeutic progress, are about – the sorcery of names: if you name the beast you have a chance to disarm it, and to open the portal that it guards.

My teachers say I am a teachable person. I provide, for myself and for my teachers, an inventory of my achievements and disasters, strengths and flaws (nowadays it’s correct to call them “growing edges,” since no one’s self-esteem can endure any less than a perfect grade). That’s how one learns to do what one could not do before, what no one (not even one’s friends) thinks one can do.

But gatekeepers are not teachers. They do not deserve one’s integrity. My honest inventory, thrown before the three snarling heads of Cerberus, is so much steak awarded to bottom-feeders. I say, This is where I came from, and this is where I have come to, and look now where I’m going; and they say, That is not what we meant at all, that is not it, at all. Thank you for telling us your faults. We’ve written them down as you told them, and this is now your punishment.

That’s what wannabes do. They close doors, keep you in your place, and confine you to the Egypt that you came from. “Once a slave, you’ll always be a slave. That’s our job.”

Wannabes leave you with a “trust issue.” It’s one of life’s harmful lessons: don’t believe gatekeepers who claim the authority of teachers. Don’t ever “be yourself” with them. Pearls before swine.

This is a lesson you’d be better off without. You must come out of your hiding place, because if you don’t you’ll be a phony, unworthy of trust, a nascent wannabe. Thou canst not then be true to any man. It is only truth that can make us free. We can begin our journeys on no other terrain than the topographies of our selves. If you don’t know where you came from, you can’t know where to go.

So you have to forget life’s deathly lessons. Like Scrooge, you must wake up one morning and love again, give again of your substance, offer again your trampled heart, name the beast and open the portal that it guards. That’s what I’m doing right now.

It’s been said that the Jews invented guilt. That’s not quite true. What they invented was responsibility. When the exiles came back from Babylon, they wrote about their Triumph and Disaster, and about their Second Chance. It was a history neither triumphal nor lachrymose. We had the blessing, they said, and we lost it, and it was our fault that we lost everything; and now we’re going to do better.

So when I go to Judgment, this is what I will say.

”I’ve messed some things up, Lord. Here’s my ledger, you might have missed a few. I am, as my headmaster used to say, molded out of faults, but faults do not define me any more than bricks define the schoolhouse. Here’s the video; watch my story, and see how far I’ve come. I tell the truth and I’m teachable. I name what I don’t know; I declare what I don’t do well; I tell you what, if I’m not on my game, could go wrong. But notice that, because I name these terrors, things don’t usually go wrong. I’m often on my game.

“I name my faults. It’s the best thing about me, Lord, so deal with it. If You're threatened by my honesty, You are not God.”

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below.

top floor

He dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

-- Genesis 28:12 (NRSV)

. . . Someone to watch over me.

-- Ira Gershwin

The sixty-fourth floor of the Chrysler Building (the floor with the gargoyles) is an unexpectedly intimate place. As the elevator opened, a round receptionist with wings blessed me silently from behind his desk, smiling. There were others: a wounded angel on the floor of a corridor, trying every few minutes to get up; a pensive angel in the window-casing of the kitchenette, looking over the East River and the place from which my journey had started – the open ground in front of a derelict asylum on Roosevelt Island.

This was the last stage of a processional,* nine “scenes” of angelic presence – or absence – across midtown Manhattan. There was the back room of a peep-show with bins of books about angelic manifestations. There was the third floor of an office building, now the locker-room of angels. There was an apartment on Forty-First Street, their recently abandoned barracks. On the fifth floor of the arrow-shaped old New York Times Building, I walked on a landscape of sand from which lilies, great white feathers and Gabriel’s horn had sprouted. In a tiny top floor office, a teletype machine banged out repeated warnings of time’s end, curling its paper onto the floor like ribbon candy. In an abandoned theatre behind Applebee’s, I saw from the stage, by work light, that angels were ascending and descending between mezzanine and balcony, while Jacob dreamed from a chair in the bare orchestra.

And here in the Chrysler Building, a messenger stood by the window in a glass-walled office, in my world and not. I approached. He turned. Through the glass, he looked me in the face. I could not bear his gaze. He saw beyond me. I did not doubt his concern, but he knew much more than I.

Several years later, I met Alice. She had been a fashion designer, and beautiful. She left nothing to chance. She was very “private,” had never married. Choosy about whom she loved, she loved those people well. Not a mother, but an unforgettable auntie.

She didn’t feel well, and went to the doctor, and learned that day she had inoperable cancer. The “progress of disease” – strange term we use – was swift. I met her a few weeks later, when she could no longer get out of her daybed in the capacious parlor. Her ceiling was so high that light from the big front window did not reach it.

For a “private” person, a person who draws a veil decisively on the holy of holies and presents herself as an artifact, the intimacies of care at the end of life are excruciating. All is now revealed. There’s no backstage any more. Every bodily process is someone else’s business. She could no longer self-produce; her appearance now depended on people who knew everything there was to know, who in every cover-up must be co-conspirators. Before she was sick, Alice never appeared anywhere without her wig. Her contest with terror: how to give away her secrets without losing herself. From the wreck of her show, could she recover soul? Could she let others love her in this way, and with grace?

She looked into the shadowed ceiling one evening, and a figure hovered there. The figure saw her. She let the figure see her. When she looked back, the figure was not there any more.

As people approach their end, it’s not uncommon for them to have experiences that we must call (because our experience does not confirm them) hallucinations. In dreams or in waking life they see persons who have died, or they may see messengers. Some are comforted, and some are terrified.

“How did you feel about it?” I asked.

“I felt all right about it.”

“It’s as if the angel were watching over you.”

“It seems that way.”

I had gone to the sixty-fourth floor of the Chrysler Building less than two years after the twin towers became pillars of flame. The fire had gone out by then, and the smoke no longer blew over Brooklyn, but the city still felt apocalyptic. The messenger looked me in the face, and I looked away. I let him see me, and I let him see whatever it was that he saw through me. When I looked back, he was turning toward the window again, gazing at the city with compassion too great for intervention. Is there anything you can do? I thought. And then again, Never mind; just keep watching, I think I’ll be all right if I know you’re watching.

For Alice and me, it’s almost enough.

*The Angel Project, a site-specific installation directed and conceived by Deborah Warner, Lincoln Center Festival 2003.

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below.

preposterous enterprise

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

-- Thoreau, Walden

Eyner iz keyner.

-- Yiddish proverb*

One is none, says the proverb. By yourself you’re nothing. Not the kind of folk wisdom that Americans like to hear. We think we did it all ourselves, by smarts and hard work. We created the new world, and birthed ourselves into it. We pioneers will do just fine, thank you, with the land we took from the people who were here before us, so leave us alone to work our slaves, or to buy the cheap product of their labor. We don’t want your meddling. Except for the fire department. And the police department. And my social security check. Oh, and roads. Oh, and the electric grid, and a cellphone. Oh, and lots of cheap petroleum bought and begged from Oriental despots and banana dictators. Oh, and lots of abominably expensive and marginally effective health care, paid for by somebody or other as long as it isn’t us.

Unitarians, American to the core, don’t like to hear that eyner iz keyner. We think that one person standing alone is everything. Emerson said “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” What would be the point, he asks, of communion with other souls? “Men descend to meet.” We don’t believe in congregating; which is why our congregations are weak, and then we blame that weakness on our ministers. Emerson soon left the ministry, beating his congregation to the punch, and made his name as a solo act. Clever he was.

Trouble is, we are not who we are on our own. Emerson, on his own, needed his audience. He descended to meet them, or at least to meet their money, as an athenaeum star. His audience paid for that haunted house in Concord. It was they who supported the transcendental circle of his less entrepreneurial clients.

And Thoreau was not on his own either. He built a hut by Walden Pond, where his mom would sometimes bring him lunch. And where, in a ten minutes’ walk, he could have the companionship of Lydian Emerson, his second mom. On the other side of the pond was the railroad to Boston, which fascinated him immensely. “I went to the woods to live deliberately.” Yes, and also to tell us about it. He had us in mind from the beginning. He kept account of his expenses because he had something to prove to us. It was important that we be amazed, and scandalized, by his pretty hut.

The one who hears a different drummer is not eyner, not alone. He is with that drummer, no matter how distant, whose authority he accepts, whom he follows and whose approval he seeks.

I am older every minute, more crotchety, more introverted, more jealous of my space and my time. Perhaps because I have not found them yet. When will it be, my time and place? How long, O Lord? Does it come this side of mortality? As the limit takes its contour, color and texture, like the distant mountain approaching over a once endless plain, I scan the horizon for a verdant glen that might belong to me, where I could, as they say, really stretch out. Perhaps it never appears. There are only these compromised places, these opportunities that are already polluted, and must be saved. How long must I wait? No waiting at all, this is the occasion right now, this ridiculous apartment where if I stretch my limbs I strike somebody’s face. My full extent, my personal space, are not to be found on this crowded island, but on the other side of the river. And I don’t mean Jersey.

The blessings are here in our jostled, preposterous enterprise: existence, as the philosophers say, rather than essence. I have been too long from this private dilemma of mine, this prayerful combat, this wrestling with words like Jacob with the messenger. But I am not solitary even here. The words come from somewhere: all night they ascend and descend, and when they touch bottom I must fight with them for blessing. No blessing without injury, no sacred time that is not out of joint. If you have a long reach, there are strangers, sojourners within its span. Their requirements are always a surprise.

On my own, I am not who I am. I am my daughters’ father, my wife’s husband, my dearest friend’s dear friend, my client’s counselor, any American’s fellow citizen. I am the one who loves as I can those who love me, and would love the rest if I knew how. I move among the poses and scripts of love; I learn more and better ones as I grow older. If I could not find these poses, remember the scripts, I would be lost. But in the leaps between them, I might recover my soul.

*Bennett Muraskin, Humanist Readings in Jewish Folklore (Farmington Hills, MI: Milan Press, 2001), p. 190.

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below.