Where Does Everything Go?

Now there was a girl when I was young who lived in the next block and who used to pass our door every day on her way back and forth from school. I remember that her name was Phyllis. She used to wear a blue skirt and a blue blazer and a crisp white Catholic school blouse, and the pocket of her blouse was always stained with blue ink from a leaky fountain pen. She had very large, very round eyes, and I remember too---or at least I think I remember---that they were also blue like ink. And even though I was much younger than Phyllis, an ungainly boy to her blossoming teenager, she did not turn away and avert her gaze the way older kids always did, but instead she would look directly into my eyes and smile the brightest smile I had ever seen in my very young life and whisper "Hello". That was over forty years ago, but I've never forgotten.

Where O Where Dear Lord does everything finally go to?

"God Bless Us---Everyone!"

Scrooge and Time

Re-reading Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" for the umpteenth time. An annual Christmas ritual.

As always, I am intrigued by Scrooge’s promise to live in the ‘past, the present, and the future’ all at once.

What could it possibly mean to do this?

Conventional wisdom exhorts us to ‘let go’ of the past and ‘not worry’ too much about the future. Every pop-psychology guru worth his or her salt has this refrain down cold. Not past, not future, only NOW equals happiness.

But is this really the best advice for us to follow?

(For a novelist or short story writer---certainly not. The past invokes memory, the future---imagination. These are the two basic tools of any fiction writer. A writer who exists only in the here-and-now is not likely to be very productive. But even for non-writers, our cherished memories and our hopes for the future are what give the greater portion of meaning and joy to our lives).

But getting back to Scrooge...

As we meet him in Stave One Scrooge is a man who has clearly taken the pop gurus' wisdom to a bitter extreme. Scrooge is completely cut off from his past---the finer feelings he once held for his sister Fan and his lost love Belle, as well as whatever ideals he may have begun his life with; and, with no children of his own or anyone else’s to care about, Scrooge has no stake whatsoever in any possible future. Sitting day-after-day day in his ‘money-changing hole’, amassing a hidden fortune to no apparent purpose, taking his melancholy meal in his usual melancholy tavern and slurpping up his bowl of gruel before going to bed, Scrooge is a man locked into a bleak and dismal present. The whole concept of ‘time’ is rendered meaningless in his life. For Ebenezer Scrooge, time, quite literally, ‘is money’.

(Notice that I said Scrooge is 'locked into' the present, not 'living' in the present. Whatever Scrooge is doing, it can hardly be called living in any sense beyond physical survival).

So alienated, in fact, is the unredeemed Scrooge from any sense of Time, that until the Ghost of Christmas Future leads him by the hand to his own cold and neglected grave, it never seems to have occurred to him that one day he will actually have to die. A sense of one's own mortality is, of course, inseparable from the experience of Time. But it is the last part of the puzzle; Scrooge will first have to voyage in other directions.

It seems to me, then, that A Christmas Carol is not so much a ghost story (as Dickens himself calls it) but rather a time-travel story, of the kind in which J. B. Priestly would later excel in his plays Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before. The Carol is the story of a man recovering the experience of Time in his life.

And of course, the instrument that re-binds Scrooge back to Time is Love.

It is love alone that transcends death. Love for the people and days we have lost keeps them alive in memory. Love of the children in our lives involves us in a future we ourselves will not experience.

(For Scrooge, of course, the children are Tiny Tim, to whom he becomes a 'second father', and presumably nephew Fred's brood, when and if they make their appearance).

In finally recognizing the truth of all this, Scrooge is once again able to take up the burden of Time that he abandoned so many years before, and, while unable to ever go back and undo his past mistakes, he is able through Love to make the present a bridge between the past he has lost and the future he will never see.

SNAPSHOT: A Seagull in Halifax

In Their Own Words:

"If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like having the moment all over again. "

— Daphne du Maurier, (Rebecca)

SNAPSHOT: Green Afternoon

On the Way Home from School

I should have been home for lunch no later than five minutes past twelve, but I yielded to temptation and made a stop at the Grand Book Center. It was nearly twenty to one when I finally climbed the stairs up to our small apartment. My mother was furious.

"Where were you? What were you doing all this time?" she demanded.

Strictly speaking these were rhetorical questions. I was late home for lunch nearly every day, even when I didn't stop at the Grand Book Center. The walk home from St. Mary’s was no more than five minutes, but I had a tendency to 'dawdle and daydream' as my mother liked to put it.

Actually, what I did do most days was stop in front of the washing machine repair shop in the next block and tap on the glass until Max, the jowly and wrinkly old Bulldog who slept his canine days away behind the greasy display window, finally roused himself onto uncertain legs and wobbled over to slobber the glass on the other side of where my hand was pressed. "Good boy," I'd whisper. Then he'd turn around and make his painful way back to his sleeping spot, shaking and trailing yards of drool behind him, collapsing once more into unconsciousness. Everyone said Max was the ugliest creature they had ever set eyes on, but that was probably because they'd never looked into his eyes. Those were large and brown and sad and beautiful. I loved that old dog. But even on those days I was usually home by twelve-thirty.

“Do you know what time it is?” I looked up meekly at the big clock hanging over the stove.

"And what's in there---" her attention was suddenly arrested by the paper bag pressed tight between my arm and rib cage. This question wasn’t rhetorical.

“Let me have it,” she said.

I handed her the bag and she slid the contents out on the table. Two Green Lantern comic books and one Justice League of America. Two issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine. One receipt for .71 cents.

"This is what you waste your money on? Junk that will rot your brain? They're going right in the garbage," she said, but she only slid them back in the bag and tossed them on top of the breadbox. I knew she wouldn't really throw them out. She might yell when she was worked up but she was never mean.

"Wash your hands and sit down."

Lunch today was my favorite: tomato soup and American cheese on toast and Devil Dogs for desert. Which meant she had been looking forward to surprising me. It made me feel rotten---but not for long. I broke off a piece of my cheese sandwich and dipped it in the tomato soup and felt happiness seeping through all the pores of my body. After a while I worked up the nerve to ask, "Do you think you can write me a note for Sister Anne?"

It was one of the rules of St. Mary's: If you were late or had been absent, you needed a note from your mother when you finally showed up. I knew there was no way I would make it back to school by one o'clock today.

"I will not. You can tell Sister exactly why you were late."

"I'll be punished," I told her. "I'll have to stay after class."

"Then maybe you'll learn not to waste time anymore."

"Just this once?"

"Eat your lunch," was all she would say.

But by the time I'd taken my first delicious bite of cream-filled Devil's Food she had scribbled a note and slid it into my shirt pocket. "Give that so Sister," she told me. I was saved.

A few minutes later as I was going out the door at 1:05 she said: "Please see if you can at least get home on time this afternoon. I want to take you to Izzy's. You need some shirts."

"Izzy's" was where we bought the white shirts and blue pants that, along with a blue-knit tie sold only in the Principal's office, made up the St. Mary's School uniform. There was a back room at Izzy's where they stored boxes and boxes of clothes, and it doubled as a dressing room. It had a nice smell of cardboard and camphor, and that's where I always tried on the new pants. For some reason though I always seemed to 'dawdle' and my mother would have to come in back to see what was taking me so long.

"OK," I said.

"No later than three-fifteen. Please."

"I'll be home on time," I assured her.

I meant it, too, when I said it. But I had skipped Max at lunchtime and I was always afraid if I let a whole day go without seeing him he might not be there next time. He was old and nearly crippled and it was probably cruel of me to make him get up and walk across the floor to the window. But I figured if he sat there all day he'd just die. I loved that old dog.

We never made it to Izzy's that afternoon.

Not long ago I read of a study that found that our personalities and our individual tics and traits are set in stone by the age of six or thereabouts:

“We remain recognizably the same person,” Christopher Nave, study author and a doctoral candidate at the University of California at Riverside, writes. “This speaks to the importance of understanding personality because it does follow us wherever we go across time and contexts.”

This morning, as I was preparing to leave for work, I picked up a copy of Brambley Hedge and allowed myself to become lost for some minutes in the wonderful world of small mice who live inside of tree trunks.

I was late to the office.

Somehow, I don't think my mother would have been surprised.

A Story (sort of) About Soup

My father loved pea soup; he could eat two-three-four bowls in rapid succession on a Saturday night --- provided it had first been boiled to the approximate thermal reading of molten lead.

“Hotter,” was his continual refrain. “It's supposed to burn when it goes down.”

My mother tried to oblige, but somehow the soup was never scalding enough. He would spoon down several mouthfuls then hand the bowl back to her.

“I want it to burn,” he’d tell her, “I want it to feel fire inside my guts.”

So my mother would pour the soup back into to the pot and boil it up again. On and on it went. I was no great fan of pea soup in those days, but I had begun to wonder if maybe the extreme heating process didn't bring about the release of some hitherto unsuspected flavor element that was impossible to resist. One night when my mother placed the soup bowl on the table I grabbed a small tea spoon from the kitchen drawer and skimmed a taste off the top. My howls of agony still echo down the Brooklyn streets to this day.

“Hold this against your tongue,” my mother said, handing me an ice cube from the freezer. My father merely glanced at me and shrugged. Someday when you're a man you will understand, his look seemed to say. Then he went back to his soup. It had been boiled and re-boiled to the point where it could have melted chrome steel, but it still didn't satisfy my father.

“Hotter," he decreed. I don’t know how he did it, except that he chased the soup down with a cold beer, so maybe that helped.

My father wasn’t ordinarily a fussy or demanding man when it came to his food. Normally he ate whatever my mother placed in front of him. Nor was he given to eccentricities of any kind. Weeknights he didn't get home until after seven, long after the rest of us had already had our supper, and he ate fast and alone (and without re-heating instructions) at the kitchen table so he’d have time to relax and watch television. But on a Saturday night with a couple of beers under his belt he grew expansive, and he’d occasionally call for a special dish, super-hot pea soup or maybe a plate of sauerbraten, a German specialty he remembered from his childhood. My mother, being a full-blooded Italian, was naturally aghast at the very idea and concept of sauerbraten. She made it for him all the same, of course, but was determined to shield her children from such gastronomical horrors. So there was laid down a strict law that I could not have so much as a taste of this strange dish until I was over twenty-one and living on my own. Having gotten a look and a whiff of my father’s plate, I was certainly in no hurry for that day to arrive. In fact it wasn’t until a great many years later that I tasted sauerbraten for the first time. On the afternoon following my father’s funeral we took the family to a well-known German restaurant called Niederstein’s, which stood for over one-hundred-and-fifty years on Metropolitan Avenue in Middle Village, Queens, and there I had sauerbraten for the first time in my father’s honor. My mother had some too. It wasn't half bad at that. But on those long ago Saturday nights sauerbraten was strictly off-limits.

As for pea soup, I can take it or leave it, but once when I had it in a restaurant it came out lukewarm and I asked the waiter if he could take it back and heat it up.

"We can't do that," the waiter told me. "If it's too hot, and someone gets burned, they're looking to sue us."

I'm not sure what my father would have made of that, though as far as I know he only ever ate my mother's pea soup. And it was only in later years that I gained any insight into his odd culinary preference.

I had come into the house after midnight. My mother was already in bed but my father was sitting at the kitchen table having a bowl of soup he'd obviously reheated from that night's supper. I could see the steam rising out of the pot on the stove.

"Pop," I asked him. "Why do you eat your soup so hot? Aren't you afraid of burning your throat?"

The question seemed to startle him. "I like it this way," he said.

"It's not good for you too hot," I lectured him. "You can damage your insides that way."

He only shrugged. "But I like it hot."

It went back and forth that way for a while, but eventually he told me a little bit more:

"My mother used to make a big pot of pea soup on a Saturday night," he said. "In the wintertime. It's how we kept warm. There was no oil furnace in those days, just the wood stove. The soup would warm us up at night."

I thought about that for a while. I wasn't sure how much it explained.

Finally I said, "But we have heat now, Pop."

Again he shrugged. "I just like it hot."

That was all a long time ago, and now my mom and dad are both gone, and the rooms we lived in belong to someone else. Even Neiderstein's is no longer there, having closed its doors permanently a few years back, after an unbelievable run of a century and a half.

So we grow older and older, and my father's soup preference is no great matter, just another small mystery in the great warehouse of mysteries we will never solve in our lifetimes.

SNAPSHOT: Evening Crossing

In Their Own Words:

"In the recurrent dream I had of the little street {I used to dream so frequently while in Paris} the scene always faded at the moment when I came upon the bridge that crossed the little canal, neither the bridge nor the canal having any existence actually.

"This evening, after passing beyond the frontier of my childhood explorations, I suddenly came upon the very street I had been longing to find for so many years...I remember distinctly the premonition I had of approaching {an}other world when, passing a certain house, I caught sight of a young girl, obviously of foreign descent, poring over a book at the dining room table.

"There is nothing unique, to be sure, in such a sight. Yet the moment my eyes fell upon the girl I felt a thrill beyond description, a premonition, to be more accurate, that important revelations were to follow. It was as if the girl, her pose, the glow of the room falling upon the book she was reading, the impressive silence in which the whole neighborhood was enveloped, combined to produce a moment of such acuity that for an incalculably brief, almost meteoric flash I had the deep and quiet conviction that everything had been ordained, that there was justice in the world, and that the image which I caught and vainly tried to hold was the expression of the splendor and the holiness of life as it would always reveal itself to be in moments of utter stillness.

"I realized as I pushed ecstatically forward that the joy and bliss we experience in the profound depths of the dream---a joy and bliss which surpasses anything known in waking life---comes indubitably from the miraculous accord between desire and reality.

"As I walked past the rows of tiny houses sunk deep in the earth, I saw what man is seldom given to see---the reality of his vision. To me it was the most beautiful street in the world....As I passed slowly from door to door I saw that they were breaking bread. On each table there was a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, some cheese and olives and a bowl of fruit. In each house it was the same; the shades were up, the lamp was lit, the table spread for a humble repast. And always the occupants were gathered in a circle, smiling good-naturedly as they conversed with one another, their bodies relaxed, their spirit open and expansive.

"Truly, I thought to myself, this is the only life I have ever desired. For the briefest intervals only I have known it and then it has been rudely shattered. And the cause? Myself undoubtedly, my inability to realize the true nature of Paradise. What else can explain the tenacity with which I have clung for forty years to the remembrance of a certain neighborhood, a certain wholly inconspicuous spot on this great earth?"

---Henry Miller, Reunion in Brooklyn

Yesterday's Papers

Growing up in the early sixties, the daily newspaper was an indelible part of our everyday lives. In our house we read the Brooklyn edition of the Daily News ("New York's Picture Newspaper) and the Daily Mirror (equally photocentric). My father brought 'the papers' home from work at night and we kept them on the kitchen table so anyone could read them whenever they had a free moment. The News and the Mirror were New York's two great 'tabloid' papers, which meant that they were to be found mostly in working-class households. The New York Post was also a sort of tabloid, but back then it was considered a 'communist' paper on account of its invariable liberal/left agenda. And the New York Times, which labored under the twin handicaps (as we saw it) of having few pictures and NO comics was just too intellectual and high-falutin' for us. There were other papers as well-the Herald Tribune and the Journal American-but for some reason we didn't much read these. Saturday mornings I would go down to the newsstand on the corner and asked for copies of the News and the Mirror. The papers cost five cents each on weekdays and Saturdays, and fifteen cents on Sunday when they were both thick with color-comics and the magazine section and the TV supplement for the week. The Mirror went out of business sometime in the mid-sixties, and thereafter the Daily News stood unchallenged as our family newspaper. My father read it every morning of his life, almost to the morning he died.

In those days my father came home in the evening after everyone had already eaten, placed the papers on the table, washed his hands at the kitchen sink, and sat down to supper. My older brother was the first to pounce on the papers.

"Those Mets..." he would shake his head after cursory glance at the back page told him what he already knew. It was one thing to hear it on the radio; it wasn't really real until you saw it in the News.

Oh, yes...The Back Page. That was the way you read the paper in my neighborhood. You started on the back page which gave the baseball scores, then opened to the second-from-last page, where they printed the racing results. On the racing page you found the 'total mutual handle'...which meant all the money that was bet at all the state tracks on the previous day...and the last three digits of which comprised...The Number...yes, The Number.

In the days before legal lotteries and off-track betting, every neighborhood bar came replete with its own house bookie. Falco's bar, where my father used to hoist a few lazy Saturday afternoon beers, was somewhat upscale in that it had two bookies on hand; there was Charlie the Bookie for betting horses (more respectable) and an individual I knew only as Apples for The Number (less respectable, but cheaper and more popular).

The Number: The way it worked was you gave your bookie fifty cents or a dollar and picked three digits---your house number, telephone exchange, the first three numbers of the licence plate on the taxicab that ran over and killed your Uncle Herman on his way to church last Sunday morning; superstition on this head was inexhaustible and often ran to the bizarre and the esoteric---and if those three digits 'came out' that week, then you Hit the Number and your bookie paid you a pile of money. Exactly how much he paid I never knew because I was too young to play the number. I knew where to find it, though.

Having ascertained that his team had lost and his number hadn't hit, my brother settled down across the table from my father and the two discussed the next day's racing schedule.

My father and my brother held opposing points-of-view on life, or at least that portion of life which concerned itself with rising from bed in the morning and going out to earn one's way in the world. Briefly stated, my father favored this course and practiced it faithfully and unselfishly every day of his working life. My brother, who had long dropped out of school and was more than old enough to hold down a full-time job, avoided work as if he were in possession of irrefutable scientific evidence that it the chief cause of leprosy in the civilized world. But one point they did have in common was a love of horse racing.

"Says this filly Escapade goes good on a wet track." my brother reported the handicappers line. "Supposed to rain tomorrow."

I didn't know much about rain and tracks and fillies, but it didn't matter anyway. Between the two of them my father and my brother could not have picked the winning horse in a field of ten if you shot the other nine horses before the race began. Charlie the Bookie was always happy to see them coming. But they were nothing if not stoics:

"What do you think of this Spicy Bones in the third at Belmont," my brother asked.

On and on it went.

On Saturday mornings my father would spread open the paper and explain the world to us. My sisters and I would dig into a traditional Brooklyn breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, bagels and cream cheese, and other delicacies, But we were always listening.

"China has a billion people. What do they care about a war? China could lose a couple of million and never know they were gone."

And there were questions of the Soviet Union overrunning Western Europe, the role of NATO, the presence of Fidel Castro ninety miles from our American shores, the battle for civil rights. I learned more about the contemporary state of the world while chomping down on a Kaiser role stacked high with liverwurst and onion slices topped with Guldens spicy brown mustard, then I ever did from the nuns at St. Mary's School.

The Sunday paper was an event in itself. It cost fifteen cents and must have weighed five pounds. There was the regular section, the movie and entertainment section, the color magazine and of course the comics. Sometimes we bought the 'early edition' on Saturday night, and it was still hot from the presses when we got it upstairs. The ink was still wet enough to stain your hands when you opened it it up and the smell was delicious and beyond description; better then the bakery or even the pizzeria, though not quite as good (to me) as the used bookstore over on Grand Street. Of course I went for the comics first. Those were the days of the great adventure serial strips with story lines that ran for months at a time. My favorites were Steve Canyon and Smilin' Jack. I used to clip them from the paper and paste them into 81/2 x 11 notebooks which I kept stacked under my bed. My mother liked to clip stuff too: coupons, recipes, and anything having to do with the Pope or the Vatican. But recipes mostly. I can still remember mouth-watering glossy photos of great orange-glazed ducks and deserts so rich and chocolate and satiny, lemon-colored creams it made your teeth hurt just to look at them.

"Are you ever going to make any of this stuff?" I would occasionally ask.

"Someday," was all she'd say.

But she never did. My mother excelled at her native Italian dishes and such American staples as fresh ham, roast turkey, and Yankee pot roast. Perhaps her nerve failed her on this point. And in any event she had no need to stray beyond her tried and true repertoire. In a way that draw full or recipes represented a glittering walled kingdom she could never dare to enter but only gaze upon from afar. And yet I am certain that if she would have remained to become its Queen.

When President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963, my mother wrapped the papers from that week in plastic food wrap and saved them for many years. I still have the Daily News for Saturday, November 23rd: President is Slain; Johnson Sworn In on Plane; Suspect Kills Cop, Seized.

When I first read that headline an idea occured to me. I picked the paper from the day before off of the pile of old papers next to the stove and found a small item in the back pages: President Kennedy to be in Dallas Friday.

I placed the two papers side-by-side. I was beginning to understand something: Here was yesterday's paper, and within it's pages 'yesterday'---the time before anyone had even considered the possibility of the President being shot down like a dog on a Dallas street---still existed. And next to it was today's paper where Kennedy's death was an established and accepted fact, already a matter of history. In a few hours the early edition of tomorrow's paper would hit the stands, bringing more news that no one could guess at now but soon would be settled fact and common knowledge. I was beginning to understand something: all points of time exist simultaneously. Past, Present, and Future are not separate entities, but instead are woven of one lacy fabric spread out over the table of eternity before time even began. All Time is One Time. And I learned it from the newspapers.

These days I don't read the newspapers. I don't even buy a newspaper. Lots of people still read their morning paper, but they way I feel, who's got the time? Besides, the pages are getting thinner and the comics ain't what they used to be. At work, we have the Cable News Network going full-blast all day, and if anything happens I'm the first to know it. And there's the Internet. Still, I feel bad about it. For the thousands and thousands of New Yorkers who lined up outside the newspaper plants during the seventeen day driver's strike in 1944, the paper was an indelible part of their lives. For my father it was a constant, a given. A day that started without the paper---and there weren't many---was a day that never really began at all, a day that somehow wasn't 'official.' And if my some miracle he were to suddenly return to us today, I have no doubt that the first thing he'd do, even before he gulped down his coffee, would be to look around for his copy of the New York Daily News so he could catch up with how the world had been going while he was away.

SNAPSHOT: Sunset in Jersey

In Their Own Words:

"Does this Aleph exist in the heart of a stone? Did I see it there in the cellar when I saw all things, and have I now forgotten it? Our minds are porous and forgetfulness seeps in; I myself am distorting and losing, under the wearing away of the years, the face of Beatriz."

---Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph

Doing Nothing

"Why don't you get out of the house and do something?
"Why?"
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
“No…I mean, ‘why should I get out of the house and do something?’.
"Why?! ...Because!..."
(Arms spread wide to indicate that the reasons for ‘getting out’ and ‘doing something’ are so multifarious as to literally fill the empty spaces surrounding us like music, like dust).
“I mean, are you really going to just sit there all day?”
“Well, I had been planning to. Evidently you know better than I do how I should spend my time.”
(Sad shake of the head).
“It’s a beautiful day…the sun is shining…and your wasting it just sitting around reading, for God's sake…it’s almost a crime…”

Maybe you’ve had the above conversation or one just like it at some time in the past. Perhaps it’s even a regular occurrence. If you’re like me you’re the person who asks ‘Why?’ rather than the one who insists ‘Because!” Of course, living alone, these conversations are for me mostly imaginary. But you get the idea: I have internalized my own voice of societal disapproval.

Not that I am a hermit or completely sedentary. I love spending time with my extended family, the children especially. I try to fit a long walk into my day Mondays through Fridays. I particularly love nature trails, lakes and brooks, even beaches. And anyplace that’s leafy and quiet---in other words, lots of trees and no people. Anyplace where I can snap some good pictures. Heck, I’ve even been known to lift weights now and then in a desperate attempt to ‘stay in shape’.

But to the ‘well-intentioned’, these simple pleasures do not count. No---they insist we always be doing something.

I need hardly point out that, to these noodges, reading certainly does not constitute doing something.

No. By 'doing something' is meant: rock climbing, camping, cycling (uphill, naturally), ‘kayaking’, or otherwise courting death in a half- dozen sweaty ways. And for the less vigorous, there is always stuffing oneself at barbecues, drinking too much beer, and pulling calf muscles playing paunchy, middle-aged softball in the park. Above all else, we must be “Having a Good Time.”

And as Raymond Chandler pointed out, in America ‘having a good time’ consists in the main of imbibing prodigious amounts of alcohol and making lots of noise.

Sorry, but I don’t want to have what other people call a ‘good time’. I do not crave excitement or challenge. I have no interest in testing my mettle against raging rapids or my footing against the sheer sides of steep mountains. And I don’t have to always be doing something.

I can sit in a room all day. Why not? The room is warm and dry and contains everything I need: Books, coffee, my computer, my video collection, food, books. So the sun is shining---fine! Nothing better! But I can see it well enough from the window. In a room I can enter into conversation with the likes of Plato, Shakespeare, and Charles Dickens. But if I step out of my house, depend upon it that within five minutes some idiot has collared me with ceaseless and inane chatter. What’s to choose? I take my stand with Lord Emsworth:

He was humming as he approached the terrace. He had his programme all mapped out. For perhaps an hour, until the day cooled off a little, he would read a pig book in the library. After that he would go and take a sniff of a rose or two and perhaps do some snailing. These mild pleasures were all his simple soul demanded. He wanted nothing more. Just the quiet life, with nobody to fuss him.

---P. G. Wodehouse, Lord Emsworh & Others.

I'm not much for pigs or roses or snails, and yet I think His Lordship and I are in all the essentials kindred spirits.

In Their Own Words

"--and so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,--pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?"

Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

SNAPSHOT: Silhouette

Mister Wizard

One Sunday night when I was twelve my uncle showed me a card trick that changed my life.

Fanning the deck out on the kitchen table he instructed me to pick out one card and turn it face up so that everyone in the room could see it. To this day I still remember that card: The 5 of Clubs.

Then my uncle did something completely unexpected. He picked up the telephone and dialed a number and asked to speak to Mr. Wizard. After a moment he handed me the the phone.

"Ask the Wizard what card you picked," Uncle Tony instructed.

If I'd been a little older at the time and already cynical, I would have no doubt suspected that my uncle---a notorious funster and practical joker---had prepared a suitably elaborate stunt of which I was to serve as the butt-end, and so thinking I would have naturally adopted a bored and disinterested tone of voice that so that later I could claim I'd never really been 'taken in'. But in those days kids of twelve were still young enough to be credelous and naive and open to magic, and I can even now recall a tingle of anticipation as I took up the phone and innocently inquired,

"What card did I pick, Mr. Wizard?"

A lugubrious voice answered, "5 of Clubs," then disconnected.

I was flabbergasted. How could such a thing be possible?

"Once you know how a trick is done," my uncle cautioned me, "it's magic is all gone."

But after much pleading and cajoling and outright begging on my part, my uncle finally agreed that if I came to his house the following Thursday night he'd reveal Mr. Wizard's secret to me. While I waited impatiently for Thursday to roll around, I ran the trick over and over in my head, and even before my uncle's revelation I pretty much figured out how it was worked: it was based on a simple word code, and those so inclined can look it up in a dozen magic books. After a half-hour's practice with my uncle I was confident enough to go out and perform the trick for my friends, who were all equally as astounded as I was. And in this way I was set off on a mission that would obsess me all that summer.

I went down to the Grand Book Center where they sold used paperbacks for ten or fifteen cents and bought up every book on card magic I could find. Then I raided the shelves of the public library and came home with another armful. I taught myself dozens of basic mathematical formula tricks, but not content with these, I spent hours working in front of the bathroom mirror until I could (with tolerable proficiency) palm a card, create a break in the deck, perform a double and triple lift, shuffle without and shuffling and deal off the bottom of the pack. Contrary to my uncle's warning, the more I learned the more I wanted to learn, the more magical it all seemed. I had no interest in card games at all, but was never without a deck of cards. I read biographies of Houdini, Dunninger, and Carter the Great. Before long I had amassed a small personal library that spilled over onto the floor of the room I had the misfortune of sharing with my older brother.

"How many of those stupid books do you need?" Jack sneered.

One trick I would have loved to pull off would have been to make my brother disappear---permanently. But that wasn't in any of the books I read. So instead I kept my focus on magic and eventually I put together a small repertoire of tricks with which I astounded (maybe bored) anyone I could corral for ten minutes at a time. With practice, I became bolder.

It happened that there was a girl in our neighborhood named Roseanne Kessler, a cherubic-faced early-developer who seemed to fill out her blouses long before any of the other girls did. Just being in her presence caused me to feel thick and clumsy and tight inside. As I was completely lacking in all social and romantic skills, I decided to woo her with my most elaborate and (so I thought) astounding effect.

"Pick a card," I instructed her, "and turn it face up." The King of Diamonds.

Then I had her insert the card back in the deck, shuffle and re-shuffle to her heart's content, then fan the cards out on the stoop again only to find her her card had mysteriously gone missing from the pack.

Then the Coup-de-Grace: from behind my back I produced a hardboiled egg and instructed her to roll it back and forth on the stoop. When the shell fell away the words "King of Diamonds" were clear and legible (in black ink) on the surface of the egg.

It had taken several hours to set up the trick, and for my thanks I received a blank stare, followed by the only two words Roseanne Kessler ever spoke to me: "You're weird."

But notwithstanding Roseanne and my brother, my magical summer continued apace. Toward the beginning of September a movie house in Manhattan began showing a revival of "Houdini" starring Tony Curtis, Every day for a week I took the subway from Brooklyn and sat each time through two showings. Never had I been so mesmerized by a movie in my life. By the end, when Houdini's Upside Down Water Torture Tank trick goes horribly awry and he expires onstage after promising his wife Bess that, "If there's a way...I'll be back," I was awash in tears. I felt the movie was speaking directly to me. And there was not the slightest doubt in my mind that I would someday join the ranks of the legendary stage magicians.

Of course, I never did. In fact, by the following summer I had almost completely lost all interest in my tricks. I'm not sure I can say exactly why. Except that the next year I was thirteen, and the year after that fourteen, and as usually happens with boys entering into adolescence, my attention wandered to other things. I lost my focus and eventually magic drifted out of my life for good.

Nowadays my fingers are thick, my timing is shot, and I wouldn't dare to try even the simplest effect. So it goes: we have it, and we throw it away.

And yet, in later years, on the most boring, rotten, paper-thin days of my life, I might riffle through a deck of cards just to be doing something, and if I should happen to light upon the 5 of Clubs I get a sudden surge of joy and enthusiasm. I may not know what to do with it anymore, but I know exactly what it is. Childhood summers are like that, they best ones anyway. You carry them around with you all your life, even if you only stumble on them in the dark once every few years or so.

Thank you, Mr. Wizard. Thank you, Uncle Tony.

SNAPSHOT: Leaf After Rain

In Their Own Words:

"For Shaftesbury, Burke, Kant, Schiller, and their followers,
{B}eauty was the path back to the world that they were losing in losing the Christian God -- the world of meaning, order, and transcendence, which we must be constantly emulating in this world if our lives are to be truly human and truly meaningful."
---Roger Scruton

STORY: The Lives of the Dead (500 word Challange)

The 500 word challange is just that: create a complete short story in 500 words; this is not exactly my specialty, but I've given it a shot. How well or poorly I've done the reader can decide.


The Lives of the Dead

I go down to the place where I know she’ll be waiting, on the street where Turtle Park used to stand before they tore it up. I find her pacing the small edge of sidewalk as if the trees and the grass and the swings have remained intact all these years.

“Have you seen my babies?” she asks.
“Not yet,” I tell her.
“They were supposed to be home two hours ago.”
“I’m sure they’re fine,” I lie. “Anyway, the police are looking for them now.”
She nods and begins pacing the sidewalk again. After a while she turns back to me and speaks.

“Have you seen my babies?”

The first time this conversation occurred I was a boy and had no idea what to make of it. I told only my grandfather, Vincenzo Tresca; he told me I had a gift he called “the sight”. Now many years have passed and I return to this place over and over and the words are always the same:

“Have you seen my babies?”
“Not yet.”

This is what it means to be dead:

Imagine your life as a giant reel of film unspooling for many thousands of feet. Now imagine a three minute segment clipped from somewhere in the middle of that reel and looped so that it plays over and over again long after the rest of the film has disintegrated. This is all that was left of a young mother: the dread and anxiety of hopeless waiting.

As a teenager, I read the particulars: her two little girls never made it home from the park alive. After the funerals, the young mother, broken by her grief, swallowed a nearly full bottle of Seconal. In all these years, my only wish is to see her at peace.

“Have you seen my babies?”
“Listen,” I tell her. “I don’t have much time. Your daughters are gone. They are at peace. There is nothing more you can do for them now.”
“They were supposed to be home two hours ago.”
“They aren’t coming home. Their home is no longer in this world. Neither is yours. You must let go.”
“Have you seen my babies?” she asks.
I keep at it, knowing it will never do any good. She hears me, she must understand, but nothing will ever change.
“They were supposed to be home two hours ago.”
It’s almost light now, I give it my last try:
“I never married,” I tell her. “I have no children. I have left no one behind.”
“Have you seen my babies?”
“For over eighty years, since I was a boy, I have loved no one but you. Now it’s my time to rest as well. Only you bind me here. I want to rest only with you.”
“They were supposed to be home two hours ago.”
“Please”---
This is what it means to be dead. This is all I have left.

I go down to the place where I know she’ll be waiting…

Jane Saw it Coming

Though she could have no way of knowing it, Jane Austen offered, in Pride and Prejudice, a pungent criticism of modern middle-class American life.

Reading the novel today, one is struck by how modern and familiar the character of Lydia, youngest of the Bennett sisters, seems. We know this girl. She lives in our neighborhood, down our street, even---God help us!---in our own home!

She is the American teenager in the year 2010. Or any other recent year.

Put another way, Lydia is almost an amalgam of the worst aspects of modern-day American adolesence---female variety. (The boys are just as bad, but they are another story).

It is easy to see what makes Lydia so familiar to us today. There is her boldness and flirtatiousness, her obession with boys and trivial gossip, her bursting-out sexuality. Of course she is the perfect product of an unconstrained consumer culture ("I bought my bonnet...only for the fun of having another bandbox"). And there is her general ignorance and, above all, the utter vacuousness of her personality. For all these reasons, Lydia seems the one character who would feel most at home in modern day America. She has friends here. If you could somehow propel her forward in time two-hundred years to any middle-class suburb in America, I'm sure that, allowing for some adjustment to modern technology (cell phones, Facebook), she would fit in very nicely with her mall-hopping sisters of the 21st Century.

Now anyone who has read Pride and Prejudice knows that Elizabeth Bennett, the novel's heroine (and Austen stand-in) almost violently disapproves (disapprobates?) of her youngest sister. Attempting to convince her father to intervene and forbid Lydia from accepting a friend's invitation to follow the regiment to Brighton, Elizabeth describes her erstwhile sibling as "a flirt in the worst and meanest degree of flirtation, without any attraction beyond youth and a tolerable person", and further laments the 'ignorance and empitiness of her mind"

As it happens, of course, Elizabeth is proven right with regard to her errant sister. Lydia elopes with the scoundrel Wickham. Retruning home with her new husband, Lydia creuelly gloats to her eldest sister Jane that she has usurped her rightful place as the first sister to marry---ignorant, of course, of the fact that Wickham had to be bribed into marrying her and that only through the efforts (and financial help) of Darcy is she saved from the tragic fate of a 'fallen' woman.

On second thought, I don't know if 'tragic' is the appropriate term here. I am not sure that anything that happens to Lydia can be considered 'tragic' except in the most general sense of the word. Her life may indeed turn out to be lousy, but in literature 'tragedy' requires a certain degree of self-awareness, and Lydia is certainly one of the stupidest characters in all of fiction. She lacks the depth of understanding and feeling needed to experiece real tragedy.

One thing we can conclude from all of this is that Jane Austen surely did not like silly, frivolous women. What is interestng to consider here is that Austen is often proclaimed to have been 'ahead' of her time', meaning by this that she was one of 'us' and not one of 'them'---'them' being the closed-minded, unliberated British gentry of the 18th Century. But somehow, I don't think that our modern world and lifestyle would have suited Jane Austen at all.

In Their Own Words:

"It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw patches down upon me also;
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious;
My great thoughts, as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? would not people laugh at me?"

Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry".

SNAPSHOT: Directionless

Summer Everlasting

When I was a boy Summer offically began on the Last Day of School---no matter what the calendar said.

It wasn't a real school day, because you didn't really have to go. Maybe half the class would show up. Sister would ask us about our summer plans, there would be treats---cupcakes, candy leftover from the weekly candy sale, baseball cards for the boys---before we were dismissed with the admonition to stay out of trouble and to pick up a book once in a while on a rainy day.

Though I was a poor student and no favorite of the nuns, I was always among those who stayed behind to straighten up so the room would be neat and in order when September rolled around again. With the windows open wide and a sweet summer breeze undulating through the room, life was transformed. The torments of the late school year were completely forgotten. It was the first day of summer. The very first.

And I think now the reason I stood behind was to extend for as long as possible that moment of absolute beginning. Maybe some part of me already understood that once the sands begin to run through the hourglass it’s only a matter of time before they run out completely. I wanted it to be the first moment of summer as long as possible. Then I’d bound down the rickety stairway, home to lunch and my friends, the freedom of time and Brooklyn completely our own.

What did we do for three long months? Once Mikey smuggled his mother’s cigarettes out of the house and we smoked in the park until we turned green and sick to our stomachs. We were maybe nine then. Mostly we played tag in the bankyard, punchball in the street, went to the movies, explored new neighborhoods, hung out on rooftops, ate hot dogs with mustard and onions from the street vendor and salty pretzels from the German bakery, told outrageous lies, and wondered what it would feel like when we were all grown up.

And because it was a working class city neighborhood and no one had a swimming pool, we’d open the fire hydrant on 90 degree days and dance madly in the streets under a hundred pounds of ice cold water pressure until the cops came and shut it off.

But for all the fun I had with my friends I mostly liked to be alone. I spent hours wandering the stacks of used paperbacks, comics, and monster magazines at the Grand Book Center. Or I’d go down to the pier with my copy of Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe, and read until the weight of words forced my eyes shut and I feel asleep in the afternoon sun.

“Life passes by like a dream,” my father used to say.

I didn’t believe him then. But always when I awoke the air was crisp and the shadows were long and it was time for school to begin again.

Silents, Please

I love silent movies. Maybe you do too. Try telling that to someone.

Looking through Intolerance and some Harold Lloyd comedies the other night, it occurred to me how difficult it is to explain to almost anyone---even those who consider themselves 'knowledgeable' film buffs---the appeal (or even the sanity!) of watching silent movies.

To me, silent film represents a lost art form, perhaps even a lost language, and the greatest silent movies tell their stories with as much, and often more, power and emotion and meaning as the most up-to-date modern films.

Try explaining this, and you're likely to get a blank stare. Or a laugh. Some may even question your sanity.

Only the most devoted and *truly* knowledgeable films buffs will understand.

The reason for this, I believe, has to do with deeply ingrained beliefs and attitudes that we as Americans hold.

Which is to say, our belief in 'progress'.

That, as technology advances, the old becomes ipso facto 'obsolete' and 'useless'. What was achieved under the old technology is now fit only for the trash can.

The reasoning goes something like this: "Movie companies produced silent features only because they had no way to synchronize sound. Once they had the technology to synchronize sound with picture, then silent films became obsolete and sound features became the standard." End of story.

So, in this view, watching a silent movie makes as much sense as filling an old rain barrel with water, poking some holes in the lid, hanging it upside down from the ceiling, and trying to take a shower that way.

The same argument has been applied to color vs. black & white. Once color became affordable and feasible for all films, it became the standard. Old films *would* have been made in color if he studios could have afforded it, so no reason not to colorize them now.

All of which is true to an extent. But what this view doesn't take into account is that, within the confines and admitted limitations of silent cinema, a number of true artist could have produced a number of true masterpieces---masterpieces that hold up today as artistic creations, and indeed far surpass most of the crap that fills the modern cineplex today.

A true artist will work within the limitations of whatever medium he or she chooses. Not only that, but an artist will even turn those limitations to her advantage, creating works of art that can only exist *within* those limitations.

And of all these masterpieces, the aforementioned Intolerance stands as perhaps the greatest artistic achievement of the silent era, as well as one of the greatest American works of all time.

And certain forms of physical comedy---Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Turpin, etc.---actually play better in silent cinema than sound.

In short, what our all-pervasive faith in 'progress' will not allow us to do is to enjoy many great and entertaining films that happened to be produced under now 'obsolete technology.

Too bad for us.

In Their Own Words:

"I have been taking stock of my fifty years since I left Witchita. How I have existed fills me with horror, for I have failed at everything---spelling, arithmetic, writing, swimming, tennis, golf, dancing, singing, acting, wife, mistress, whore, friend, even cooking. And I do not excuse myself with the usual escape of not trying. I tried, with all my heart."

---Louise Brooks (actress)

SNAPSHOT: Memories of Winter

Family History

I am looking into the past.

With the help of a powerful convex lens I pore over old family photographs of my grandfather Vincenzo and my grandmother Rosa in the old Brooklyn apartment house they bought in 1920, with money scraped together from my grandfather’s various laboring jobs and my grandmother’s thrift and economy. That was the house I grew up in.

According to census records, grandfather Vincenzo worked as a ‘fur-puller’. I had to look that up: as near I can make out, it involved ‘pulling’ or skinning the fur off of rabbits so that the skins could be used to line coats and jackets. It doesn’t sound like very pleasant or lucrative work, but he supplemented this income selling plaster animal figurines he turned out at his basement work bench, and a second job as a bank night watchman. As a child I remember playing with a set of ‘police’ clubs I was told belonged to him. I bragged to friends my grandfather had been a policeman. In any event, my grandparents raised eight children and bought two houses, so I’d say Vincenzo wasn’t the worse provider who ever lived.

Sorry to say I never knew them; My grandfather died of tuberculosis in the early 1930s, and my grandmother’s heart gave out just as her sons and daughter were coming home safely from war in 1945.

In one of the photographs the family stands around the kitchen table which has been festively set with the best dishes. I easily make out the faces of Aunt Jennie, Aunt Madeline and Aunt Carmella. When I knew them they were already thick and matronly, but here they are three slender girls with bright, merry eyes, eager to get started on the path of life. My mother should have been standing with them but for some reason was out of camera range that day.

This morning’s mail brings a photocopy of the passenger manifest for the Anchor Line of steam packet ships arriving in NYC on June 21st, 1882, carrying to America my grandmother, Rosa Pagano. She was one year old. Seeing her name penned in a florid hand by a harried immigration officer on a fading but still legible document, Rosa seems somehow more alive to me than ever. My father used to brag that he was her favorite son-in-law. He would go down to the basement and chop wood for her stove, then shovel coal into the furnace. In return he sat at her kitchen table and she poured him glasses of red wine and fed him meatballs fresh from her frying pan and drenched in homemade tomato sauce. My father told me that the hallway was always filled with my grandmother’s cooking, an aroma richer than the lushest garden, fragrant with tomatoes and garlic and olives and spices from distant provinces. And right now I only wish I could bite into one of those meatballs, but Grandma Rosa is gone and no one knows how to make them anymore.

SNAPSHOT: Dogwood in Bloom

In Their Own Words:

"What shall we do when hope is gone"?
The words leapt like a leaping sword:
"Sail on! Sail on! Sail on! And on!"

---Joaquin Miller

STORY: Legal Martinis (500 word Challange)

The 500 word challange is just that: create a complete short story in 500 words; this is not exactly my specialty, but I've given it a shot. How well or poorly I've done the reader can decide.


Legal Martinis

The boy had been thinking of proposing since graduation. Dinner seemed as good a time as any.

"Listen," he said, when they were finally seated, "do you think you'd want to marry me?"
"No."
"No?"
"No."

The waiter appeared, took their order for martinis and placed a tasseled menu to the left of each plate.

"Isn't it wonderful to finally be able to order a real drink?"
"Why won't you marry me?" the boy asked.
"We have college yet."
"We could become engaged, at least."
"I'm already engaged."
"Oh."
"Sorry."
"Sorry to disappoint me, but not sorry you're engaged?"
"That's about it."
"How come I didn't know anything about it?"
The girl only shrugged.

"So who is he anyway?" the boy asked.
The girl opened her menu and began to scout the entrees.
"Just someone."
"Someone has a name, doesn't he? What's his name?"
"Tom Wilson. He lives on Long Island."
"Where'd you meet him? He didn't go to Watchung Hills?"
"I just told you he's from Long Island. Why would he go to Watchung Hills?"
"Where'd you meet him then?"
The girl made a vague motion with her hand. "My father does business with his father. We were invited to their home one Sunday for dinner."
"And now you're engaged---just like that?"
"Not 'just like that.' We've been seeing each other the last year or so."
"And where was I when all this was going on? How come I know nothing about it?"
The girl shrugged.
"And you are really going to marry this guy? For real?"
"Yes. For real."

The waiter brought their martinis and took their order for dinner. The girl took a sip of her drink and from her expression seemed to like it fine.
"Just think," she said, "to be able to order a real drink anytime we want."
"So I guess I'm pretty much out of the picture then?"
"Except as a friend," the girl said, not without kindness.

After a while the boy asked,
Does he even know anything about you?"
"Can we stop now?"
"I mean what does he really even know about you?"
"I suppose you think because we've lived next door to each other for eighteen years you have some kind of deep insight into my soul or something?"
"Does he know how you used to swipe eggs from the kitchen and hide them behind the furnace because you were certain they'd hatch into chicks?"
"When I was three," the girl said.
"Or about the poetry you used to---"
"Have you tried your martini?" the girl asked. "It's really quite good." She took a long slim cigarette from her bag and held it between her fingers.
"There's no smoking here."
"I'm not smoking it."

"You don't even sound like yourself anymore---'the martini is quite good'"---he mimicked.
The girl stared vacantly across the room. "Will you ever grow up?" she asked.
The boy looked away and took a sip of his drink.

SNAPSHOT: A House Along the Road

What's Killing Literature

In A Tale of Two Cities a dissipated young English lawyer named Sidney Carton sacrifices his life by switching places with the French aristocrat husband of the woman he loves, thereby losing his head to Madame Guillotine.

You’ve read the book, you’ve seen the movie, you know the line:

“It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done. It is a far, far greater rest I go to then I have ever known.”

Or so you would have thought. A participant in the online Dickens reading group I belong to proposes the following:

“Since Charles Dickens’ day, psychology has made some progress…

...Isn't it strange that a man could not give up or overcome a destructive habit because of the pleasure he takes in it and yet give up his life for some higher ideal?...

...Of course, allowance must be made for the possibility of true sublimation taking place i.e. in the case at hand substituting physical self-sacrifice for oral pleasurable self-destruction through drinking…"

Huh?

In other words, there was nothing very noble about Carton’s sacrifice. He was simply a masochistic, self-destructive individual who traded long-term self-destruction (booze) for the quick dirty thrill of having his head lopped off. Yes, that is the latest word (evidently) from the hallowed halls of enlightened academia, neo-deconstructionist anti-literature division.

Scratch Sidney Carton from the list of literary heroes.

Too bad, but if he has to go, he has to go. But it does lead me to ask…

Why bother to read the book?

You can find more accurate histories of the French Revolution, Robespierre, and the Terror. Why bother with Dickens’ melodramatic twaddle?

Well, here’s why:

For the past 150 years, readers have found Sidney Carton’s death inspiring, ennobling, and somehow redemptive for both the character and the reader. Dickens somehow leads us to believe that we, too, might be capable of such self-sacrifice for something we believe in or love. A bit naïve, perhaps, but this is what millions of readers since 1859 have always found in A Tale of Two Cities. This is what lifts the spirit when the last page of the novel is finally turned.

It certainly lifted my spirit when I was eleven and stayed awake all night reading the book. Then the unlikely duo of Sidney Carton and Cyrano de Bergerac rose in the heavens as twin constellations in my private childhood galaxy, defining for me the upper reaches of human heroism. Trust me that I have fallen far, far short of that ideal. But these days it seems even children are too wised-up and fashionably cynical to believe in the reality of heroism and self-sacrifice in the first place.

Put another way…what kid is going to sit up all night reading about a sublimating drunk who, in the words of my learned correspondent,

{allows} himself to be trampled upon and humiliated {before} he gives himself up to the punishment he has craved for all his life…” ?

Not this eleven year old.

In Their Own Words:

"I wandered over the land...I heard a great deal, many lies and falsehoods, but the longer I lived the more I understood that there were really no lies. Whatever doesn't really happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn't happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year."

---Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gimple the Fool.

On the Street Where I lived...

Order or Chaos?

"Chaos is the score upon which reality is written."---Henry Miller

We want things to add up. We want the world to make sense.

Virtue and hard work are to be rewarded; sloth and vice punished.

If some stroke of bad luck should befall us we respond by throwing up our hands and asking "What did I do to deserve this?"

Conversely, we would also like to be informed why an undeserving acquaintance should have been blessed with a windfall of good luck.

In both cases, there is a deep feeling of injustice.

A child is born with leukemia. A vicious murderer goes uncaught and dies peacefully in bed. Where is the sense in all of this?

If rewards and punishments are distributed randomly, with no regard to personal merit or lack of same, how then are we to live our lives? Why should we be good if good is not ultimately rewarded? We may claim that we do the right thing because it is the right thing, and not for any thought of reward. But if the moral order of the universe is unenforceable, who is obliged to obey it?

And in terms of social policy, we want to believe that there is one approach, one set of laws, one economic policy, that will lead to prosperity and social justice, and it is just a matter of finding it. Most often we believe that we have already found it, now it's just a matter of convincing everyone else that our way is the best way.

But what if nothing really works in the long run? What if human existence is fundamentally flawed in some way that ensures that every social system eventually fails?

Put another way, we need to believe that life makes sense. But what if it doesn't?

What if all our fine ideals---Virtue, Justice, Compassion, reward for hard work, and the like, let us call them our 'Indigenous Human Values"---are simply fictional overlays we attempt to impose upon an indifferent universe? Do these concepts represent eternal truths that exist outside of time, or did we invent them to make life livable?

Are they memories of a more perfect world from which we have descended, as Plato thought, or are they simply expedients and necessary fictions that we tell each other to keep out the darkness?

Are Logic and Order like a libretto we attempt to write upon a score of Chaos?

I'm afraid I can only ask the questions in this short space, not supply any answers. That has eluded the greatest of philosophers.

But I will say that our "Indigenous Human Values", whether they ultimately represent truth or fiction, are absolutely necessary. We cannot live without them. To attempt to is to give way to dissolution and destruction. We must act as if life makes sense and there is order in the universe, even if this is not the case.

And so our beliefs are true for us, even if the rest of the universe (whatever that may be) doesn't give a damn.