Random Thoughts VI

There are those among my friends who hold, some with a sense of envy, some with utter disdain, that I have lived my life unfettered by scientific logic, a condition that both camps deem irrational, definitive of madness. I think it an unwarranted charge. True, I do not understand the infinitesimal calculus. I am equally ignorant of quantum mechanics. Such ignorance is another of the many blessings granted me. But the unconscious has a logic of its own and grounds its elaborate reasoning thereupon. I am Who (I) Am. This is the definition of self  that places the ego properly in relation to the infinite, defines the scope of one's freedom, and permits the cognition of one's own soul. Contest my premises if you will but know that my syllogisms are sound.

And of that self, that soul (a pilgrim soul in a world of tourists) and its reasonings, what to say, what task ascribe to it, what question pose it? This perhaps at first: how best to dispute the primacy of the fact as sole constituent of the real world, of Reality?

It is an error to mistake ignorance for humility or humility for ignorance...and a greater error still to mistake either for fear.

How then do I understand the Christ? As the sum of all the innate, unrealizable aspirations of our common consciousness, the coda to all our immemorial dreams.

Memory is an impediment to love (and therefore love consumes all memory).

I had thought of myself most often as the central character in the fiction of my life, but there are times, more so as I age, when I am beset by the unhappy intuition that perhaps I am no more than a bit player in that particular drama, not Hamlet but Polonius.

Does it mean anything to speak of the scope of one's freedom, or is it the case that, genuinely understood, freedom is without scope, is absolute?

Politics is the communal expression of the mechanics of human will, be it free or bound, the aggregate of all the individual affirmations and denials in a given collective.

The Judgment is a come-as-you-are affair. You go clothed in all your virtues, all your sins (which is probably why your grandmother made such a point of insisting on the importance of always wearing clean underwear).

Random Thoughts V

All theories of social consciousness to the contrary, the split between the world and the individual is final and irrevocable, as exclamatory as birth.

Courage, at least of a spiritual sort, being perhaps more essential in this the "post-modern" age than heretofore, it becomes necessary to reverse the common dictum: the brave man dies a thousand deaths, the coward only one.

To meditate deeply on America, on what it means for one's soul to be American, requires a peculiar sort of stubborn patience, the sort that keeps one sitting silent and cross-legged in the stream of common consciousness, buffeted by ceaseless flotsam, the endless floating evidence of some far off catastrophe, some distant miracle, until perhaps at last light congeals to thought, thought yields to revelation.

This fragment bobs past: America is a purgatorial nation. It exists to purge history of its gravest faults. This is its glory, its honor, and its most grievous danger, the seed of its apotheosis and perhaps of its demise. Profoundly understood and profoundly undertaken, such a destiny might well merit for its people in their singularity an accelerated advance upward from the mud and in their congregation as a nation the laurel of a more humble exceptionalism.

Profoundly understood, profoundly undertaken...though perhaps the latter is predicate of the former...which would give new meaning to the notion of revolutionary struggle, America's natal genetic. How then best to undertake it? And what depth of understanding to glean from the undertaking?

There is no thought, however worthy, no cause, however noble, no prayer, however pious, no love, however timeless, no pain, however grievous, that does not merit at least one good laugh (..musings of the riant deity).

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: God's commandment to a benign narcissism.

On popular culture: Great art endures. All the rest merely persists.

Would that I could,

I would write a concluding verse,

A solemn psalm for Man:

A dirge of failed distractions,

A canticle of hope,

A just recessional...

A Parable

The Accident

The accident occurred at 7:45 AM in heavy fog on the remote and sinuous stretch of interstate that runs between Capon and Norristown. The truck, eastbound with a load of strawberries, swerved out of its lane to avoid a stalled car, jack-knifed across the road and came to rest on its side, Three dozen other vehicles following behind were involved in the subsequent chain reaction. The relative inaccessibility of the spot, in a valley deeply shadowed by towering hills on either side (you are familiar with the area?), and the sheer complexity of the accident itself severely hampered rescue and removal operations so that, by eleven, when the sun had burned away the last traces of obscuring fog, upwards of fifteen hundred vehicles, their engines off, their whistling tires silenced, immobile, stretched back toward Capon in a solid mass, as if frozen in a dream.

At first the stranded motorists were angry and restive. They could not be blamed for this. After all, appointments were being missed, delivery schedules disrupted, business meetings unkept, vacations delayed and all without a word of explanation to those waiting beyond the wreck, for, owing to the high surrounding hills, there was no cell service, no easy means of communication, no way of rescheduling the meetings or saving the business deals or extending the hotel reservations or reassuring the worried relatives. So there were shouts and curses and the broken roar of horns washing over the great line of cars like some gigantic wave smashing itself to pieces on a line of breakers, furious and frustrated at the impenetrable solidity of the obstacle in its path. The cars closest to the huge tangle of wreckage did not behave in this fashion, of course, as the drivers of these could see how serious was the matter, were aware that there were most probably dead and injured and that the mess itself, the massive interlocked metallic tangle, would take some considerable time to clear even after the human effects of the tragedy had been dealt with. These drivers, then, left their cars and did what little they could to give first aid until, an hour or so after the crash, the first medical units arrived by helicopter. The honking and the shouting and the cursing, then, came from farther back along the line, from those cars whose drivers, lacking insight, a clear vantage point, could know nothing except that they seemed irrevocably delayed.

In time this too stopped. Someone up front retained enough presence of mind to start a message on its way back down the line: a terrible accident, some serious injuries, road blocked, a long delay. Each driver left his car and walked back to inform the motorist behind him and so on, relay fashion, all the way down, so that within two hours everyone had at least this rough sketch of the event that had immobilized them. This seemed to quiet their anger and had the additional benefit of starting a flurry of conversations so that the motorists, accepting their impotence to dissolve this frustrating blockage, turned their attention instead to ways of occupying their time.

Some slept, reclining in the seats of their autos or searching out some shaded piece of grass along the roadway. Others, more active by temperament, organized impromptu football games or played a kind of lazy catch with bright plastic saucers. Lovers, some young, some not so young, walked hand in hand in the warm spring air, many of them barefoot, shirts off, pants rolled up to take the benefit of the sun. Older women gathered in small groups to gossip, commiserating with the poor wretches whose bodies lay trapped in the unseen wreckage ahead or exchanging stories about their intended destinations and their spoiled plans or worrying about their grandchildren, who must certainly by now be somewhat alarmed. Card games sprang up. Here and there someone lugged out a guitar or a portable radio and there were little knots of music up and down the line. People read books or magazines or newspapers and chatted and argued (for by mid-day the sun overhead had become quite hot). Some, who had been on their way to one of the picnic spots upstate when the accident stopped them, brought out their hampers and their coolers of beer and soft drinks and had their lunches beside the road or up on one of the small hillocks. Many simply idled about, irritable and disaffected. One old man died of a stroke and another, younger, of a knife wound, perhaps after a trivial argument or something of the sort. In this way the time passed.

By seven that evening the wreck had been cleared away, the road opened and people returned to their vehicles. The long line began to move, like some slumbering animal waking from a hibernation, and within an hour all conditions were normal again. Any impartial observer who had taken note of the day's events and who strolled now among the detritus of papers and scraps of food and discarded bottles and forgotten blankets or shirts or shoes might have been moved to conclude that this multitude of souls, these pilgrims stranded by an inexplicable caprice, had constructed in some dumb, instinctive fashion, a grotesque parody of what might be called a culture, a civilization.

Random Thoughts IV

Men: prisoners of the coulds and woulds and shoulds and cans and mights and mays, of the isms and the osophies and the ologies.

The manifestations of charismata have always been troublesome for the church. Paul, whose own experience of God was certainly not ordinary, counseled nonetheless against speaking in tongues and similar displays of excess. The madness of Pentecost was the church's birthday celebration; immediately thereafter the disciples were exhorted to sobriety, and the institutionalization began which has proceeded apace ever since. By the middle ages, the man who burned too brightly in public with a spiritual flame was likely also to burn publicly with a temporal one. The meaning here is clear: like any other living entity (so runs the law of this world) God is better understood neatly classified, neatly contained. But the spirit listeth where it will, and instances of the divine madness are perhaps not so rare even in our own day as is commonly supposed, Many cases, I am sure, escape the scrutiny of the theologians as well as that of their secular counterparts, the psychiatrists.

These things begin innocently enough. Life is full of pitfalls, camouflaged snares strewn throughout the various paths and byways of existence for no particular purpose except perhaps to fulfill some secret design in the unfathomable uncertainty which men style God. The exchange of glances between strangers on a streetcar or a bus, a chance encounter with an old friend, a rose, an apple, a passage in a book: any of these will serve to initiate a chain of events that moves a man out of his accustomed routine, out of the habits with which he disguises his unconsciousness, and into a circumstance inexplicable and devastating that brings him to the moment of recognition at which life begins to work its elusive miracle, for good or ill. What must be stressed above all else is the ordinary character of such events. Rarely does any event, ultimately dramatic, ultimately overwhelming, begin in a dramatic way. There is perhaps a psychological law operative here, some secret protective process of the soul designed to prevent fear from always and inevitably accomplishing its life-destroying work.

Increasingly, our communications become soliloquies: in the annals of intergalactic history that will one day note our passing we will perhaps be referred to as 'the race that talked to itself.' This colloquial identification will aid future students in remembering us for the few hours that intervene between the cram session and the examination. Doubtless we will be the subject of a great many research papers and learned dissertations.  Some poor creature,  attracted perhaps by the quaintness of our mores, will make us his life's study. If his work is of sufficient quality our immortality will be assured; otherwise, we will become the footnote that we seem intent on convincing ourselves we have always been. A study in inconsequence.

Every intuition of energy is an intuition of the human soul, a broken glance backward over the shoulder of time toward the first shock of creation, when god slowed the energic dance that was his thought and began his experiment with matter. (I am able to muster considerable enthusiasm for the theoretical physicist.)

False gods are no rare phenomenon. Indeed, throughout the long history of our uneasy sojourn on this fragile atom they have far outnumbered any gods who could lay even the most remote claim to being  true, to true Being. Witness  the  divinities  of  dim antiquity, a veritable menagerie of godforms --- caprine, bovine, anguine, canine, leonine, ursine, taurine, feline, lupine, ibidine. Nor did the anthropomorphizing Greeks much improve upon their predecessors, bestowing upon posterity a pantheon chiefly characterized by the common humanity of its collective vices, a rogue's gallery of gods the central divinity of which is today remembered chiefly as a prime example of the ravages attendant upon overactive glands. It is a longstanding perversity of our nature to enshrine the worst, to apotheosize the mediocre and the criminal, and if the intellectual development of the race has somewhat diminished our taste for gods of any order, enervating them without distinction, reducing them indiscriminately to the level of the myth and the fairy tale, it has not succeeded thereby in obviating our appetite for the banal and the beastlike. Rare today the cenobite consuming locusts and sanctity in the wilderness, the god-stunned anchorite living a life of intense spiritual selfishness in some monastery deleted by severe discipline from the temporal and the compound: modes of existence rendered obsolete by the wider  monasticism of  vulgar thought imposed by this common age, the service of the new, aseptic gods.

The unexamined life is not worth living. The old adage pops unbidden to  mind. It  seems somehow  tired in this electric age, reared to escape self examination. What tempts me to this enterprise, what prevents it? The times have diffused my thought, shortened my attention span, clipped my capacity for meditation. Tonight I drank wine, ate dinner, had coffee, smoked, did the dishes, helped with the laundry, talked to my wife, talked to my son, watched television. Tomorrow night I will drink wine, eat dinner, have coffee, smoke, do the dishes, talk to my wife, talk to my son, watch television. A lifetime of meals stretches ahead of me, gallons upon great unnumbered gallons of wine beat like ceaseless tides against the shoreline of my future. I will speak myself hoarse, I will break my eyesight on a cathode tube. Earnest in the preservation of this bliss, I will bind my days to the clock, my weeks to the paycheck, my months to the mortgage, my years to strict routines. I will wrap my dreams in oilcloth and store them in the attic beside a pair of boots two decades aged that I could not bear to throw away.

An overwhelming sadness attends this distance from God. I remember fondly the simpler certainties of my youth. God made us to know, love, and serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him in the next. No doubt, cankerous and parasitic, attached to these facts. The lost tridentine sonorities, wreathed in incense, buoyed by chant, seemed to my childish understanding as absolute and as mysterious as the laws of physics. Like the laws of physics, they were the unfathomable ciphers of forces beyond comprehension that served despite their impenetrability to keep the world from flying off unglued in all directions. Our first church was  a small, dark, low-ceilinged building across from the school, an old tavern that had been wrested from profanity by the sheer bullying, bellowing will of a fire-and-brimstone Irish priest. It was not impossible to sit there and think of gravity. Indeed, in certain moments of dim solemnity, gravity seemed a natural subject for meditation. Was not ours a God Who walked on water, ascended into the air, and would return riding on the clouds?

On Elites: Without elites there is no meritocracy. Without meritocracy, democracy fails. We have no royalty. Therefore we must promote elites of conscience. We must conscript them.

These are disconsolate meditations, connected by the frailest tendons, their discomfort assuaged only by the fiction of the first person plural. But if we speak as though our voice comes from a great distance it is not because we seek to frame a dispassionate style (it is dis-passion that we seek to escape) but rather because these broken fragments are the stirrings of a mute spirit struggling to congeal into an "I", beginning the pilgrimage of merit whose reward is a voice cohesive, flammable, and immediate.

What is the experience of grace? This instantaneous and certain apprehension and this only: all my sins forgiven, all my loves sanctified.

Not without reason is silence considered one of the hallmarks of sanctity. It is the saint's particular calamity to have seen God. In the face of that one great Assertion, the saint comes to know that assertion is futile, that nothing on this earth speaks meaningfully save perhaps the passage of the seasons, that to speak, to utter, to declare, to assert, to mouth even a single halting syllable is not only to retard the soul's ascent but perhaps to blaspheme as well. Far from being a matter of humility, a discipline imposed by the holy upon themselves, this silence is the inevitable result of the encounter with the Unspeakable.

Ours is an age which has lost the sense of God, the terrible fascination for the Divine which is neither a habit of intelligence nor a surrender to superstition but rather a natural facility for living at certain levels of our being. Whether our anxiety is the result or the cause of our having lost this sense is difficult to determine, and, in either case, it is probable that it does not matter. Like the saint, we too hesitate to make assertions about God, but our hesitance derives not from an intuition of his terrible immediacy but, on the contrary, from the confusion which results from our insistence on the immediacy of the world. Unable to sever the umbilicus which holds us to the womb of matter, we collapse into Reality. Unable to surrender our wills and be reborn, we collapse into the vacuity from which we so lately arose and will ourselves instead unborn into the world.

         

          

Weasel's Ninth

19 March 2014

They say a cat has nine lives. Weasel, our Tonkinese, spent the last of hers today. Ill for a while and deteriorating rapidly and irreversibly, she visited the vet one final time; we put her down.

We brought her into our home some sixteen years ago along with her litter mate, a twin sister whom, for reasons still a mystery to me, we named Wombat. For fourteen of those years, the two were inseparable, eating daily side by side, their postures nearly identical, their every movement almost synchronous, almost in unison. At night they slept together on the couch, curled spine to spine into opposing commas, mirror images one of the other.

Close as they were, their personalities were yet distinct. Weasel was the very definition of a lap cat, a plump, contented organism conceived entirely as an insatiable purring receptacle for belly rubs and chin scratches in whatever evolutionary workshop bears responsibility for nature's smaller miracles. Convinced of her superior intelligence her sister Wombat was more independent, more aloof, more inquisitive, more adventurous.

We kept them as rigorously as possible as house cats, sequestered from the dangers of the world beyond the door. Still, we could not wholly keep from them the awareness that there was an "out there" prohibited them. They watched birds in the backyard through the kitchen window, the neighbors through the side window, the daily life of the street --- traffic, walkers, dogs, the mailman, other cats --- through the front. Her curiosity thus irresistibly piqued, Wombat would not be deterred; she positioned herself stealthily near the door whenever we approached it, poised for opportunity.

In the end we were forced to compromise. We allowed her out onto the back patio, free to explore within the confines of her own yard, always and only with at least one of us out there with her, attentive and supervisory. Any attempt on her part to broach the  boundaries set her merited swift and certain transport back into the house. Weasel, determined against any unjust distribution of privilege, insisted on participating as well in these monitored forays into the open air, but, in keeping with her mellowed temperament, contented  herself with napping in the sun on the back steps or on the warm patio stone, never more than a few feet from her minder.

I am uncertain how deeply and how fully one can enter the mind of a cat but on the evidence of observation only it is clear that one can doubt neither their memory nor their perseverance. One day Wombat's long and patient indoor vigils paid off. The circumstances of the escape are unknown: perhaps a door not fully latched blown open just enough by the wind, perhaps an unseen dash behind one's back while bringing in the mail. For just that second, the wider world, unmonitored, beckoned, and she rushed out into it.

And never returned.

We stuffed mailboxes with flyers, walked the street and neighboring blocks, searched garages and under porches, all to no avail. For the first few days, perhaps a week, we comforted ourselves over coffee in the morning with the thought --- the frail hope really --- that, lovely as she was, someone had taken her in, that she was the delight of some new household, warm and well fed and awaiting just one more open door before she would return home. In our hearts we knew otherwise, knew that there had been some unhappy accident --- a passing car, an aggressive dog, something --- and that she was gone for good. Certainly we grieved, but for us, in time, the memory of loss lessened, the grieving abated.

Not so for Weasel.

Her daily routine changed. She now began each morning sitting before the patio door, awaiting exit. In the good weather we would let her out and watch her through the kitchen window. She would position herself on the top step and mewl plaintively for a good many minutes, a sound we had never before heard from her, part inquiry, part moan: Rachel crying for her lost children. In inclement weather she would say this mournful matins inside on the rug in front of the door. Only when she had completed this melancholy ritual would she deign to eat her breakfast. She grieved ceaselessly in this manner for the next two years.

In the end I believe that it was this grief as much as her failing liver that did her in, that, unable to sustain any longer the weight of her loss, the inefficacy of her daily plea, she determined once and for all to find her sister by the last means yet available to her and that this determination and the mechanisms of her failing health were inextricably bound one to another, were in some sense the very same thing.

The worst of it took about eight days. We medicated her as prescribed, hopeful for some sign of a turnaround, some hint of returning appetite. There was none. Unable or unwilling to eat, she subsisted, barely, on the fat of her own liver. She weakened daily: her voice diminished, her eyes dulled, her gait faltered.

I stayed with her to the end. She deserved no less from me. In the privacy of the vet's examining room, she lay prone on the table, feeble, now distanced but loving yet, bonded yet. I scratched her chin for the final time, rested my hand on her side, felt her shallowing breath. And still she purred, faint but responsive as always to my touch. After the first sedating injection I felt for the few remaining moments her quieting heartbeat, her breathing sliding into sleep, almost restful, almost resigned, almost at last peaceful. Then the final, euthanizing injection and she was gone. I restrained the sobs somewhat. I could not contain the tears.

I am neither naive nor ignorant nor even unduly sentimental. My soul has been appropriately hardened by life and by my experience of it. I know that the world is full of pain. The loss of a child, the death of a spouse or a life partner, the hunger of the world's ignored, the despair of the world's poor: perhaps these and these alone merit the heart's true pain, and my conscience therefore, mindful of just proportion, prohibits the use of that word. But the soul is capable of other deep bonds. I have missed her sister. I will miss her. And my soul acknowledges and my conscience permits a profoundly deep and profoundly abiding sadness.

        It will be so for some time.

Random Thoughts III

   

Psychologically, being elected to govern in America is very much like being commissioned to teach a common language at the University of Babel. E Pluribus Unum. We've got the "Pluribus" part down pat (no one can say that Americans don't understand diversity); it's the "Unum" we seem to be having trouble with.

      

We would do well frequently to recall that the world is at best a hypothetical place.

           

I believe I understand at last the liberties that poetry takes with language, which is only somewhat less than the liberties that life takes with men.

          

As in all ages, it is not unusual for a modern man to think strange thoughts. I am not here speaking of disturbed thoughts, pathological thoughts, sick thoughts (common though these too may be) but simply of strange thoughts, thoughts without apparent motivation or direction, the endlessly ambling thoughts with which the mind amuses itself when it tires of maintaining the fiction of reality. The man who thinks strange thoughts has always existed. He is one of the archetypal characters and has moved across the world stage from the beginning, although to others he has generally revealed only his shadow selves, the madman and the eccentric, the genius and the fanatic. His peculiar difficulty lies in the fact that whereas God's thought is cohesive, unitary, harmonic, it exhibits these characteristics only in its totality, that is, only in the mind of God. We fragmentary creatures, unable to contain even a single syllogism of the divine reasoning, must content ourselves with spending our lives in some comfortable corner of that divine thought, living some simple, routine calculation, some minute syllable of the divine speculation. The man who thinks strange thoughts is not blessed with such a grace; swept up in a broader surge of divine intelligence, engulfed by the inconceivability of an entire divine sentence, he spends his life in an attempt to shake off the effects of this mental rush, to clear his reasoning. He is much like a man trapped inside a bell of infinite size and resonance that has just rung soundly...twice.

Work, like all the other curses of the flesh, has its origin with the unfortunate incident in Eden. Immediately subsequent to that primal indiscretion (the source of all our fears, all our poems) man first felt the full consequences of his corporeality, consequences up to that point hidden from his understanding by the same salutary myopia that kept him from any intuition of shame at his nakedness. "By the sweat of your brow." So ran the divine imprecation, and at that moment were born both labor and history.

Before I suffered from this flesh,

laboring these penitential muscles,

I strove in absent time,

convinced of grandeur as eagles are

or fish that break the bottom of

black waters with iridescent fire.

If we have descended into nightmare, slipped through the fine mesh of our better dreams into a wilderness of abstractions, lost touch with the concrete, declined belief in the possibility of the real outside the confines of our cranial cavity --- that witch's cauldron, archetype both of the miracle of creation and of the perils of sorcery --- then we have done so out of the suspect grace of an impassioned logic. Artist suffering from a scholastic vice, a lust to know the answer, we have conceded our original privilege, that of creating the facts. In consequence of which we have suffered the most subtle and multiple of deaths. Nor will it suffice to whimper and bemoan our fate. We have placed the judgment upon ourselves, we have abdicated reality to science of our own blind will, a stupidity that demands an equally bold prayer of penance: let us humbly petition, therefore, that we be allowed somehow to assist the great angel with the little book who, bridging the gap between the sea and the earth, will swear the oath that is the abolition of time. Having fumbled away Eden, let us aspire to a finer, a purer, apocalypse.

One of the devil's attributes that we often overlook is that he is as superb a mythologist as he is a metaphysician, equally adept at story or syllogism, that is, a master psychologist. Hence the peculiar quality of the age, its indistinct and nebulous quality, its uncertain psychological atmosphere, its dense, unsettled atmosphere. The new war is a psychological war, a war of nerves, low-keyed and alluring, a hypnotic war, a war of images, an imaginary war.

It is not sufficient to construct intricate paragraphs, models of precision and economy achieved by considered marshalling and deployment of subtle grammatical endowments. Somewhere one must accomplish a link between language and life, two concepts which, though inherently synonymous, are nonetheless so difficult to combine in practice. The thing is never what we say it is (it Kant be), yet we have no approach to it other than language of some sort.

Random Thoughts II

        

To write because you are convinced that you are correct is to be a polemicist; to write because you are convinced that you are alive is to be an artist. It is not always a matter of choice, but when it is the second is always the preferable of the two alternatives.

To be cut off from history is a damnation, a curse. "Those who do not read history are condemned to repeat it." In the individual or in the nation the attempt to radicalize existence at a single stroke, to make a clean break with the past, to distort history, to rewrite it or to dismiss it, is at once doomed and pathologic. It is a law of our mortality, as inexorable of our spirits as are the laws of physics of our flesh: severed from our antecedents, we are severed from ourselves. If we cannot reclaim our actual past how can we assert even the barest approximation of a certainty to which we might cling in the face of the violent doubts of our present? Action and uncertainty are at root antithetical. Having grown skeptical as an article of faith, cautious as an expression of imprudent skepticism, timorous as a consequence of too rigorous a caution, we condemn ourselves to eternal inaction, hell's passive aspect. We tangle our speech in our qualifications, create a chaos of conditionals. Thus, in our age every voice is a voice crying in the wilderness, every proposition a proposition hurled into the general din. We have deafened ourselves and in our deafness have created a true democracy of comment.

The ultimate function of education is  spiritual. It is the task, the duty, of education to dismay the temporal. The world, however, labors under the delusion that the function of education lies in extending our conquest of matter. A Promethean error.

"My intentions," she said, loosening the button at her throat, "should be perfectly ovulous."

If I could believe, really believe, in our mere physicality, I could survive this age. If I could believe, really believe, that these several certainties that hound me are prejudices merely, superstitions educated into me, it is possible that I could come to easy terms with myself.

To have a child raises the complexity of one's fate to the level of a quadratic equation, cubes the unknown factor in the subtle formulations that one's energies are directed toward balancing; it represents the shift from the Newtonian to the Einsteinian universe, projected, of course,  onto  the  prosaic  realities of looking for a house with a third bedroom, scouring the papers for a good buy on a used crib, sleeping with a once-flat-bellied woman now grown incomprehensibly round and in constant uncomplaining discomfort, looking in polite bewilderment at the shower gifts. Such things shake one. That particular morning arrives: one awakes as usual, except that this morning that last delicious fragment of the early morning dream which up to now had never --- repeat, never ---  dissolved  until  very  late  in the afternoon (and even then with still the slightest fragrant residue remaining to imperceptibly cloud the rest of the day's shocks and insanities until the precious moment when the day's end and the day's beginning come full circle) that last delicious fragment is on this morning immediately and completely gone and one recognizes one's position at the leading edge of the hurricane. It is an indication of God's infinite mercy that courage at such moments is no longer a matter of choice, that it becomes rather an instinctually guaranteed response.

The virtues peculiar to sleeplessness constitute a formidable repertory of counterclaims to the more common lacerations of the diurnal brain. Not discounting the value that accrues for thought from persistent application to the specters that surround us in our waking hours, we are compelled in all honesty to reserve a higher  value  for  the  phantasmagoria --- ghosts  of  a vanished metaphysics, spirits of an undreamable future --- that  belong in their  exclusive  solitariness  exclusively to sleeplessness: all lucidity is a form of insomnia.

I cannot name the exact date and time at which I began to seek the sources of my sanity, but I suppose that it was sometime after I reached my twenty-third birthday. Up to that point I had been too busy pursuing the female of the species to devote myself or my energies to larger issues. Somewhere in my unconscious, of course, lurked the suspicion that the world was mad (in my youth I had read Arnold and Eliot avidly) but that its madness would ever become a matter of great personal concern did not occur to me. I comfort myself by reflecting that in this I am not unique.

Less advanced cultures, by virtue of their burdensome retardation, are spared our particular problems. In a primitive society, life moves in a more natural round. Survival is the single law, and under its iron heel those lacerations of the soul that are the luxuries of civilization are ground out. Advanced civilizations are self-conscious civilizations. This is not to imply that the level of consciousness is generally any higher in such civilizations than in those less advanced, for in truth it often is not. For most beneficiaries of civilization, life retains its essentially dreamlike character; lucidity is not highly prized, and hence lucidity is rarely achieved. The vast majority of our pursuits, collective and individual, are vain, a chasing after wind. Who today will say that the purpose of his life, its driving force, is an irresistible desire to experience the beatific vision?