night of Harps and Davita

"I don't like anyone to be dead, Papa. It's like a big forest and it goes on and on and never ends."

It rained most of the night. I lay in bed and listened to the roar of the wind-lashed surf and wondered how far up the beach it was. I thought I could hear it just below the dunes, foaming and boiling and reaching for our cottage. My mother came into my room and held me and cradled me in her lap and sang to me softly in a language I did not understand. I fell asleep inside her warmth.

"Sometimes things happen to people and they change," my mother said.
"They do things they didn't do before?"
"Yes."

I found as the weeks went by and winter approached that my mother had been right: I was no longer clearly remembering the look and cut of my father's clothes. At times I could not even recall his face. My mother said that was natural; but it frightened me to be losing my memory of my father.

Religion is a dangerous fraud, Ilana, and an illusion. It prevents people from seeing the truth and expressing their discontent, and sometimes it inflames the heart so that people follow horrible ideas like fascism.

"I especially like the shul."
"Yes. I know."
"I like the singing."
She said nothing.
"I don't like the wall in the middle."

I had learned a strange lesson: walls are laws to some people, and laws are walls to others.

Do you wear your glasses when you read and write? Always remember to do that so you can see the world sharply and truthfully. Truth is often very painful, but it alone will save us. How is our little bird? Does it still nest peacefully in our harp? Ilana Davita, sooner or later birds grow weary and close their eyes. Some fall from the heavens while in flight, dropping like stones to the earth, others run into a mountain, a hour, a tree. Still others are caught in the talons of a bird of prey. And still others simply fall asleep, and sleep on and on and on.
Care for our bird and do not let is close its eyes. It is wrong to face this world with one's eyes closed, no matter how deep the weariness.

Good-bye, Davita. Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time.

dangling dialogue

-- How is your French? he asked
- Pretty good.
-- Read L'Homme Revolte by Camus. It came out last year. You can get it in French.
- We are reading the same books, I said. Then I said, Not everyone who resorts to violence is a fool. Remember the story of Abraham lopping off the heads of the idols.
-- Yes, he said. I can understand violence if a person makes a rational decision that his world is utterly evil and irredeemable and that nothing in it is worth saving.
- Not many people can make a decision like that rationally.
-- They ought to read some good books.
- Marx read a lot of good books.
-- Marx was full of rage. Books don't do much good when you're that full of rage.
- We're all full of rage. That's something I've begun to think about these days. Who isn't full of rage?
-- Yes. But most people manage in one way or another to handle it.
- Why are people so full of rage? How would your friend Freud answer that?
-- With a lecture on sex and repression, and by drawing you a model of the id, ego, and superego.
- Would it help?
-- To some extent. It would begin to teach you how to become aware of yourself. That's what the soul is, I think. Self-awareness.
- The soul.
-- The crust is self-delusion. The soul is self-awareness.
-And if you're rebelling and are full of rage and don't have that self-awareness - what then?

-- You become a Marx..

outside it all, watching

Levi came over and asked me to join him in a dance. I got up and entered a circle of Hasidim with Levi at my side, and danced.

We danced around Danny, who stood clapping his hands and singing, and I looked at Danny and felt a part of myself slide out of the dance and look coldly at what I was doing, and heard it telling me how strange it was to be dancing with Hasidim, whose way of life I disliked, whose ideas were so different from mine, whose presence was destroying my world, I continued dancing, but for the rest of that night that part of me remained outside it all, watching.

-- familiarities on so many different levels. so many.
The most awesome is to slide out of the sliding out, and just be there.

I found myself intrigued by those books. They were written in a clear and on occasion almost exquisite prose style, the kind of style one rarely finds in works of philosophy and theology. And they were filled with blunt questions: Do you believe the world was created in six days? Do you believe in the order of creation given in the Bible? Do you believe Eve was created from Adam's rib? Do you believe in angels? Do you believe in the biblical account of the Revelation at Sinai? Do you believe in miracles? Do you believe that G-d guides the destiny of every living creatures? Do you believe that G-d talked, actually talked in the manner described in the Bible? How is one to react to the findings of archeology and anthropology and biology and astronomy and physics? How is one to react to the discoveries of modern biblical scholarship? How might one not believe literally in the Bible and still remain a traditional Jew? Are total belief or complete abandonment the only available choices, or is it possible to reinterpret ancient beliefs in a way that will make them relevant to the modern world and at the same time not cause one to abandon the tradition?

The problems he raised fascinated me.

They didn't fascinate me, though. They cast a calm and a frenzy over me. They cast a calm and a frenzy over me. over me.. in me.

the leaves of the Sycamores

Then there were the twilight weeks, a length of gray time between October and December when the weave formed in the summer seemed to come apart...

The patterns of our lives were being spun out in different worlds, and as the sycamores turned and the air grew cold the summer became a distant dream, and I could recall it sharply only in the very early mornings as I lay in my bed, no longer asleep but not yet fully awake.

At odd moments of the day... a disconnected piece of the summer would float slowly toward me and expand into dim memory... but the strange conjunction of events that had begun with the carnival appeared disentangled now, and the summer faded together with the leaves of the sycamores.

faded...faded

he talked

Can you feel the sun, Reuven? Can you feel how hot it is? Did you know Giordano Bruno was burned alive in Rome in 1600 for writing that the stars were suns? Did you know the gases in the interior of the sun are more than ten million degrees Kelvin? That's hot. They burned him alive because he wrote that the were suns. I wonder what it's like to be burned alive. Fire on your feet and around your legs and the pain as the fire creeps up. When do you die when you're burned alive? I think about that sometimes. They cheated Bruno. They killed him for the truth. But he didn't cheat. He wrote the truth. You have to get killed sometimes but you can't cheat. The cheating never hurts the stars but your eyes get clouded. I really believe that. Your eyes get clouded and you can't see through the telescope, any kind of telescope. There are different kinds of telescopes. Did you know that? There are refracting telescopes and reflecting telescopes and there's the Schmidt telescope. I read about them in a book. Refracting telescopes are okay but you have to watch out for chromatic aberration. Reflecting telescopes don't have that problem. But they have other problems, lots of other different problems. God, listen to me talking. I can't stop talking. Why can't I stop talking? What was I saying? Problems. The Schmidt telescope has problems too. Everything has problems. There's nothing anywhere without problems. There's no one without problems. Look at the clouds. They're beautiful. God, they're beautiful. There's one that looks like someone burning. Yes. Someone is burning. Who doesn't have problems?

We sailed and he talked and then we were near the shoreline and he talked and I could make out clearly the trees and the boulders and summer homes and people on the lawns and a deer at the edge of the woods and still he talked. Then, quite suddenly, he was silent. We sailed in that silence the rest of the way to the dock.

yes.

A father can bring up a child any way he wishes, he said softly. What a price to pay for a soul.

Open quote. Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less that the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?

I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignifcant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here. Do you understand what I am saying? End quote.