Februum

It is snowing lightly here, and the cold air seems all the more cruel after having spent the past few days in Texas.  We had one truly fine day there, with the temperatures in the sixties, and we went with the grandchildren to a park and watched them exhaust themselves on the swings and slides and climbing apparatus. We were sheltered by ancient live oaks, and a bird whose call I did not recognize kept us company as we called encouragement to the little blond boys and marveled at all the movements and actions that we can no longer perform. How many of our own feats we take for granted now will seem like wondrous feats in the coming years?

But we left Texas behind, and last night the wood stove was roaring at full capacity so as to keep the icy reach of the outside air at bay, and I stared at flames and embers with the sense of dissociation I always have after a long road trip. How can it be that we are here, when just some hours ago, we were there? A very curious thing, travel. We get into a small room with a steering wheel, and we sit there and the floor hums and scenes flash past the windows, and Someone moves the lamp around from front to back, and occasionally we leave the room and find that some prankster has changed the scenery around outside, and then we re-enter the little room for some more humming and flashing, and then after tiresome hours, we leave the little room and we are back here in our home, and we dreamed the entire thing, we never really left, we never really moved.

**

I’ve begun corresponding with a fine, perceptive writer named Francis Berger, who lives in Hungary. He has generously sent me a novel he wrote, and I have begun reading it with an eye to reviewing it here when I am done. Words are life, and words are magic, and it is a pleasant thing to encounter people to whom these meaningful symbols are important, to whom the skillful use of language is paramount.

**

I own many bibles, and I am looking up on a high shelf at some of them right now. Various translations and versions, some with luxuriant bindings and covers, they all have their histories within the little monastery that is me. I have always felt melancholy when I see bibles in used book shoppes or thrift stores or yard sales. I look down at them and touch their covers, whether pebbled leather or slick paper, and I think, “This bible was once quite important to someone. Someone referred to this book, treated it with reverence, and now it is like an old coat or a mismatched set of Corning Ware. See if someone else has any use for it, because I no longer want it.” And I am accusing myself here, because I peer up at the bibles on my shelf and they are like a year’s supply of broccoli to me: technically functional, but almost completely unappealing. My long and complicated sojourn in the church has left me almost unable to read the Holy Scriptures without hearing the usually unwelcome voice of some pastor or teacher or church member. Instead of living spirit, the words on the pages have become catchphrases, like political slogans or television advertisements, and this is hateful to me. To try and counter this reaction, I have begun reading the fourth gospel, commonly known as the Holy Gospel According to St. John, as if I had never before encountered it or the bible. This is an experiment inspired by Dr. Bruce Charlton, an erudite and penetrating thinker. How far will I make it? Will the voices of my ecclesiastical past rise up and overwhelm my attempt to receive The Word afresh?

**

I long for the certainty of youth. I was so, so sure of so many things up until my early fifties. But now…now I am unsure of everything, hesitant and double-minded and unstable and timid. I sometimes detest myself for being this way, but I have difficulty fighting through the fog. I am like the old man in Ishiguro’s lovely novel The Buried Giant. Nowadays, I find that tactile things mean much to me…staring into a candle flame while inhaling the dark scent of the wax as it pools around the living wick…eggs in a skillet as they solidify and their edges become continents on a map…the rasp of a chair’s seat against the back of my trousers when I sink gratefully into it or arise petulantly from it…the veins on the backs of my hand, and the map of Orr that they represent, and am I headed in the right direction, and can I follow it until I find something, and is there something to find, and how will I know either way? My mind and spirit sometimes grow dull these days, but my physical senses are heightened and acute. I seem to recall that madmen report similar symptoms. The narrator in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” comes to mind…