achievement

I don't know quite why, but I felt a strange kind of sadness reading the final few pages of Cheever's journals. I think it was his deeply conflicted being, his profound loneliness, his longing for a different kind of light, a moral beauty of light and, I suppose, there's the lack of resolution. Towards the end it seems that nothing is solved-maybe that's precisely what life is, an unsolvable mystery?

At the end one doesn't want to sit in any kind of judgement but, instead, just say: here was a human soul, here was a life. What else does the presentation of a whole life attempt to achieve but this coarse, incantatory statement: here I am, warts and all.

As a whole, does it make sense? You sometimes hope that something of that medieval idea is alive and well in the modern period but if truth be told you know that that kind of narrative is reserved for the very few, the rare exceptions, in this day and age. And still, you are gripped by the possibility and are unwilling to relinquish standing in that strand of light for the undefined shadows.

I am no longer dealing with the common disadvantages of need...I am dealing with time, with alcohol, with death.

Who wants to look back on their own life, who can? Especially in mid-stream? The past seems like a far off continent today, as the morning light cracks open, peels away. You look and see that everyone is asleep: little r like a drunk, H, statuesque, and the little one who, when awake, looks at me with those quizzical eyes, the eyes of an old man, of someone who is asking the fundamental questions: what am I doing here, do you love me? These questions never leave us and never fail to startle us.

You look, and look. There is something of the deep warmth and order of civilisation in this sleep, this last hour before everyone wakes. You will eat porridge (barley and Quaker oats), grilled cottage cheese with Worcestershire sauce and grilled tomatoes, exercise, collect your books and notes and yet there will always be this sense of something missing, the idea that no matter what achievements there are life is radically incomplete. You have to learn to walk around like that; it marks your steps, curves your back, hunches your shoulders, folds another line into your hands, narrows your eyes, makes your heart sing a song you don't know the words to.

"But I deserved better". There is, of course, no such law.

What law is there, then? What latitude is given to me on this faint, sunless morning, to understand the stumbling of my life? What do you expect at this time of your life? There can be no prolonged engagement with truth when you have skimmed the surfaces so lightly, sought out the corners in shadows. You want to be a mystic for $3.50.

~~~

In a discussion a colleague asked me to imagine a perfect contract, imagine, as a thought experiment, that we could foresee every contingency. If we start from that then we can make sense of reality as a lack, a falling away from that ideal.

But what if there are some things we simply cannot know?  Why should we imagine we can have God's perspective, can see final causes, the last hour, every detail? Is this finite, limited outlook, this 'brokenness', precisely what makes us human?

Among all the debris, the scathing comments, the cock-ups, there are moments of great tenderness:

So I say that what I love is the world that lies spread out before him [my son].

You think or want to think that words and gestures like that are enough to redeem a man's life, overcome all the pettiness, the bitterness,  that surrounds you, that has infected you. But it doesn't always work like that: a beautiful door doesn't always open to a beautiful room. And the light varies; there is darkness in the morning and an old music strikes up. A set of circumstances, a memory, a character, a sense of permanence that was not tarnished and that stood aloof from the times we live in, something that could touch the universal, the true, and shine.

The nature of this sorrow is bewildering. I seek some familiarity that eludes me; I want to go home and have no home.