When I was about 12 or 13 I caught a film in the Oceana movie theater in Brighton Beach. In those days you just went to the “movies.” “Captain’s Paradise,” if I have the title right. It was in black and white, starring Alec Guinness and Yvonne DeCarlo. The premise was simple: here is a captain who had two wives in two different ports. In one scene he is observing number one or two from the side of a building with a chum of his. He is asked what he is doing and Guinness, in that impeccable and clipped English accent, seeing the possibility of wife one meeting up with wife two, unfurls the quotation that heads this blog. I always remembered that and years later I looked it up and committed it to memory. When David Herrle of Subtletea was a little late with the announcement of my having won his summer contest and offered his apology, my rejoinder was that the delay did not matter, giving him Chesterton’s words. His response: “Indeed.”
Of late a lot of things are brewing and I cultivate the faculty of patient expectancy. Seeing my son, Jordan, in Chicago in one week is a delightful concern, being offered two opportunities to review books on major websites, contemplating sending out another piece to a contest, re-editing my winning essay for submission to an ezine of worth, reveling in that I am down 26 pounds (Yes, I can, Barack), relishing Palin’s return of her “rags” to Neiman-Marcus, and disgusted by Hannity, O’Reilly and Rove twisting what they had said, sore losers three. The latter is proof of what a conditioned mind is, of how causes make you rigid. All three would be apt practitioners in the Inquisition.
What I want to do this year is to publish my next book, “Sojourner,” a quasi-existential book about a Chinese who comes to California during the Gold Rush to seek out his destiny. It was the first real attempt at writing a novel in my early forties. I’ve revised it considerably, bringing to it all the expertise and smarts I have at 68. (Perhaps.) It is a “departure” from my last two books, but not really. Intention is always on my mind and the book dwells in that. I would like to publish a book each year as the years go by. I am inspired by Kazantzakis who after a lifetime of writing poetry began to write novels in his seventies and what novels they were — Saint Francis, The Last Temptation of Christ, Zorba the Greek. And his remarkable confessional, Report to Greco. What retirement! What conditioned blather that is. One can never retire from life, but one can become blind to it and end up as a street light — there, but unseen, there, but unengaged.
Every day counts now. I try to eviscerate its marrow. “Try” is the operative word, for I know that serendipity is the secret hormone of attainment, that striving leaves rut marks. I “Columbus” my existence, sailing west in order to discover east. I relish in the self-knowledge that I control zilch, that my life is spume bursting above the wave, that helter-skelter is the sea I am on. I imagine that my secret fantasy is to “potter” life, taking the slurping clay into hand and molding an existence. The cliche is the defining moment. All my life, as I reflect and look back, has had a philosophical flavor to it, as if purpose is critical for me to live well. I imagine, once again, as I come to draw my last breath that my Rosebud might be: “Know.”
So many of us go to our deaths like unmade beds. I do not seek answers, but I spend a lot of time speculating and asking questions: “What’s it all about, Alfie?” I have lived with and among friends and relatives who may have had the same questions I do but they never did share them. To go to one’s death unrealized and unknown to one self is to me a tragedy. Although “knowledge is death,” the philosopher said, I’d rather know that the stork did not bring me nor that I was bought in Macy’s. I’d rather see than to be blind to myself. The rest of life is work and love as Freud opined.
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