When i used to live in the Berks

We used to our laundry in the basement at this run down old apartment called the Berkshires, named after the sort of place where people drink cognac and stay up late to play billiards when what they mean to say is pool, but too much money gets stuck in their mouth. The place was mostly populated with college students ready to leave campus but desperate to stay in its orbit.

The other residents were elderly people, mostly from scattered countries of Eastern Europe, with thick accents. They'd wander the wide halls, which some people say meant the place used to an asylum, looking every bit the part of a recent escapee, wispy hair sticking out in obscure ways. Every now and again you'd hear a story from one of your friends or through a friend of friend who had actually met one of these people and talked to them about living in DC for fifty years, but I was never one of those types. Frankly, they scared me.

The place wasn't too bad for all that, though people are always shocked to find out I lived there. "That must have been fun for an adult," they say, as if the college kids in our neck of the woods were throwing keggers every Saturday and vomiting on our welcome mat. They were fine. In fact, we had the cops called on us once during a book club discussion. The book wasn't very good and things got heated. That isn't entirely true. Our neighbors were just silly college students getting ready for a mid-term.

We eventually had roaches and mice, but that's not really the story I'm telling here. Back then it was decided that I would be the one in our house to do the laundry. It was really my only other chore beyond going to grad school classes and talking about Hemingway, Fitzgerald and why the short story was dying in America, so I took it seriously. I'd walk downstairs, usually on a weekend night, bags slung over my shoulder like some cheap, skinny Santa Claus. I could usually feel tendons in my forearm actually shredding with the weight.

The machines were routinely out of service, and you had to check them to make sure they weren't full of water before you started your load. This is all years ago and for all I know the place is like a manor house now with bath attendants and people who iron your clothes, though I wouldn't bet on it. Anyhow, after getting myself ready I'd sort the loads, whites and colors because my wife always wanted me to do it that way, despite the fact that I'd read somewhere that it didn't matter. Read somewhere wasn't considered a credible source.

After loading all the clothes into the dryer, laboriously pouring over enough quarters to fill an entire fountain, I'd slip off my clothes and turn on the wash. We were a frugal family growing up, and I'd grown accustomed to saving every last bit of water, so naturally it seemed to me that things would be the same there. Mind you, I wasn't entirely nude. But I was close. I saw no need of leaving on my shoes and pants when they'd just go to the bottom of the laundry pile for a week or three as I wasn't very good at doing my job regularly.

And then I'd sit in my underwear and read a book on one of the empty dryers, waiting for my clothes to finish. Or sometimes I'd walk over to a little shop that used to be there, which was operated by a Korean family, who rented movies and sold alcohol and pop corn and cheese if you needed it. I'd browse the movies and chat with the owner, who always treated me with the dignity of any other customer.

You see that customs in families and cultures are just like that. I couldn't understand why people looked at me as if I were a stranger when I walked around the store in my underwear, trying to find the proper can of Mayonnaise. For me, it was considered quite normal. At first I thought that perhaps my figure was displeasing, but I was 26 then, and though it may be hard to imagine for people who know me now, I was in decent shape. It was only after a complain was filed against me by a tenant, probably the same one who one night keyed my car with the words, learn to park. This complaint was brought to my attention by the manager, a self-assured white man, the likes of which we're all used to, who was completely incapable of getting the roaches or mice out of my apartment, but who was always happy to snatch a rent check from me. Is there anything so hated in the world as a building super?

It was communicated to me in no uncertain terms that it would be in my best interest to leave my clothes on if I planned on continuing to take up residence in the Berkshires. At first I was confused, didn't everyone grow up in a single parent home in which no spare ounce of water was wasted? What was so wrong with my body, with any body that would cause someone to file a complaint? This line of thinking did me no good at all, but you're an intelligent person and probably already knew that.

I should confess, dear reader, that eventually I did start wearing clothes when I was doing the laundry, and though I went about the same tasks, chatting with couple in the grocery store about the wind and the rain, or reading a book on the small bench, everything was changed. I could see that in changing my behavior I had changed something essential about myself that I'd never get back. At home, at night, I'd wander around the house in my underwear for hours, looking out the large window at the traffic below, or at the building across the street, which looked like a spaceship, where window washers were always at work though no one seemed to live there.

The glass was cold, and I'd stand for an hour or more, waiting on the light to change. Sometimes it would gather in the boughs of an old magnolia, who's pink flowers were the first harbinger of spring, and I'd wait for it to move on before I left. Outside, mid day, students would sit out on the lawn in their bathing suits, guys shirtless, reading books called International Communications or Basics of Accounting while I reflected on the strangeness of the world.

I haven't told this story to many people because they often also find it strange that I used to do my laundry in my underwear. I always say to them, "Isn't everything in life strange. Isn't strange that you and I, descendants of monkeys from the heart of Africa are sitting across from one another having this conversation. Gravity is strange, and science. Insects are strange and so is the universe." Some people agree with me though most just continue to shake their head, wondering how I once could have been so strange, so different from the person they know now. Aren't we all full of obscure surprises and disappointments? 

The pale light of the moon swims across the floor

I was living in Nova Scotia then, part of a troop of monks who'd crossed the sea to bring the good message of the lord. In the morning, at 3 AM, I'd walk the dark garden paths, brick covered in thin layers of moss, until I reached a small walled garden, with ivy and honeysuckle climbing its walls. In the yard, when all the other monks were at prayer I'd sit and think of her.

When I was fifteen and made to take up in the monastery because of some familial debts I'd been in love. The girl had hair the color of thatched roofs. She had green eyes and freckles across her nose. She was thin. It was as if her bones were weightless the way that she moved through the trees, with the grace of a swimmer through sheets of water.

Before I left, we stood at the back of my house, in a small walled garden not entirely unlike the one where I pray now. We were both crying, and it was nearing dusk. A few birds were sitting on the fence, looking for worms and eyeing us with curiosity. I told her that I didn't believe that this was the only world that would exist. I believed that there were other worlds, worlds in which we both traveled by ship to bring about the good news, worlds where we both stayed and lived together in the village where we grew up. I told her that there were worlds that both of us couldn't even begin to imagine. That in some ways it didn't matter that she wouldn't look up from a book with a sweet look on her face, as I lifted a lock of hair in my fingers. This was nearly immaterial, our lives a temporary stay and that we had to imagine these far away worlds. She said that she believe me, and we lay on the cold ground and stared up at the stars, which seemed so much more distant and useless than usual.

In the morning, we parted with a kiss, and I squeezed her hand. "You know," she said, pulling me close, "you just get the one life." And then the two of us parted, and I climbed the stairs of the ship and tried not to cry. We made decent time but lost three people to some food born illness. Eventually landing on the shores of Nova Scotia in relative safety.

Years and then decades passed, among these people who had never heard of our God. And now I am 85 years old, staring into the dark, having just wakened from a dream of Anna. my love, still not sure which one of was right. It's so cold here, and the pale light of the moon swims across the floor. Perhaps she is dead now, most likely she is, but I don't intend to think of her that way. Rather, I'm thinking of her in the world that lives just a split second after hours, where she's walking through a field of wheat, and she turns for a moment, the sunlight tangled in her hair, and then I am awake again, waiting only to die, and see which one of was correct in the end.

On Children crying at night

In the middle of the night, somewhere between 3 and 5 am, long after the body has drifted into a deep cycle of sleep a cry issues from the bedroom where he sleeps. In that first cry is the suggestion of more cries, which will follow it, and eventually lead me out of bed into a rocking chair, or leaning over a crib having a conversation about scary monkey's or the amount of books that he needs in his crib.

Always though, I lie there quietly after the first cry because there is always the chance that the first cry will not multiply into more that the cry will fade away into the other sounds of the evening, a fan, a furnace, and these moments seem to last for days, I relax, hoping for the best, always anticipating that no cries will follow.

Sometimes a second cry issues, and I wonder whether she'll get up to get him, or whether I should get up to get him. I start doing calculations about hours of sleep and hours of work and expectations, and I lie there in bed silently willing her to roll out of bed and enter his room.

And still the rarest of things. Sometimes I hear a cry, and I roll out of bed right away. I walk into his room, and I pull his limp body close to mine, and I sit in the rocking chair, with my chin resting on his soft, soft hair, and I tell him that everything is going to be all right, "Daddy's here." Everything won't be all right, but I don't want to tell him that now. Right now I just want him to sleep and dream.

A Mystery in Paris

I was living out in Paris in a small apartment after a woman had left me. I'd flown out there on a grant from the small Midwestern college where I was getting my Phd in writing, hoping to discover the spirit of the flaneur in the wide boulevards of Van Haussman, flower pots stacked on window sills like a dream of Paris, which is all Americans can conceive of anyway.

It was spring and the city was in bloom. He'd spent it walking by the Seine, ribbons of sunlight falling across the water like bits of gold. Though this was all viewed from a distance, standing by cheap peddlers, smelling booze, hawking pictures and paintings of the very same Notre Dame that he could see with his eyes at that very moment, as if the picture were capturing the soul of the place in a way that his mind's eye never would, which was true of course, memory being the shitty barometer that it was.

For a while she'd said that she loved him, in e-mails, over the phone on some lousy and intermittent Skype connection, so he'd booked a ticket out to Paris. By the time he got to Paris she'd fallen in love with someone else, though this didn't come out until after a number of awkward days had passed, wandering the Orangerie and the Louvre together, spying out the beauty of impressionist painting or gawking at Winged Victory while she patiently read from the guide book. This was the finest painting of Monet's last period...and so on.

The truth of the matter is that after a few days of wandering the streets he'd decided to stay. If she didn't love him, fine. Love was fickle and strange. He wasn't going to base his life around emotion. But he also wasn't going back to the shitty office job he held on to by the edge of his fingertips.

This particular afternoon, the wind swept the hair from his face, leaving an unobstructed view of Notre Dame, a cathedral amongst cathedrals, Gothic spires and gargoyles piercing the veil of the sky, a Godlly replica of the tower of Babel. He was walking about this long spring day waiting for something to change, a blossom or light to fall in such a way that would let him know everything in his life up to this point had made sense.

No answer was to come. On the causeway below him, a family, probably American, was posing for a picture by the Seine, a river boat in the back ground, a near recreation of a scene from one of his favorite movies, except the people in that movie had been lovers. He wanted to take the picture for them, to be a part of something larger than himself. He wanted to be the child again, the little boy being whisked from cafe to cafe and bookstore to bookstore in the company of benevolent adults. He wanted to be the husband, easy going, snapping a few photos with his camera and laughing at the result, and he wanted to be the wife, small eyed and thin-boned, begging everyone to just smile for one goddamn second.

She had left on a Tuesday after telling him on Sunday that she'd fallen in love with her French tutor, an older man with a silly mustache. He was incensed but didn't tell her so. He stood at the window and looked down at the street, watching her leave, a small roller bag bouncing down the street behind her. He watched her recede like light over water.

Life wasn't always like this. In fact, mostly it was mundane a repetition of a repetition, a dream just beyond the window that no one can grasp. He knew intently that this would be a moment that he'd remember for the rest of his natural years, a think wisp of a girl walking down the streets of Paris to another man's place.

The memory came back to him, years later, when he said goodbye to his youngest daughter, walked back to his room with the help of a nurse and watched her drive back down into town, and then away to the airport and soon on a place back to CA. He knew intuitively that he wouldn't see her again before he'd die, and so he watched at the window for a long time, waiting for the light to turn pink against the clouds, then washing everything, the cars in the drive, the oaks and the buildings in a steady blue before it faded, and he went to be, waiting for the next mystery to come.

Today has been okay

He didn’t think his particular brand of loneliness was special in any way. He thought of it as something that was just a part of the human condition like waking up in the morning and having to pee. And yet, even knowing this, as he walked along the river listening to a dog bark somewhere, he couldn’t tell how far away in the dark, he found it hard to not consider his loneliness to not just be an essential part of the human condition but to be instead a particular type of loneliness that only he could experience. A thought pattern which made him lonelier still by confirming his original belief, that loneliness was both an essentially banal and unique condition at the same time, that feeling bad about it would be like feeling bad about having a nose, it was just a thing everyone dealt with, and yet, this reality did nothing to diminish the feeling itself, or so he thought. 

He wandered by a koi pond, stopping to buy a few grains of fish food, or whatever it was and dropping it in, watching the yellow and blue and red backed monsters glide along beneath the surface of the green water. He disliked the feeling of the grains between his fingers and he regretted having bought the fish food at all. He would now spend the day smelling like an animal trough. What if he came across a beautiful woman? Perhaps he’d tell her he was a horse trainer. He scanned the area but only noticed a couple of women pushing strollers, families standing at the edge of the pond with a relative in a wheel chair. No one to impress. He threw the last few grains of fish food into the pond in a heap, and, just as he was to turn and go a monstrous golden koi surfaced, brushing the other fish aside as if he were a locomotive and they, mere rail cars, snapping up the food. He could see that the fish was probably metaphorical. But he could not see or hear what Melville had said about water, about it calming the soul. He was finding no peace in staring at the green looking bilge water. Melville obviously meant open water, something free. The fish and the open water were metaphors for the taking, of that he could be sure. He stood up, knees cracking, and walked away from the metaphors and towards a street lined with office buildings. 

For how could a person, he thought, possibly hold all of the people he encountered in such contempt, without beginning to hold himself in contempt. He didn’t know if it was  uniquely human trait, or whether it was biological, though, come to think of it, he didn’t know if he thought of humans as mere biological manifestations of Darwin’s laws come to light, as cosmic dust from a very small point exploding infinitely, or as something special, essential. It sort of depended on the day. He’d had a Catholic upbringing, which had not helped him to figure things out at all. 

He was taken back to the problem of America. Bits of trash, gum wrappers, fractured bottles glittered in the street, stars in a smoldering grey sky. The wind seemed to be from the Northwest, though it might have been Northeast, he was never quite clear on his cardinal directions. Either way, it was now intensely cold down by the forgotten water. He’d left the girls down by the water after taking a drink or two straight off the bottle and reflecting on the kindness of strangers. And it was this reflection that had led him back inside himself. It was precisely this phenomenon. 

Whenever he found himself experiencing an intense gut level dislike of people in general, he had to remind himself that, in truth, he liked individuals, it was people he hated. This seemingly strange conjecture was really just another aspect of a self-attribution bias. A person, even a person with base views about the need for state militias and the demagogue of free enterprise, by virtue of knowing him instantly became more likable, more like himself he supposed, as he circumscribed them, painted a picture in his mind of what they were like, and decided on where to hang it in the gallery of his mind. And this mere act was enough to make him actually begin to like most individuals he met. Certainly there were a few, here and there that he felt he could do without, but, in general, he liked individuals, but gather them together in a group  and he instantly began to dislike them. It was a kind of weakness, he knew, this inability to separate himself from his perception of the world at large, but the supposed it was the sort of thing that everyone went through, and that only people like Gandhi managed to escape, though he, Gandhi, spent nights sleeping naked next to his attractive cousin, and, regardless of the point he was trying to prove, in truth, he was still sleeping next to a good looking woman naked, which was one step up from not doing so if truth be told. 

A part of him wanted to blame the whole problem on a Judeo Christian ethic. The us vs. them quality of the old Testament in which the Canaanites are slaughtered so that the Israelites might lay claim to their land. And yet, he knew, that despite Christianities thinning hold over his thoughts and consequently, the risk that he might turn virulently against it, that people had always, upon finding someone different than themselves, shot arrows, or stole, or thrown up a flag to signify peace, or an attempt at peace, because it was well known that people who were different were different for a reason and that reason was probably bad. 

Either way it was still as present as oxygen or thin cirrus clouds somewhere on the horizon. It had been a part of his childhood, the last vestiges of the Cold War, they’d hid under their desks from earthquakes, not from the Soviets, by then it was clear that the wall was crumbling, but it wasn’t down yet, and they watched in his first grade classroom as the Challenger exploded, a monument of the folly of competition, or so it seemed to him now, though he’d concede that perhaps it was something else. 

When he walked in the evening he was often overwhelmed with a sense of loneliness, of not being known by anyone. He thought of himself as a little boy standing before an ocean wave, and being enveloped, all alone, covered completely by the water, bathed in the sound, alone, forever. And so when he took these walks at night he took them as a puppy or a very friendly dog would, in search of someone to unburden his soul to, if soul’s existed, or whether they were just constructions of the mind. He deemed the answer unimportant, because he felt that he had something that needed to be shared. 

It was commonplace, he knew, to live in the depths of a city and feel completely anonymous. 

The street was lined by empty cars and old blue gum trees that had been planted some forty years before.  

It struck him that the understanding of our place within the universe was either radically important or deeply uninteresting. On the one hand it seemed fundamentally important whether a person believed that the universe was created and sustained by an all powerful being who’s true aim, problems aside was the redemption of some portion of humanity. Or whether you thought that the world was a mere accident in a myriad of accidents, or some sort of cosmic inevitability that was ultimately meaningless, just a collection of matter that had a tendency to form organisms, who in turn, formed more complex organisms. In short, whether human history was directed towards some goal, or whether human existence was just a monumental accident. This, it seemed to him, should be the essential sort of question that every human being should come to terms with before deciding how to live their life, whether things like ethics and morals etc. were even relevant, seemed somewhat contingent on this conclusion. And yet, people, himself included, tended to give more sustained thought to whether they’d prefer Chinese food or pizza for dinner than on the nature or direction of their existence. Why was this? Did everybody secretly already know in their gut whether they believed in anything beyond themselves as cosmic jokes or not? Or were these questions so difficult to answer that they just functioned in the background of everyone’s mind, like a computer running some endless processing function. 

The real problem was that, from a societal standpoint, at least in the technocratic western world where he’d been weaned, the answer to the question was a non-sequiter. What does the creation of the universe or your place in it have to do with rent, with a spreadsheet, with staying in shape? You’d hear, and heard a couple in his church going days, a sermon or two that said that it made all the difference, but he often wondered if that was true. People who professed to believe in the direction of God in the world always seemed hopelessly naïve, or so like their non-believing cohorts that the belief didn’t seem to matter. It was too hard to walk a reasonable middle ground. And either way, it didn’t seem, with the way society was made, to matter at all. We were no longer sacrificing cows or other human beings to deities for rain. It had become a thing that a person could consider in the privacy of their own home, like whether to have cable or not. In short, religion was on the fringe. He wasn’t even sure that that was a problem, or whether it was just a natural result of being a citizen in any developed nation. 

He left the office and walked out into the cold night. He was wearing a grey scarf and thinking about a woman he’d seen on the bus that morning. She had been no more than eighteen, dark-haired and pretty. She’d sat next to him, smelled of peach blossoms. Was he insane to have waited his entire day to think about a girl that he sat next to on the bus that morning? What other thoughts should have been occupying his mind? The street was lined by a row of conifers and shrouded by junipers that had been dragged in from lord only knows where. The chances were that he would never see the girl in the bus again. In fact, given their relative proximity, he was fairly certain that the girl on the bus had never actually seen him. And yet, here he was, thinking about the girl on the bus after the actual interaction, or non-interactions, and there she was taking up mental space in his brain, a person with whom he had no personal connection. Maybe the mystery of celebrity was not mystery at all? Maybe it made perfect sense to imagine the lives and legs of strangers. 

It was reasonable to ask what it said about community, the obsession with other lives. What about the lives right in front of us? What about his neighbors. My god, did he have any clue what his neighbor’s names were? He didn’t know if there was something fundamentally wrong with the current iteration of society, the distance between people that was supposedly lessened by being able to contact 300 of your best friends at any time and let them know what you were doing. Perhaps it was better in the old days, when a person went over and told his neighbor, or better yet, didn’t tell his neighbor anything, just had dinner with people he called friends and didn’t talk about his problems at all, or only talked about them as they related to his friends, perhaps they talked about the weather, how the cold had lasted longer than usual in April, and then he went home not having thought about how miserable he was, not giving himself the luxury of being unhappy, taking the crutch away. Well, the crutch was always there now, and it had turned out that people were just as interested in themselves as everyone had always suspected. The flattening of the world had only revealed the flatness of the people who inhabited it. 

He didn’t believe all of this. In fact, the thought that the doomsday folks were remembering, as usual, a time in America that had never existed, when one used to go over to his neighbor’s house for dinner and then drink themselves into oblivion, or when women or blacks were marginalized or unhappy. There was really no better time to be alive than now in terms of things like social justice and equality for the sexes. And yet, everyone he knew seemed to be mildly unhappy, unmoored in the world. Thinking about life as though it were a problem that was capable of being solved was probably the wrong tack. You were not, he concluded, sailing alone. Others had traversed these same streets and hallways, loved the same strands of hair, and perhaps he would look for his comfort there, in the minds of others. 

He spent that summer studying in Paris at an American University. That particular night he was sitting near the Eiffel tower drinking a bottle of wine, studying the glittering tower above him, the women walking by, the clip of their heels on pavement, and the image of them burned on his retina like smoke drifting slowly at out of a room. It’s bad business to fall in love in Paris as most people know. Truth be told, it’s bad business to fall in love anywhere, but it’s particularly bad to do so in Paris. This is because the Parisians are notoriously rude to outsiders, and there is no one who is more of an outsider than a person in love. They take very little interest in anyone besides themselves, which, of course, makes lovers the worst sort of Parisians to be around. In short, it’s bad news to be around lovers for they tend to focus inwardly. 

Paris had existed in his mind long before the plane had touched down at De Gaulle, and he’d spent an hour waiting for the train in the small grey depot below. Before he landed Paris had been an idea of faded grandeur, an expression of what it would be like to be in New York when Tokyo had reached its final ascension. Only better, because the Parisians were so damn proud where New Yorkers were just pushy and mean, and so as he walked the grand Boulevards of Van Haussman, that old rascal clearing out the mud and filth and charm of a Paris even older than the one in his mind, a Paris of winding streets and whores with consumption, he thought how the boulevards could just as easily have been used for ships, how he, as a child, had flooded the lawn by turning on the hose all afternoon to float his army men across the heavy clumps of grass, and how if one were to turn on a spigot in Paris, the liners would have no problem sailing down the streets with passengers plucking flowers from window boxes. 

Everyone he knew in American had a fine and upstanding belief in the power of their own opinion. It’s just an opinion, the weaker of them would say, but opinions, he’d learned, had an odd tendency of resembling fact. And yet, he knew that opinions sometimes changed. That Christians sometimes became atheists, and atheists Christians, that sometimes people swore up and down that they’d never own a dog, or get married, and then, you’d see them on facebook three years later with their arm around a woman and a Boston Terrier, and go on to read their numerous blog entries about the trials and travails of being the owner of a Terrier, and you’d wonder if anyone sticks to their convictions. The fact of the matter was that people rarely changed their minds about things he was interested in like cinema and literature. And he’d as of yet found no more compelling argument than proclaiming his antagonists vapidity as a means of convincing them that a three hour movie about depressing people digging through messed up lives was somehow more meaningful than things that showed to a larger audience, more real. 

He slept with three women during his stint in Paris. The first woman was named Regan, and she was younger than he was, and pretty. At first, he’d thought she was a literature student like himself, and he’d recommended some modern authors that she might like to read, and she’d told him that really, if she could do two things, she’d like to be a development worker, which is what she was in school for, and also a writer, but she worried that she didn’t have time for the latter, that it would just live at the edge of her conscious mind, a thing unrealized. And, though he reassured her, he was also certain that everyone in the world as their first or second job probably wanted to be a writer. It was a pretty common thing to desire. And so, in talking with her they found a middle ground discussing the history of Western Art, which was a requisite class for everybody abroad that semester. 

And, in these conversations, he delivered disquisitions on the caves at Lascaux and of the cave drawings, dated to incredibly distant times that they’d found in remote parts of the Appalachia in America. She found him interesting, liked knowledge of the sort that the displayed. He had this habit of not really making eye contact when he talked, as if he was nervous. He was relatively attractive, and the thought that she made him nervous, secretly pleased her, made her feel a bit of the control that was always absent in these sorts of interactions. It was always dependent, or nearly always dependent on the male of the species to begin the conversation, and, while this always seemingly gave the woman a modicum of control, really, what it did, was placed her in a position only to receive advances rather than capture them for herself. And so, only if she had one hundred hands could she count that the number of conversations that had not gone this easily with men, she was sure, even at her young age, would have liked to have slept with her, or at least gone out on a date with her, and it was a delicate, a difficult thing, to balance their expectations, set them straight, without being conceived of as a bitch or vapid or somehow manipulative, which she wasn’t. She was just a woman who had to manage expectations. 

And this young man, who was quietly telling her how the cave paintings at Lascaux weren’t really art at all, but religious signs, was worth listening to. “That’s the crux of art,” he told her, putting his glass at an angle and spinning it deftly as if it were a top. “All art or at least all good art is religious, or fine, if we’re uncomfortable with that term, spiritual. It seeks a connection with someone or something beyond ourselves. When art becomes self-referential, baroque, it starts to lose its meaning. Art cannot exist for art’s sake. What are the things you’ve read? Apologies, it’s more my field of expertise, look at Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, their texts are more or less spiritual guides to life. The amazing part is that they provide so many characters struggling with the reality of being a human being wrapped in the mystery of spirituality. The two seem inseparable, threaded together in the fabric of our beings.”  

She was not a strict atheist, but she had never really believed in any type of organized religion. It seemed silly, in the way that an older relative with dementia might at a large party. It was not worth attending to because it couldn’t possibly matter what they were saying. To give it more attention as some of these famous atheists, whose books she’d only glanced through, was to give it more credence than it deserved. “The struggle,” she said, wetting her lips with a bit of water, “is not spiritual. It’s carnal. The thing human beings spend most of their time thinking about is where their next meal is going to come from, its shape and flavors, or where the nearest bathroom is. It’s an illusion that literature, from what little I’ve read,” she demurred, “tries to play with, the delusion or illusion that we spend the majority of our lives on a different plane of being than we actually do. We spend the majority of our time worrying about food, water, toilets and sex. It’s a wonder we find time to think about anything else. And, any writers, even those old greats, who spend so much time describing the spiritual are being disingenuous, painting pictures as they’d like them to be rather than as they are.”

He concluded that if a person was to account for all the problems in the world, even just those of living, like, what should one do, that it would require a person to devote their entire lifetime just to unraveling each of the ethical knots that a person would be routinely tied in if those sorts of problems weren’t routinely pushed down to the subconscious level, or, better yet, never really rising the conscious level because people weren’t aware that driving a car was problematic on ten sorts of way, but so was eating fast food, and was it right to give a letter of recommendation to a person who you didn’t think that much of as a worker but liked personally? These sorts of things. Anyhow, one can picture the man who’d spend his entire life just figuring out how to live, brown coat, brown hat, a mutterer. He’d live alone, or maybe with a cat, and spend long hours walking by the river in his brown hat and coat, the wind whipping up near his face, trying to figure out whether it was okay to own a dog, or whether one should take all that money and love that it takes to keep a dog healthy and happy and give it to his local Catholic Church. But then, he thinks, what if I did the latter, but I gave it all to an organization that doesn’t believe in birth control or our current understanding of the universe. If he was a modern atheist, why, giving money to the church would be an abomination greater than owning a puppy. Alternatively, if the church was right, and he walked on ruminating about these things in just such a way, making it apparent to us all how King Saul just suggested that they cut the baby in half and was thus declared wise. 

It would probably take a lifetime of walking over cobble stones, across uneven ground, contemplating the scattering of light coming off the frozen river from weak winter sun, watching the geese fly in V’s overhead, scanning the strata of clouds for the appearance of an airplane that would never be boarded or thought of again. That would be the only way. If a person wasn’t to take the word of a man born and died two thousand years ago, or four thousand, or a man dictating from his hat, or a man from Athens wandering the streets to give advice, if a person was to cast all these aside and deeply study and engage with the world around them, create their own set of standards, not all those standards that go unmentioned, buying electronics that have been assembled with nearly cheap labor, discarding a phone that will be sifted through by children in Asia, whether to hold the door open for all five people, or just one, what is the import of the self? Asking all of these questions and making an attempt, hell, answering them, answering them all, so that on his death bed the man with the brown hat would look out the square window in his house onto the street covered in rain and the caterpillar like blossoms of oaks piled up in the gutters and know exactly how a person was to expire.

This project would create its own problem to be solved though, as if a person was to add infinity to one. The next person would have to consider why exactly a person must spend their whole life thinking about whether to swat a mosquito that is feasting on your blood if it is one of God’s creatures, a malaria carrier, or just plain annoying. And, this in and of itself is a problem, another question to answer. And, if that question has been unanswered, then the searcher would be forced to reconsider all of the considerations of the old man in the brown hat, examine them for their voracity, and in so doing, they’d pass away their life as well, this time selecting and old rocking chair and a stone hearth, occasionally lit with birch and dry leaves, and perhaps a dog for company, considering those same questions, and perhaps coming to different answers about what it means to live in a universe that will eventually be torn apart. And that was life.