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PARTISAN REVIEW
an obituary can give life: it enriches our emotional terrain, makes us
grateful for one more day, helps us to see life as something given to us,
not something coming to us. For we are worthless creatures and have
nothing whatever coming to us. The fact that we emerge from nothing
and return
to
nothing, the fact that we are alive is in itself a gift, a
reciprocal gift, a gift of mutual gain, because in life as in love, giving is
receiving. We cannot make a clearcut distinction between ourselves and
those near
to
us. We establish a symbiotic relationship with our
environment in such as way as to merit at least a mental stroll through
the realm of the end-in-itself, and as we stroll, we indulge in the idea of
having a self-contained purpose.
If
dust we are and unto dust we shall
return, if such is our only trajectory, if we are made in God's image and
thus meant to be as perfect as our Heavenly Father, then let us be unique
and like unto Him who made us. Life is but a form that becomes visible
with the passing of time and the presence of someone desiring
to
behold
it. The challenge is to create a work of the limited time we are given.
Our job is to live, and to live is to live together. We live together
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the classroom and the dining room, in the hospital and the air-raid
shelter, in the swimming pool and in bed . We miss one another and
make sacrifices for one another, though when we grow up and move
apart we lose sight of one another. Nor do we need
to
be together all
the time: solitude has its merits. Where do old alliances go? Into the sack
of things past, the ego's timeless chronotope. We are for ourselves and
one another as animals and the heavenly bodies.
Life from this standpoint is an arbitrary gift and should therefore be
appreciated as it stands.
If
we proceed from the assumption that the end
can come at any moment, history begins anew for every individual every
day, though most people grow more defined, confined, and calcified in
what is unremitting agony. The more rigid, the more unbending one is,
the more mortal one is. Taking a shape, accepting a mold, moving in a
single direction - they all mean coming to nought. Yet we do have a
certain freedom to choose how we cover the short stretch allotted to
us: there are a wide variety of paths available.
As attentive as we are to our own comforts and impulses, as accus–
tomed as we are to looking after ourselves and even others, we know
that at any moment we can have a stroke or a car accident, we can be
done in by business failure or heart failure, by a family tragedy or a pistol
shot.
It
follows that the novels we write with our lives may end today
or any day. Just being able to open my eyes is a gift.
Honoring the here and now goes against the transcendental. I am
