Sanita and Will 2005 in Niagara Falls
Beauty is a dangerous, unpredictable gift. Sanita had it over me from the start. I was captivated by hers. We were unlike in every way, the most improbable and uncomplimentary two ever to become a couple. Yet we did couple, procreate and marry. It threw us into each other’s arms. All those frequent moves we made are a testament to her influence over me and my loving compliance to her in our worldly affairs. My independence of mind, my self-extraction from worldly matters, my books, kept me in balance and a happy man. But the outcome of ‘love’, nature’s purpose, is a child, a far greater ‘game changer’ than either of us could fully comprehend till it happened, a permanent bond and responsibility that makes any other life choices, any shift in careers or continents or social groups insignificant. Nature plays its tricks. The last third of this history of how I navigated it, with all its bumps and surprises. They were colorful years. The rest I can sum up in a few pages.
By 2002 I had full custody of Will. After that he went to her in Florida for two summers, each time a more unpleasant experience. I was his home now, well off in the electrical union. Then she began occasional trips to see him here, on my invitation, paying the flights and everything she asked. I was making great money.
No one in my family bore her any ill will now that things between us were happily resolved. She’d alienated her own family, Jaime and Charmaine not talking to her for years after her escapade with Mark and stealing Willy from me. She felt comfortable and welcome by everyone here, visiting Christmas in 2005, staying for five months in 2006 and twice later. She never did lose her good looks, her constant practice of yoga and vegetarianism was her saving grace, while I grew heavy and balding and gray. The hard and heavy industrial work over the years took some toll on my body, as daily, minor aches and pains, twenty years later, testify. But most of that is natural aging. I know my mind is unimpaired, as good as it was at twenty-five and far richer in experience. One of the blessings of this trade is that it requires a sharpness of wits at all times and challenges thought in its variety and complexity. In other words it’s one of the healthiest professions there is, for mind and body.
I kept up my reading in Latin and French, now easier than ever to enjoy, close to English in fact. My range of English lit. is larger, and my familiarity with the best is greater, as I keep rereading my favorites. My taste in quality is improved. Only my Greek decayed. It takes too much effort and time to keep up. But I could recover it in six months, with daily effort, full-time. It’s still all there in long unused memory, as words sometimes recur to me, uncalled for, out of nowhere, in a flash, just like other random memories from long ago that pop up and surprise me, like a face or name or scene from some long ago experience, forgotten completely, till they surprisingly resurface.
The last twenty years of my life have been rich in experiences, new friends, new places. But none like the old, none so bright and life-altering, not even close. So I suppose I’m set in my ways, never to change. My education will never be over, as long as I can read.
This story is much longer than I ever expected when I started out. But as it progressed I decided to make it as full and detailed a recollection as possible, including every bright scene and all the details that defined me, the road map of my life explained, my own personal encyclopedia.
As I stated at the beginning, I don’t care how I appear to others or how I affect them. I’m sure I’ve gone to boring lengths in parts and offended quite a few with my opinions on society and the dark future we all face, our possible end soon, our brief truancy on this planet we exponentially abuse and destroy, “veritates odiosae” in Latin, ‘unpleasant truths’, but so probable I’ve harbored them in vague consciousness since childhood, growing ever clearer and more potent as I read and matured. They’ve guided many of my steps to non-conventional choices at every fork in the road.
I’m not a nihilist. I never would have procreated a child if I were. My friend Chuck was a nihilist, and miserably so. I do have a glimmer of hope and the strongest desire to live as long as I can, just to see what might become of us in this unfolding and exciting drama, perhaps the last chapter in human history.
At worst you can call me a fatalist, not an angry one but a curious sort, always interested, watching and thinking, trying to refute my own beliefs as I see some good, some kernel of truth in all philosophies. I never swore allegiance to one, as that’s folly and far beyond our ken. Most days I’m a skeptic with Socrates as my model. Reading Thomas a Kempis I’m a Christian.
Will on his thirtieth birthday, Sanita at sixty, lovely still, in our dining room, a three day visit.
To sum it up, there is no summation. For each talent you gain in some areas there are drawbacks and losses in others. Our time is brief and whatever we focus on at any length, we ignore in other fields. The years I gave entirely to books in and after university I lost in social skills with women, an awkwardness in dating and a blindness in choosing whom to court. But I’ve found the universal consciousness I gained was a gift in its ability to elevate one above the present and abstract oneself from the world. I developed my imagination to wild, poetic degrees and spent many hours every week, (since early youth) with eyes closed but my mind busy, ensconced in vivid fantasies. This pleasure in a way predisposed me to adopting the strange friends and choices I made, as they enriched my imagination. Those who can’t do this are stuck in their minute by minute, present state and suffer whatever that involves, good or bad, but something they can’t escape.
As I think about this last statement in its wider, philosophical scope, it explains the whole gist and theme of this work. Why has any one scene in my life more value than another, making it worthy to be recorded? It’s simple: any memory still vivid after twenty or thirty years spells its importance to me and describes me, my quirks and interests, my character. But it also portrays the mind itself. Some memories are lasting because I keep replaying them, revolving these pieces of experience that either please me the most, as achievements, pleasurable to recall, or puzzle me somehow, with greater, hidden meanings I can’t quite get at, but keep trying to settle, to soothe an annoying question.
Those are the two things that excite the mind, our successes, either lucky or deserved, and the opposite, our losses or near misses, our ‘might have been life’, our failed loves. Those are the memories that plague us with the question ‘why’? Where did I go wrong, or did I? And was it me or other forces of nature at work or pure chance?
The riches I received from literature softened every failure in my worldly life. It’s easy to describe my love affairs on these pages. It’s impossible to describe the many hours of pure, ecstatic pleasure I enjoyed over the years, the days and nights of reading some great author, not only the joy, (far greater than any sensual pleasure) but the self-revelation and self-esteem that came with those increments of consciousness. What I show in these records is that elevation and richness of soul carry us through all sorts of losses and disasters. It’s a wider perspective that soothes the hardships of life and reconciles all, making the company of pariahs, misfits, or any and every chance acquaintance, high or low, profitable and enlightening. If I’ve a lesson to impart, here it is: Never burn bridges, never leave any person you meet on an unpleasant note. Never prejudge others. Get to know them. Everyone has some hidden jewel to share and better you.
This is what I’ve done here, collected and recorded them, for my own self-revelation and possibly for yours. Other than that, what has any meaning?
So I’ll end it here with one last poem, the final one in my little collection. The title I found on a rare volume by a French astronomer and thinker named Camille Flammarion of the late nineteenth century who wrote a book entitled "The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds". He believed there were canals on Mars, the remnants of a civilization. He believed in an intimate relationship of all life and the universe, that the veins in a leaf were the exact picture of the vascular system in our bodies and that river systems traversing our continents seen from high up in a balloon were exact mirror images of the same pattern. He pictured these on charts in his book and as far as appearances go, he was right. This inspired my poem.
On the plurality of inhabited worlds.
That there is a plurality of inhabited worlds
I deduce from the abundance of singing birds.
If one so tiny sphere regales so many
What must the stars contain in all their plenty.
When nature is so rich our whole world sings,
How could we deem the stars poor, lifeless things.
Only an infant mind could see such skies
And think them baubles, sparkling for his eyes.
I’ll live in greater reverence and trust
That we are not alone, and they, not dust.
The end
