What To Do

And she looked forward to heaven as a place where clothes did not get dirty and where food did not have to be cooked and dishes washed. Privately there were some things in heaven of which she did not quite approve. There was too much singing, and she didn't see how even the Elect could survive very long the celestial laziness which was promised. She would find something to do in heaven. There must be something to take up one's time - - some clouds to darn, some weary wings to rub with liniment. Maybe the collars of the robes needed turning now and then, and when you come right down to it, she couldn't believe that even In heaven there would not be cobwebs in some corner to be knocked down with a cloth-covered broom.

--East of Eden, John Steinbeck 

Right? I've been thinking of these things myself. There must be something to take up ones time, to break up the celestial laziness (otherwise known as boredom, I suppose). What about reading, as I've mentioned before? What is life, or death, without reading? How will we while away the eons of eternity? And what about eating? Will there be food to eat, or the need of food? I have always imagined not, but come to think of it now, the Lord himself ate while clothed with the resurrection body. He fried fish for the disciples and ate with them by the fire. And he broke bread with the men he met on the road to Emmaus. This, as theorized by many theologians, was to demonstrate to people that he was not a ghost or an ephemeral spirit. Touch the wounds in my hands, he told Thomas; put your hand into my side where the spear pierced. So we have this body, this resurrection body, and surely something must be done with it. We must be put to tasks, else we may as well be in the grave. What is the nature of these eternal occupations? About that, we know nothing - - other than this: that No eye seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him.

More from Eden

More news from Eden [all quotes from East of Eden by John Steinbeck] 

One day Samuel strained his back lifting a bale of hay, and it hurt his feelings more than his back, for he could not imagine a life in which Sam Hamilton was not privileged to lift a bale of hay. He felt insulted by his back, almost as he would have been if one of his children had been dishonest.

Yes, I am insulted as well, and feel betrayed. I cannot do the things I used to do, the things I am supposed to be able to do. Just this morning, three of the neighborhood dogs were attacking a little white dog halfway up the street. I started up there in a hurry, but found that running was quite impossible. I did run a few steps but it became clear that I would soon pitch forward onto my face if I were to continue. It was important for me to get to the dogs quickly, and I was insulted and offended by my inability to do so. 

There are small things, everyday things. Sweeping or mopping the floor soon send me aching to my bed. Lifting the 5 gallon jug of water into the water dispenser leaves me sweating, and the task oftentimes undone. My back has rebelled and has won, but this is still not something I can just sit back and accept. No, I will do it again, I will do it next time, and next time I will succeed. 

Did I get to the little white dog in time? I don't know. I was able to chase off the attackers, and yet the little dog only lay in the grass after I arrived, looking up at me pitifully. He could not get to his feet, or he would not for fear that the dogs would return. I don't know which. 

There is no sane or reasonable world in which I cannot run, in which I cannot manage my own house. And yet there is. 

   "Was she very beautiful, Samuel?" 

   "To you she was because you built her. I don't think you ever saw her - - only your own creation." 

Here again is my own past, peeking into judge me - - or is it to console, to validate? I know this truth, I have thought about it lately, I have discussed it with my girlfriend in answer to her questions, and so how curious it is that the subject keeps showing up in what I happen to be reading. There is a sort of magic in literature. Somehow, it marches along with you, it examines you as you examine it, it puzzles over things that puzzle you. I've seen this happen so very many times. There's a synchronicity to it. Meaningful coincidence. And it is wonderful.

Morning

Morning seems to come earlier every year I live. 

--East of Eden, John Steinbeck 

It does indeed. And evening is the same. I have my coffee in the morning, and then who knows what happens to the hours afterward--up until about 8:00 p.m. that is, when they regather themselves and crawl heavily toward 11, my usual bedtime. Here is the 3-hour eternity of each day. What will I do, I wonder? How very long it is until I may sleep! And then the same all over again. Days pass, and weeks, and months, and all the while I have not much time remaining. Time is rushing before me, ahead of me, and I know I will not catch up. Only now, at the late hour, do we begin to grasp the value of time, for the sands are low and forever running to the end. I wonder if people in heaven ever read. I can't imagine life without coffee, a cigarette, and a book.

Three Quotes from East of Eden

There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good.

Monstrous changes indeed, and that is where we are now. Monstrous changes are being forced upon us, and in this case, in our time, they don't just seem evil, they are evil. And yes, the things we hold good are being shoved aside, by a corrupt and lawless administration, by a lazy, clueless, hate-filled electorate, and more and more commonly by an armed and unrestrained military style force. 

But harkening back to an earlier post, it seems that monstrous changes have always been upon us. In this passage from East of Eden, Steinbeck is talking about the turn of the last century, the atmosphere in the early 1900s, but he published this novel in 1952 and I'm certain that, as is peculiar to all great novelists, he was talking about his own time as well; moreover, as is part of Steinbeck's point throughout the novel, and in fact extending back to biblical times, he was looking ahead to times beyond his own life span. Our times. 

But some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread their hatred around like butter on hot bread.

There are others, yes, and there always have been. Perhaps it is as Steinbeck says, that this is first of all a self-hatred, and then is translated outward to a hatred of a certain people, people of a different color or nationality or culture. They hate because they are weak and insecure and greedy and ignorant, and boy does that hatred spread like hot butter when allowed to spill. We have powerful people among us now who call such hatred good and right and reasonable. And so God help us all. 

Perhaps Adam did not see Cathy at all, so lighted was she by his eyes. Burned in his mind was an image of beauty and tenderness, a sweet and holy girl, precious beyond thinking, clean and loving, and that image was Cathy to her husband, and nothing Cathy did or said could warp Adam's Cathy.

Totally unrelated to the first two quotes, but definitely a deja vu moment to me. I worshiped a woman once, put her on a pedestal, and kept her there through unshakable faith in my own delusions. Nothing she did or said could warp my vision. I would not allow it. All things that did not fit with my fantasy were counted as anomalies, not really who she was or meant to be. Misunderstandings. My vision was good, lovely, lasting, true. But ultimately, it simply had nothing to do with who she was. She was my invention and lived only in my mind. And in my heart, yes. Very much so in my heart. 

East of Eden

You can see how this book has reached a great boundary that was called 1900. Another hundred years were ground up and churned, and what had happened was all muddled by the way folks wanted it to be--more rich and meaningful the farther back it was. In the books of some memories it was the best time that ever sloshed over the world--the old time, the gay time, sweet and simple, as though time were young and fearless. 

--East of Eden, John Steinbeck

I once some many years ago started out reading East of Eden, but somehow at that time I could not get into it. Or perhaps it was just the many responsibilities and demands on my time that existed back in those younger years that interrupted my progress. It is, after all, a very long novel, requiring a reader's devotion. But I have returned to it again, now bereft of excuse, and, some 150 pages in, I am quite enjoying it. 

This is a story, in the most brief summation, of a good man, a bad man, and an evil woman. And of course it is all quite biblical. The blurb on the back of my particular edition describes the book as 'A fantasia of history and myth', which seems apt enough, because the Bible itself is a fantasia of history and myth, all intermingled and vigorously stirred to a froth. So it happens that we make myth of history, and vice versa, and are never quite sure of which is which. It is all muddled in the way folks wanted it to be. What is truth, right? Lost in the soup of history and myth, of personal preference and personal experience. 

A professor of mine at university once said that one cannot understand American literature without knowing the Bible. I have always remembered that. And I cannot help but see that East of Eden is laid out in a sort of biblical form, flowing from myth to tale to history to poetry, leaving it to the reader to divine which is which, and leading him in any case, whether he divines or does not, to the same aggregate of understanding. (In other words, old literature majors like to pick and pluck at a book, but it is hardly a requirement in general 😉).

Good Times

In November, a reporter broke the story of the My Lai massacre, which had happened back in March of '68. Two platoons of U.S. soldiers had walked into a cluster of villages in the Quang Ngai province one morning, expecting to encounter Vietcong. Instead, they encountered families cooking breakfast, husbands and wives and elderly and children. None of them armed or even very worried, at first. Then one of the soldiers opened fire, another tossed a villager into a well and dropped in a grenade, and the rest of the soldiers joined in shooting, lobbing grenades, rounding up and executing person after person for sport. Mothers and babies, grandparents. They marched groups of villagers into ditches and shot them en masse. They raped young women in front of their families, then shot them all. Over the course of two hours, the two American platoons tortured and murdered anywhere from 350 to 500 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians. That story on everyone's breakfast table (the photos, by chance, taken by a young war photographer from Cleveland) cut through any lasting, reasonable perception that the war was under control.

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This is why old people seem distant and distracted, he thought. We aren't living in the past; the past is living in us. 

--Buckeye, Patrick Ryan

And yet we live as well, doggedly, necessarily, in the present moment, and moment by moment, moving through, pressing on. We live continually in the worst of times, because those are the times that are upon us, those are the times that disappoint us once again, that break our hearts, that seem a crisis perhaps insurmountable. And we are too old for this. The whole world is playing with fire. 

And then we remember that it always has been. 

Buckeye, by Patrick Ryan, reminds me of the many unpleasant fires we have all walked through, and come out on the other side, only to find a new fire burning there. Or perhaps it is the same fire burning eternally and for all generations. It is a long novel, but an easy read, in terms of flow, hearkening back to an older style of American narrative, reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser. It is a story, and no more than a story really. It is a reminder of the '40s and the '50s and the '60s and the '70s--those years that created all of us old fogies of the present time. There is no other story lurking beneath the surface, no mystery to interpret. But it is the years themselves that interpret us. We move along through love, relationship, betrayal, repentance, forgiveness, regret, loss, grief; we all live and know and experience the same things in various shades. It is built into life, and this life is played out on the stage of a world constantly at war, relentlessly ruthless, inclined toward evil. It has always been so. We merely forget, and call these years the good old days.

Wonderful

"I won't lie to you ... dying was unpleasant. But death? It's wonderful." 

--Buckeye, Patrick Ryan

That's just the thing, isn't it? As an aging man in my final years (any way you look at it), the dying itself does not seem like bad news. It's the unpleasantness of getting it over with that one would prefer to skip.

And as I reach this point of no return, as must we all, I am torn between regret and relief. Strangely enough, for all the pains of age that we suffer, for all the bother of full body arthritis, for all the embarrassments of progressive memory loss and even more progressive clumsiness and ineptitude, life begins to take on a new sharpness of focus - - not through the eyes, mind you, but through the soul. Color that has faded through the years, as if through simple neglect, begins to return, and how wonderful the world seems once again. We find ourselves, ironically, with time on our hands - - time for kindness, time for love, time for patience, time for forbearance, time for appreciation, time for empathy, and time for growth. Growth! Of all things, growth, at this age. And we can't help but wonder why we didn't do it sooner. 

We find ourselves with time, I say - - and yet, not much. We have but little time remaining and so very much to do and to be and to become. We cannot possibly finish, and yet we are nearly finished.

Lest, however, I paint too bright a picture, what we find before us as well is ruin, heartbreak, decay, failure. Not in ourselves, if we are fortunate enough to have lived not too badly in our time, but in the world, for which we once had high hopes. I will admit that I am no longer able to watch the news. It is simply too tragic. I attempt to clean my algorithms, so smudged with the dirt and shit of my country's relentless decline. I suffer every day from what I see and from what I hear of my old home even though I am not even there. Even though I've not been there in 15 years. And yet I am there. My heart is there, my soul is there, my mother, my father, my son, all of my family, albeit all in the grave. We are there, I am there. It cannot be undone. It is in my blood. No tree exists separately from its roots.

This wonderful world, in the end, as we cannot help but acknowledge, is no more than a hopeless wasteland. And so I say, Enough. I'm done. And so I am relieved to be relieved. No more of this. My heart cannot stand it, my soul longs for better things than a fallen world which will never rise. It was always meant to end, just as I am meant for an end.

And what then?

And then I am there.