Читать книгу The Meaning of These Days - Kenneth Daniel Stephens - Страница 9

If you’re young, take a chance if you love her

Buber regretted his comportment toward the workers, having left them not with the Eternal Thou, but with the philosophers’ God of the intellect. In 1933 after he was dismissed from the university, he continued to be present in Germany for his people instead of leaving for Palestine. In the face of the boycott, the deprivation of civil service jobs, the Reich Citizenship Law, and the lengthening shadows of harassment and horror, he continued to counsel and console.

Though I could not connect the dots all around and beyond the sky, I intuited the singular truth of Buber’s message. I possessed it, I grew into it as I had grown into my father’s New York City suits as a teenager. It was not clear to me how exactly the Eternal Thou, God, fit into the I and Thou scheme of things. This nagged at me. The best I could do was to say that particular I and Thou relationships are in some sense perhaps sacred ground, and that a particular Thou is related in some murky sense to the Eternal Thou. The God question was turning out to be the big and momentous question quite early in my life.

Did I see the face of the Eternal Thou in the face of Paul and Mary Bodine? A short and stocky freshman, soft-spoken but articulate, Paul was carrying a full academic load. He did not have a full scholarship as I did. He delivered newspapers on the narrow streets winding up and down the hills in the foggy mornings, and he came to class tired, not having read his assignments. His background was conservative too, and we talked when we could. Paul and Mary took the trouble to have me over for dinner in their small rented house on one of the hills.

My visit was an intimate look into their life. She was pale and very pretty, with a round face. Hugely pregnant too, and shy, blushing easily. We spoke of her Salvation Army background and their courtship, and we noted that she wore no lipstick. It is sad that we lost touch so soon as the academic years progressed, as often students do. I have treasured them like old photographs in my heart for a long, long time. Were they reflections in a metaphysical pond of the Eternal Thou? This question, in truth, was not yet fully formed in my mind, but waiting for its time, like a road that one has seen but not yet had a reason to travel.

I spoke of I and Thou with an Arab student I met at the International House in Berkeley. It was lonely at the seminary on holidays. Most of the single students went home. I had taken the bus to Berkeley to look for someone to be with, but it was just as empty on that campus. The coffee shop was open, and I ordered a milkshake. The Arab student and his young blue-eyed female companion prepared it for me, giggling and flirting.

The young man did come and sit with me at a booth, probably at my invitation. He was a graduate student in economics and spoke of how he would apply his studies to the situation in his country. He smiled dismissively when I explained my own interest in theology and the new book by the Jewish theologian Martin Buber. To introduce the Eternal Thou into the universe of discourse, however, felt more labored than logical. He looked over his shoulder to his companion. Serious purpose and resolve were carved in the dark ancient lines of his face, but he was distracted now, full of fire and mischief, his eyes giddy with delight and desire. His obsession with the young woman reigned supreme over our dialogue, which ended shortly. Was I in encounter with the Eternal Thou in some important sense, in the person of both the man across the table and perhaps the woman behind the counter?

A small but quite memorable thing happened on my first Thanksgiving Day. Interesting how such seemingly insignificant moments become part of the architecture of our minds. I was grateful to be invited by the student body treasurer and his wife Alice for dinner that day. I was directed to sit next to Alice’s sister, who appeared in my sky like a dazzling comet with a trailing flare. That was when a spry, preppy, flamboyant woman sat next to a dimwit who was pulled to her by his roots. Which fork do I use anyway? Do I eat the salad first? Was I being invited to be her boyfriend? That couldn’t be! If only I was capable of pursuit. I hated my oversized dull brown suit, which made me look only skinnier and browner against this celestial luminary.

Was this house of fire and fog in some sense sacred ground?

It turned out that I could drown the pain, if only temporarily, of the thorn of anxiety both of my discomfiture in intimate situations like this and of something like individualized existence itself. That the anomie was not a temporary condition but a permanent inhabitant of this clay vessel was sinking in as a foregone conclusion. I began taking the Greyhound bus into San Francisco. The Hungry Eye, known for its jazz, was too far away from the bus depot. It was on or just off Market Street that I saw The Young Lions and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing and ate Mars Bars in grand cinemas and submerged myself in dark adult amusement arcades and burlesque shows of comedy acts and dance routines harking back to vaudeville. On the screen I saw women in bathing suits frolicking, shaking supposedly to the swing music of small combos and big bands. It was amusing, however, how the music of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and the Dorsey brothers was tacked on so out of sync. While the music changed, the reel continued in dead silence.

Most shops were closed on holidays. My face went by in the windows up and down the lonely boulevard. The one place always open day and night was the bus depot cafe. There I sat and watched the “Anchors Away” navy men in uniform milling about waiting for their buses. I played Frank Sinatra on the juke box, “If you’re young, take a chance if you love her. Tell her you love her, tell her you love her.” The song was an abyss of dread for young inept lovers who craved tenderness but were afraid to risk themselves enough to say, Could you put up with me forever? And their ship was waiting in the harbor.

For me there was no Thou but for the waitress. At the counter alone with its apple pie, coffee, and cigarettes, the I was vagrant and impotent. It was voiceless except to ask for the remaining piece of pie or a refill. In the asking, however, its voice was heard and for a fleeting moment the cup brimmed over. And the song continued, becoming urgent, “Tell her now before it’s too late. And before she belongs to another. . ..” By now the young wilted I was a prisoner in Alcatraz looking into the waters of futility. It was said that no one has escaped by swimming across from the prison island to the mainland, the undercurrents being so powerful.

In the middle of the night there were few passengers. The dark vinyl seats soaked up whatever light there was. The hit songs played in my head as the bus moved across Golden Gate Bridge and through the sleeping towns. The driver called out their names as we came to them, Sausalito, Mill Valley, Larkspur. The street lamps glowered down in the fog as a passenger got off the bus and walked away. The classy Foster and Kleiser and other billboards drew the eye on the freeway as we passed them. The freeways were brand new then. Everyone was talking about how one could drive forever without coming to a light. This luxury blinded us all. No one saw how these roadways would proliferate. No one understood their true meaning in terms of their political provenance or their human and nonhuman consequences.

When we came to San Anselmo the driver glanced at me in his mirror.