Читать книгу Flight from Ein Sof - W. E. Gutman - Страница 12

PROLOGUE

A close friend, a fellow-journalist, inhabits his past the way Diogenes occupied his barrel -- a loner given to periodic fits of acrimony and despair.

Whereas Diogenes sought “Light” (knowledge) in the shadowy regions of human credulity, malice and stupidity, my friend retreats into the darkness of his own ruminations. Defying logic, given to self-treachery, he claims that everything that happened yesterday was wholesome and joyful. He dreads today. He lives in fear of tomorrow. A casualty of his own selective memory, he is visited by black-and-white recollections of a Gatsby-like adolescence, of doting parents and foppish peers stylishly attired in the latest art deco couture. He dredges up silver-screen memories of cruises to exotic locales, winters in Zermatt, lavish suppers at La Tour d’Argent in Paris, gala performances at London’s Covent Garden and lazy afternoon tennis parties spent sipping Veuve Cliquot Champagne in fluted crystal glasses. He replays halcyon days filled with improbable metaphors further tarnished by the passage of time. He stopped wearing a watch for fear that each ticking second takes him closer to the brink.

In his closet, hangs the elegant ensemble in which he will be buried -- a black velvet Dior suit, a pink poplin shirt and an Italian silk vintage tie bought in Milan for the occasion twenty years ago. He fears death but, damn it, he will put himself on display in an open casket, suitably made up, a hint of rouge adorning his lips, a white carnation pinned to his lapel. He cares not a whit about life but he will take his final curtain call with studied chic.

“You don’t find that bizarre,” I ask. “Or paradoxical?”

“That’s who I am,” my friend pleads.

“That’s who you engineered,” I retort.

“I can’t change.”

“You refuse to change. Misery loves company.”

The humble reed sways and bends and yields in the wind. The mighty oak tenses up and resists, snapping like a twig and toppling over. Everyone can change. I feel sorry for my friend but I’ve stopped preaching the virtues of positive thinking, will power and optimism. His is a hopeless case. Yesterday is an unforgiving prison. He has committed himself there until the end of time.

In stark contrast, I live on the cusp of a never-ending tomorrow. A lifetime of inauspicious yesterdays has taught me to steer clear of the past and to keep an eagle eye on the future. The past is gone. It can’t be altered, revived or updated. I revisit it on occasion when memory beckons but the sojourn is brief and utterly lacking the tinges of maudlin melancholy that color my friend’s reminiscences and poison his existence.

Unlike my friend, who is mired in the rose water-scented dreams where yesterday’s evanescent specters congregate, I feel no nostalgia, no regret. I find his narcissistic fixation on “olden times” a noxious fad and a colossal waste of time. The past is irreversible. I file it away in some dark and dusty attic where I keep bric-a-brac and junk.

More rewarding than tomorrow -- which can’t be foretold, postponed or prevented -- is a dimension rarely glimpsed by the fretful or the hyperactive. It is so fragile and magical and fleeting a realm that most of us traverse it without notice, conscious scrutiny or recollection. It’s a spatial and temporal continuum better known as “here-and-now,” whose assets are squandered with gluttonous frenzy by the unmindful and the emotionally comatose.

It was in Ein Sof, where I spent what seemed like the mere blink of an eye, that I navigated, after months of frenetic but meaningless exertions, the troubled waters of introspection. How soothing it was, once back among the living, to reconnect with my inner self, to surrender to life’s alluring embrace. Yes, I retold myself as time stood still: More useful than the past, safer than the future, is an existential realm that is tangible and lucid, at once fleeting and ceaseless. It’s the present, a place not bounded by geography, a circumstance unmarked by clocks. For those who have the courage to settle in its ineffable actuality, it’s the only place to be. Anyone yearning to break free from the shackles of the past and the ambiguities of the future will always find a warm welcome in its bosom.

I know I didn’t have to cross such galactic distances to apprehend the obvious. But serendipity is where you find it. As I came to, cleansed and brimming with a thousand spare tomorrows, I thought of my friend and others like him who, submerged under the weight of a thousand yesterdays, shackled by myth and superstition, can find no peace. Because they have ceased to dream, they have also ceased to be.

*

To be raises an interesting inference. As I transited in Ein Sof’s misbegotten universe, a part of me kept asking: Am I dreaming, or am I being dreamed by someone dreaming he is me? The question, the province of ontology (the nature of existence) and epistemology (the nature of knowledge) is simply this: Where does dream end and reality begin? Are my ruminations the byproduct of a heightened state of consciousness or the undigested leftovers of surplus meditations? Is reality a dimension only an involved observer can traverse? Or am I an accidental onlooker fated to replay reality through my mind’s eye? These and other questions not easily enunciated with words and pondered many times in silent thought -- as well as in my sleep -- have yet to yield suitable answers. As I would find out, a stopover in Ein Sof, however brief, exacts its own heavy price.