Not in My Book
On her blog yesterday my friend Bobbie wrote about the Bored Drawer she kept as a kid. “I’d write things to do on little pieces of paper and fill the drawer with them. Then, whenever I felt that frightening bored feeling coming on, I’d pull one out, make myself do that thing, and get un-bored. “She also mentions Russian-born writer Joseph Brodsky in this connection who got kicked out of the Soviet Union for parasitism, which I know, sounds like he was eating people’s good wool sweaters, then came to the States and mastered English so well he won a MacArthur award and was named our Poet Laureate. But in one speech Bobbie quotes him as having told hsi audience never to run from boredom "because boredom teaches you the most valuable lesson of your life: the lesson of your utter insignificance.”Well with all respect for a guy now dead I say: To Hell with That. Was Mozart insignificant? A show-off at times and maybe a bit childish but look at his work! And what about Beethoven, whose music was considered so erotic by his contemporaries some said it must be kept from the ladies whose passions would be stirred and then what? Was my sister’s cat insignificant who figured out how to use her paws as hands to grasp the pulls on Nan’s bureau drawers so she could hop in whenever she liked and scrabble among her dainty washables?Ah and here I am at cats again.Eighteen months ago when our cat Abraham almost died of a raging infection her now-missing-and-presumed-dead sister Charlotte did an unusual thing. Generally Charlotte thought Abe was a big dummy and ignored him completely but on that rainy night when we found him after three days’ hiding, holed up, waiting to die, hot with fever, and papery with dehydration, she came over to him and began licking his head and face, whether for comfort or in farewell we never knew.Was she insignificant, and also her whole little life, now ended as it seems? What about her brother's life of single-minded devotion to us? What about your life? What about mine?I think of the line from Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town where the character known as the Stage Manager, posing as the minister at a wedding, freezes the action for a moment and, addressing the audience as he does throughout the play, recalls all the young ones he has married, naming the cottage, the Sunday drives, the children, the first rheumatism, the grandchildren, the second rheumatism, the deathbed, the reading of the will - then pauses and says, “Once in a thousand times it's interesting,” but in such a tender and affectionate way you think he must mean the opposite.So are we significant at all then? To ourselves and to the ones who love us surely but how about to the One who created us if such a One there be? Which brings me to what is said of the life Jesus, namely that even if he was no son of God and never rose from the grave at all, still what he said about Giving What You Need to Get and Placing Love First seems so bright and true and real you feel you could just hang your Jiminy Cricket umbrella on it and fly clear up to Death, and past and above it until Death is revealed at last as what it well may be: a tiny dark point on an endless shining line.
