Category Fiction

The older I get, the more sense history makes. All the pieces of humanity’s exceedingly checkered past fall more into place, resulting in both more compassion for what we have come through and alarm for what continues to befall us. More than 500 years after the Renaissance posited that humanity could become a shining beacon of perfectly realized rational values, we lurch from one crisis, one massacre, one civil war, one bellicose despot to the next. One part or other of our world is always threatening to go up in flames even as many of us preoccupy ourselves with whose dessert will make the grade on the next installment of some epic cooking show that plays like the Last Judgement, set to music.

These thoughts occur as I work my way through two books that have piled atop each other on my reading table this week: Charles Taylor’s sweeping account of the secular-religious tracks running on their often paral...

There is this one life we are given. This we know. All the rest of it—the heavens, the reincarnations, the other life-as-rehearsal scenarios—let us set those aside for the moment and concentrate on the indisputable facts staring at us: We are born, we live, we die.

And most often, even if we are fortunate enough to ripen through the full flesh of our cycle on this earth, we will say it has passed too quickly, as unto a dream.

The grains. Through the hourglass.

Jack Kerouac has been pushing his response to these essential facts since he wrote his cultural icon of a novel, On the Road, at the cusp of the 1950s. (It wouldn’t see publication until 1957.) Dead since 1969, Kerouac maintains a living, throbbing literary identity, his spirit among many that hover barely behind our dead-of-night, ceiling-staring queries:

Is how I’m living worthwhile? Is this how I want to spend my time? What would I be doing,...

“I can’t imagine how you feel.”

“I can’t imagine what it’s like to…”

—lose a child
—get cancer
—nurse your mother through dementia
—be deserted by your spouse

Actually, I can imagine it. I really can. I may not know how you feel but I can certainly imagine it. Imagining it is the only way I can muster the compassion, empathy and identification with your suffering that allows me to offer you comfort and solace in your time of trial.

Imagination is not only at the root of all art and religion, but it also provides the foundation upon which all true human relationship is built. Even in strictly utilitarian business transactions devoid of any deep personal interchange, the capacity to imagine and identify with the other’s interests is what allows for fruitful, mutually satisfying negotiations.

So please, let us be done with the kind of well-meaning but essentially trumped-up, misplace...

I’m about to let my membership in the Church of Human Wholeness lapse. It’s not that I can’t afford the tithe anymore (there isn’t any). Nor that the people there aren’t nice (everyone I know striving for wholeness tries unceasingly to be as kind as they can be).

It’s just that the effort is based on a model and goal that are not only unattainable in this fractured existence we encounter, but, in my mind, not particularly desirable. Too many treasures abide in the roiling waters just below the surface of our everyday social selves—nuggets of contemplation, tensions leading to inspiration, interpersonal imbroglios leading to insight.

So I’ve had enough of wholeness. I’m giving it up. And I couldn’t be happier.

Let’s face it: human beings are a mess. A glorious, endearing, mystifying, contradictory, staggeringly complex, often-edifying-but-also-aggravating mess, but a mess nevertheless.

“What I was really getting at in Running Dog was a sense of the terrible acquisitiveness in which we live, coupled with a final indifference to the object. After all the mad attempts to acquire the thing, everyone suddenly decides that, well, maybe we really don’t care about this so much anyway.”

—From a 1988 interview with novelist Don DeLillo in Rolling Stone

Just under a decade later, DeLillo gave us Underworld, his epochal novel whose first 84 pages contain an almost hypnotic, you-are-there account of the seventh game of the 1951 World Series and the pursuit of the Bobby Thomson home run ball that capped the New York Giants’ improbable comeback against the Brooklyn Dodgers. The ball plays a pivotal role in the novel as it is pursued across time, geography and mystery by would-be possessors who have barely a glimmer of what fuels their own obsession.

Later in Underworld, a small group attends a ...