|
|
November 30, 2001/Kislev 15, 5762, Vol. 54, No. 12
Traveling light
The world is a book
I don't think I've ever baked as many cakes as I have since Sept. 11. Or prepared as many soups or stews. I favor dishes meant to last - no soufflˇs that take hours to assemble and moments to eat. It's leftovers I want to see: soup stored in the fridge, banana bread wrapped up on the cake plate, each improving as the days go by.
At first I tried to fight my impulse to flee to the kitchen, telling myself that I belonged in my study, at the keyboard, working. But then I gave up. If I needed to see my family eating homemade meals with gusto, well, that was a need that could be easily gratified.
As we dig in, we talk about events of the day, but just briefly. My kids are coping enviably well precisely because they don't dwell on what's happening. Jake, 14, asks a couple of questions, and then lets us know, by his wandering attention, when he's had enough. From him I learned to take in only what I can absorb, which means that our house is now pretty much CNN-free.
His older brother, at college, talks about world politics as globally as possible. He doesn't want to focus on casualties, risks, or the future. He's tends to begin conversations by saying, "I'm thinking of traveling this summer. Maybe going to Europe. Or Israel."
"Not this summer," we tell him.
Mostly, though, cakes and travel to the side, it's been a season of unbearable contrasts. Sept. 11, after all, was a picture-book fall day. The black smoke pouring out of the doomed buildings couldn't have defiled a bluer, more crystalline sky. And it was against this backdrop of gorgeous weather that we nursed our grief and anxiety.
In my own family there's a huge gap as well. My life has never been easier or richer. My children are thriving (knock wood) and more self-sufficient than they've ever been; my marriage is going strong after a quarter century. Within, peace; without, horror. It's fitting that this has been a season of discrepancy, for the war itself is about a gap - between those who believe in metaphor and those who don't. As the novelist E. L. Doctorow eloquently explained in a radio interview, there are two types of people (he was paraphrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson): Those for whom the book is a world, and those for whom the world is a book.
For those of us who see the world as a book, everything is a text that can be plumbed for meaning, debated, appreciated, and derided. Examining all phenomenon, rejecting nothing a priori, is an inductive way of looking at life.
But if the book - the Koran, the Torah - is a world, then the text is finite. Instead of the openness of induction, we are left with the claustrophobia of deduction. Everything we need to know is right here, between these covers. Everything else, discard. Distrust. Devalue. Destroy.
Literalists, fundamentalists - in all religions - believe that the book is a world. I think that they take this cloistered position out of fear. The world, as we well know, can be a fearsome place. Planes can be deliberately crashed into buildings.
Those of us who love the book of the world know that fear is real, and hard to manage, but that we must find a way to manage it, as my family is learning to do, without denying its reality.
Our hearts are hypersensitive; our emotions compose a delicate ecosystem: if we try to shut down any one feeling, eventually all feelings shut down. If we deny fear, then soon enough we will deny love. That's why zealots, who can't face their fears, can justify killing in the name of their cause.
As we approach Hanukkah, a season during which we open ourselves to the possibility of miracles, I'm thinking about embracing, not denying. The world is a book. To place it between two covers is a crime against the human heart.
|
