406: For years, ...
Reservations Recommended, the Preface begins
Preface
FOR YEARS, I have spent a good part of every day living apart from the present moment, living in my memory or in my imagination. In those hours I have found some of the greatest pleasure in my life, but I’ve also found pain there; sometimes memory and imagination gang up on me, and they become monstrous, ferocious, not a gift but a curse.
For example: about a year and a half ago, I was body-surfing and caught a wave badly. I came up spluttering and choking, with the salty taste of death by drowning, and found myself thinking of my old schoolmate Matthew Barber. I hadn’t thought of him for years, but I found that once he had re-entered my mind I couldn’t stop thinking about him until I had written this book.
I had lost track of Matthew many years earlier; in fact, after we graduated from high school we never saw each other again, although we exchanged letters a couple of times during college, and he telephoned me one night in our senior year, not long before graduation. He sounded drunk, which struck me as odd, because I’d never seen him take a drink and couldn’t picture him drinking enough to lose control of himself.
“How are you, Matthew?” I asked.
He answered, automatically, “Oh, fine,” but from that “Oh, fine” he took a step downward to “Well, not so hot, to tell the truth,” and that began a descending recitation, from disappointment to doubt to disillusionment, disaffection, darkness, depression, doom, despair.
“They only taught me things,” he complained. “They didn’t divulge any secrets. I thought they would. But they didn’t. No divulging. No divulging at all. So — what was the point? If this wasn’t the first step on the path to that vast and verdant plain of understanding where once I hoped to graze, then what was the point of my coming here?”
“Well — ” I said.
He went on without a pause: “Having expected to start out on the way to enlightenment, I have found only — a deepening darkness — a widening abyss of misunderstanding.”
“Gosh,” I said.
“Some days I don’t see the point of getting out of bed.”
This remark brought to my mind, with astonishing vividness, a weekend I had spent with a clever red-haired girl from my molluscan biology class, but I knew that this wasn’t the time to bring it up.
“Oh, wait, wait,” he said. “I did learn something. You ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“You might want to take notes.”
“I’ll remember.”
“Okay. Here goes. You know what a frustrated system is?”
“Yes!” I said proudly. “I do.”
I waited, but he said nothing.
“Well?” he said after a while.
“Oh. Sorry. It’s a mathematical system, a matrix, say, in which the elements or the relationships among them or both are defined in such a way that not all the conditions can ever be met. For instance — ”
“That’s all right. That’s all right. You’ve got it. Well here’s a frustrated system for you. You ready?”
“Still ready.”
“It’s the attempt to do more than two of the following three things. You ready?”
“I’m ready. I can’t do more than two of the following three things.”
“Yes. You. Me. One. One cannot do more than two of the following three things: Live in the world, be happy, and have a conscience.”
He lapsed into a phlegmy laugh that made me think he might have been drinking for some time.
[to be continued Thursday, January 12, 2023]
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