EPILOGUE

History, in the end, turns out to be not what actually happened, but what historians say happened and what people remember. Along with rationalization, revisionism has always had an important place as one of the Fates that determine how we think. Writers help create history, and so much the worse for any facts that get in the way. The physical survivors don’t last long anyway, and only art remains. True or perverted, it becomes the lasting cultural memory. That’s fine with me: I have never been too troubled with certainty. Life has always remained mysterious to me—not only the meaning of life in any metaphysical sense, but even the plain fact of what is and what was. Behind even the most commonplace facts I see lingering ambiguities. Maybe that’s part of the reason my imagination turned to fiction in the first place, and why I find it mildly amusing that so many people have known so much about life that they could live mine for me in addition to living their own. (Letter to Steven Bodzin, April 12, 1995)

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about ignorance and knowledge, about how long it takes to really know something or somebody, how unlikely we are ever to understand anything completely. You sit in a group of people and you can’t even begin to know what brought all of you together. You can’t capture the essence of a single moment of experience. You can’t for a second begin to articulate the full depth of your own emotions, motives, impulses. When I woke up before four this morning, in the faint light I visualized a curtain of ignorance in front of me. As I stared it took vague shape, became the outlines of the countless well-intentioned but uninformed people who had tried to apply one formula or another to the mystery of my life, as if by their undifferentiated and generally uninformed observations about my life they could understand their own. Then I noticed a pinhole of light. As I approached, it became a cacophony of certainty. It was “the answers” all jumbled together—a white hole of knowledge. But just as a black hole sucks everything into it, this white hole repelled me the harder I tried to approach. I backed away and thought about myself at sixteen, on the day before I entered the yeshiva, lying on a ramp in Cleveland Stadium, jammed against a wire mesh screen. There were almost ninety thousand people in the stadium, and enough of them were in front of me that I could only rarely get a glimpse of the field. I did not see much baseball that day, only people in the way. The image has become an important one for me, because I have come to see that people are not in the way—they are just people, doing whatever it is they do. And if they only occasionally step aside long enough for me to get a brief glimpse of the action, then I must take advantage of those fleeting moments so that I do not lose whatever I am capable of grasping. (Letter to Arlene Bender, February 2, 2003)

Catherine and I sat on our couch last night, grateful for life, grateful for the relative calm of our environment, grateful for whatever health we have, grateful for being able to give more than we want to take, grateful for each other’s company. Grateful for the box of Kleenex that sustained us through the film version of a book we had already read.

For years, I have had the uneasy sense that I was living somebody else’s life. The once familiar life ended long ago. When I was experiencing the Jewishness, the Americanness, the academia, they fit like my own skin, even when I no longer enjoyed them. They were me. Somehow, after I left the family I had made and had thought to carry to eternity, nothing was mine. My life was an accident, an aberration. As comfortable as Ottawa is, it was always a place I knew I would leave someday. For ten years, fifteen years, that thought sustained me. The jobs I was doing were just an expedient, not really me, not expressing my hopes and dreams. They were somebody else’s activities, pursued for the sake of money only. But they would never give me enough money to buy my life back. I had left that behind somewhere, on a farm in Maberly, in a house that long ago burned down; it was filled with children who no longer existed, it persisted in memories that haunted me with the hope of once again becoming a person of substance. Somewhere in the past I had been a person I really liked, but I could not really remember when, only remember that it had been true. And nobody could share any of those feelings unless I wrote about them, and I was not writing.

How many times do we have to learn the letter A? There on the couch with Catherine I realized, as if I had never thought of it before, that this is as good as life gets. There were people within walking distance of our house who didn’t want to go home, people who had no home to go to, people desperate enough to wonder how easy it would be to get ten or twenty bucks from the till at that little store, people out in the cold because their car wouldn’t start and they didn’t have a quarter to call anybody, or they had nobody to call. And I realized that if I had to fabricate the most pleasant and rich life I could, it would probably look something like this: Catherine and me sitting on the couch in the early winter, snuggling against each other, sharing a box of Kleenex and focusing on the things on earth we must learn to be full human beings. John Lennon said life is what happens while you're busy making other plans, and I have seen it so often. I decried the beggars at the Wall in Jerusalem because they were getting in the way of my life, but months later I awoke to the realization that they were the essence of the experience. Maybe I can now abandon my image of self as Rip Van Winkle, an image that has seemed apt since I left Thunder Bay in 1973. I have not been asleep while the world went on. I have simply been looking for the world in the wrong places. And another heaven has been going on all around me. (Letter to Lianna Bodzin, December 8, 2004)

Brad Hill used to wonder at how I could continue to turn my back on the Jewish tradition. But I don’t, really. I'm just more concerned with finding identity in front of me than behind me. And I remain the person I was years ago, only more covered over with veneer of civilization and rationalization.

Many people my age seem to have finished life, or at least made peace with it, while I am still only starting. Many are judgmental overachievers who accept only overachievement as normal. They consider their working life finished; they have already done whatever they had planned to do and have turned their careers over to children or strangers. The children are grown, married, their homes filled with the spoils of a full life. There is a kind of complacency about them, which I hope never to experience. Their lives burn like an indictment that I have never taken advantage of my era or my talents but have squandered a rich life experimenting and continuing to ask the basic questions that most people stopped asking when they were eighteen: How shall I live? and Why?

Then there are the people who envy me because they mistakenly think I have lived a life without cares, at the university, on the farm, freelance writing, even freelance thinking. They do not know that achieving dreams comes at a cost. They don't realize that isolation in the pursuit of Truth is almost always painful. The woods and the farms were just part of a long list of eagerly sought after earthly delights — like degrees and vocations — which ultimately turned out to be disappointing.

If my letters seem grim, it may be because I have no grandchildren. Instead of sending progeny into the world, I send cryptic messages. Just think of what your grandchildren save you from thinking about. I wouldn't know what to do with a life that had more answers than questions, and I like to think that much of my purpose in life is to raise questions for others as well. Some of my colleagues at work think it's a necessary function. But they don't know that I have some answers. They just never reach them because they ask the wrong questions. (Letter to Cherna Kowalsky, August 18, 1997)

Shaping a life is not unlike shaping fiction. It rarely goes where you think it will, or should. There are always people around, conditions you didn’t anticipate, new commitments and passions, the baggage of the past. And it takes a supreme effort to make a life into a work of art—especially in this era, when you can’t talk about art in the traditional sense any more. Since I was in school, when it was a novelty to speak of what Truman Capote and Norman Mailer were developing as the so-called non-fiction novel, so much fiction has come to ignore plot. Paintings without pattern are not uncommon and, of course, there is music without melody.

My dad was always big on melody: You can’t have music without a good tune, he used to say. But it had to be straightforward. He couldn’t hear a melody unless it hit him between the eyes. He loved Verdi, for example. I reminded him that dozens of composers had arranged the Dies Irae theme with their own unique orchestration—it was a favorite tune of Rachmaninoff and Liszt; Berlioz used it in Symphonie Fantastique and Shostakovich in the Leningrad Symphony, to name a few. Each unique orchestration almost made it a new piece. But it didn’t do any good to argue. Vision, I guess, is limited by experience. There were subtleties he didn’t get. Most chamber music, for example. Not enough color. And he couldn’t appreciate any of the symphonies of Sibelius after the second. No tunes. He was unimpressed by harmonics and compositional form; only the big stage and the expansive palette could satisfy him. Ironically, he had no patience with the grandest and most inspired sounds of all, organ music and religious choral music. Once he mistakenly bought a recording of Bach’s B Minor Mass, listened to the first side of the first disc, and put it away forever. Some of its tunes leave Verdi in the dust, but you can’t hum counterpoint.

I know there are blinders that limit my own esthetic vision. Some no doubt great composers of the recent past have composed music that speaks to me about as lucidly as pots falling out of the cupboard. And Beethoven sounded that way even to professional musicians in his time. Can the same kinds of blinders be keeping me from appreciating the poetry of my own life?

I went backstage to meet Glenn Gould the first time he came to Detroit. When I held out my hand to shake his, he pulled back as if I had slapped him. “Artist,” he explained under his breath. Shaping a life, even accepting the universe, can sometimes mean drawing back from it. To maintain your own integrity you sometimes have to tell the confused souls around you that you have your own business to carry out. For my life to become a work of art I have to remain convinced that nobody else has ever lived it, that my materials, my talents, my perspective are unique, and so will the outcome be unique—even if along the way it seems to have no melody, no shape, no plot, no rhyme or reason. (Letter to Merton Sealts, March 29, 1996)