In his closet, hangs the elegant ensemble in which he will be buried -- a black velvet Dior suit, a pink poplin shirt and an Italian silk vintage tie bought in Milan for the occasion twenty years ago. He fears death but, damn it, he will put himself on display in an open casket, suitably made up, a hint of rouge adorning his lips, a white carnation pinned to his lapel. He cares not a whit about life but he will take his final curtain call with studied chic.
“You don’t find that bizarre,” I ask. “Or paradoxical?”
“That’s who I am,” my friend pleads.
“That’s who you engineered,” I retort.
“I can’t change.”
“You refuse to change. Misery loves company.”
The humble reed sways and bends and yields in the wind. The mighty oak tenses up and resists, snapping like a twig and toppling over. Everyone can change. I feel sorry for my friend but I’ve stopped preaching the virtues of positive thinking, will power and optimism. His is a hopeless case. Yesterday is an unforgiving prison. He has committed himself there until the end of time.
In stark contrast, I live on the cusp of a never-ending tomorrow. A lifetime of inauspicious yesterdays has taught me to steer clear of the past and to keep an eagle eye on the future. The past is gone. It can’t be altered, revived or updated. I revisit it on occasion when memory beckons but the sojourn is brief and utterly lacking the tinges of maudlin melancholy that color my friend’s reminiscences and poison his existence.
Unlike my friend, who is mired in the rose water-scented dreams where yesterday’s evanescent specters congregate, I feel no nostalgia, no regret. I find his narcissistic fixation on “olden times” a noxious fad and a colossal waste of time. The past is irreversible. I file it away in some dark and dusty attic where I keep bric-a-brac and junk.
More rewarding than tomorrow -- which can’t be foretold, postponed or prevented -- is a dimension rarely glimpsed by the fretful or the hyperactive. It is so fragile and magical and fleeting a realm that most of us traverse it without notice, conscious scrutiny or recollection. It’s a spatial and temporal continuum better known as “here-and-now,” whose assets are squandered with gluttonous frenzy by the unmindful and the emotionally comatose.
It was in Ein Sof, where I spent what seemed like the mere blink of an eye, that I navigated, after months of frenetic but meaningless exertions, the troubled waters of introspection. How soothing it was, once back among the living, to reconnect with my inner self, to surrender to life’s alluring embrace. Yes, I retold myself as time stood still: More useful than the past, safer than the future, is an existential realm that is tangible and lucid, at once fleeting and ceaseless. It’s the present, a place not bounded by geography, a circumstance unmarked by clocks. For those who have the courage to settle in its ineffable actuality, it’s the only place to be. Anyone yearning to break free from the shackles of the past and the ambiguities of the future will always find a warm welcome in its bosom.
I know I didn’t have to cross such galactic distances to apprehend the obvious. But serendipity is where you find it. As I came to, cleansed and brimming with a thousand spare tomorrows, I thought of my friend and others like him who, submerged under the weight of a thousand yesterdays, shackled by myth and superstition, can find no peace. Because they have ceased to dream, they have also ceased to be.
*
To be raises an interesting inference. As I transited in Ein Sof’s misbegotten universe, a part of me kept asking: Am I dreaming, or am I being dreamed by someone dreaming he is me? The question, the province of ontology (the nature of existence) and epistemology (the nature of knowledge) is simply this: Where does dream end and reality begin? Are my ruminations the byproduct of a heightened state of consciousness or the undigested leftovers of surplus meditations? Is reality a dimension only an involved observer can traverse? Or am I an accidental onlooker fated to replay reality through my mind’s eye? These and other questions not easily enunciated with words and pondered many times in silent thought -- as well as in my sleep -- have yet to yield suitable answers. As I would find out, a stopover in Ein Sof, however brief, exacts its own heavy price.
ONE
I arrived this morning after a brief and uneventful journey. I have scant recollection of this crossing. I may have suppressed it. I was eager to leave, disembark and settle in, and I paid little attention to the featureless landscape that unrolled before me. Unlike my travels of yore, when every ripple on the open sea, every cloud, every blade of grass, every flower picked along the way enthralled me, this voyage elicited only impatience. Not so very long ago I had dawdled, happy to suspend the moment as ports-of-call sang their siren song in the distance. Meandering to the antipodes and back had helped quell boredom, quench recurring pangs of wanderlust. I likened these expeditions to hitching a ride on a time machine that defies the sameness of immovable space: I sought in transience an antidote against immutability.
Wars, migrations and expatriations (or was it ruthless heredity?) had predisposed me to the meanderings that would highlight much of my life. Suitcases, always at the ready, were to me what wings are to birds, devices by which one takes flight, instruments of escape.
In a rare moment of controlled frustration, my mother had once astutely remarked, “When you’re here, you're restless and melancholy, so you go there. And when you’re there, you can’t wait to move on. Where in this vast creation can you ever find contentment,” she asked. I remember blurting out, unconsciously, what must have been a self-evident truth.
“In between, mama, in between.”
Time moves on with unrelenting swiftness. With it comes change, some unforeseen, some unmanageable. “Time,” said Henri Bergson, “is what hinders everything from being ceded all at once.” His was an optimist’s perspective. Time is a thief: it takes back everything it cedes -- itself included.
It was in haste and with a feeling of relief that I now proceeded toward my final destination. If you recall, it had been a year of gloomy forecasts and apocalyptic omens. Crops were dying, ravaged by torrential rains, droughts and cyclonic winds. Starvation was spreading across the globe and those who were not yet dying rioted in the streets and paid with their lives at the hands of crazed constabularies and vigilantes gone mad. Dark passions, political and religious, threatened to envenom societies already weakened by decaying economies, corporate greed and unregulated capitalism. Everyone, even the most sanguine, privately conceded that a menacing morrow lay ahead.
*
Despite my protestations, friends and relations had gathered to see me off, some armed with useless offerings, others so moved by my imminent departure as to shed a few ceremonial tears. The tears, I knew, would soon be stemmed. Life has a way of dimming surplus memories. You can always count on those most given to mawkish displays to recover from the deepest sorrow. Time heals everything. And life goes on.
My instructions had been clear: No crying, no lofty words, no banalities, no expressions of regret, no outpourings of maudlin sentimentality, no long-drawn sendoff, no flowers -- especially no flowers. I’d always hated goodbyes, not because “parting is such sweet sorrow” but because I had detected, even as a child, a troubling insincerity in the effusiveness of the farewell ritual. I’d seen too many congealed smiles of regret and tear-imbibed handkerchiefs; I’d heard too many words of staggering triviality