Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (48 page)

To do so, let me reference what I take to be Henry James’s most haunting novella,
The Beast in the Jungle
. The story concerns the relationship between John Marcher and May Bartram, a relationship based on a very remarkable covenant that they have established. Marcher confided to Bartram, when first they met in their youth, that he has forever had a secret but overpowering conviction that he was destined for something special in his life, that, as Bartram put it, “something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible,” was to befall him. What it might be seemed to matter less than the necessity to be prepared for it, to be on the ready so as not to miss it. And that is to be the solemn, virtually sacred nature of their bond: she pledges to watch with him, an entire lifetime if need be, as partner in his strange “passion play,” as faithful friend, indeed as co-sleuth, eyes forever fixed on what time brings, so as to espy the Event when it comes, the Beast whose rendezvous has been ordained.

Time passes. Years pass. They are the fondest of companions, they meet regularly, at the opera, in the city, at her lodgings for meals together; they are ever finely aware of the gap between their private, invisible, unshowable, yet shared intimate conviction and the great wide dense world that knows nothing of it. As the years go by, however, he begins to worry that he may be mistaken or that he may fail to perceive the miracle, so he relies ever more fully on her perspicuity and loyalty, while also sensing that she somehow knows more than he does, something potentially deadly about his aspirations and destiny, but that—out of compassion—she won’t tell him.

Then, late in the story, she becomes ill, then worsens, grows ever more feeble, is demonstrably stamped by impending death. James has written their habitual routines in such a manner that we actually feel the texture of their shared life, such as it was, and thus we understand all too well Marcher’s anxiety at losing his “coworker” too early, before her labors pay off: “What if she should have to die before knowing, before seeing—?” James offers us several beautifully drawn farewell scenes—she suddenly seems older to him, making him realize that he too is older, that time is pressing on him, making him ever more desperate to get his Vision before it’s too late. The final parting is something that gathers, that seems at once brutal and exquisite. He accuses her of being done, of having had her experience, of leaving him to his fate, and he feels dreadfully cheated, for now the door will be shut in his face. She, almost too ill to speak, tells him that the door’s still open, looks at him with all her soul, asks the ultimate question: “Don’t you know—now?” “I know nothing,” he answers. Her maid then assists her out of the room, en route out of his life, yet words are again exchanged, solemn, foreboding words. He: “What has then happened?” She: “What
was
to.” James reserves one more encounter, where she repeats that it
has
happened, even though he did not know it, telling him at the end, “I would live for you still—if I could,” then adding, as final postscript, “But I can’t!” And she doesn’t.

At her death, at her funeral, Marcher is full of sorrow, but it is a sorrow that cannot be explained or shared or even made sense of, just as their secret could have no public dimensions, and thus he is treated as a stranger; and he feels himself indissolubly bound to her while being regarded as the merest acquaintance, with no claim to grief. Another year passes, during which he travels to Asia, but he is untouched, beyond reaching, as if already dead, locked out of the secret of his own life. Returned to London, his only place of solace is her grave site, to which he makes regular visits, and it is there that the final Event transpires. It is occasioned by the sight of a younger man—Marcher is quite old now—in the grip of unmasterable grief, wrecked by his loss, ravaged, and this encounter triggers the long-overdue, awful truth: this other man has lived and loved and lost; he, Marcher, has not. The great event he was to have in his life, the event that he missed, was her. “It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion.” As he then remembers her, “pale, ill, wasted, but all beautiful, and perhaps even then recoverable,” at that moment when she had said her fateful and defining truth, her Sphinxlike riddle, “Don’t you know?” light at last comes, and the story moves inexorably to its close as the Beast finally leaps upon the man whom it haunted, and he flings himself down, dying, onto her tomb.

Is this a fable about truth or blindness or time or growing old? Doubtless all of the above. “The wait was itself his portion.” One doesn’t ordinarily think of Beckett when one thinks of Henry James, but I’d argue that
Waiting for Godot
’s depiction of two tramps suspended forever, waiting for the mysterious Godot to appear, is cued to the same chilling, corrosive truth that James is uncovering: that our life, our portion, is waiting. Our apparatus—both perceptual and conceptual—seems to be such that we focus on what we’re waiting for and hence neither see nor measure the waiting itself. The doctor’s medical report, the lover’s response, the employer’s reply: these get our attention. James’s story whispers to us that we have it wrong, that waiting is weighty in itself, that not only are we blind to the huge significance of waiting, but waiting may itself blind us. Each moment, each week, each year we wait, we move that much closer to death. Waiting suspends life, yes, by postponing decisions, by holding off action, by locking our eyes on a specific target while concealing its own price tag, its own cancerous role in silently consuming our existence. “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons,” T. S. Eliot wrote in “The Love-song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; so have we all: coffee spoons and all those other rituals that parse our trip through time. As readers, we are in a tight place, interrogated: Did we see it coming? Did we realize that Marcher had his treasure right there all the time but was blind to it?

The mind itself is targeted here, charged with faulty vision, rebuked for its accounting methods, its hideous capacity to “hold its breath” through long stretches, its propensity for outright error: looking left instead of looking right, checking out minutiae and missing the Main Event. I used to fantasize, in my younger days, that Grace (or some stupendous happiness) would come one fine day (or night) to my life but that I’d be, at just that moment, looking in the other direction and miss its arrival. (You didn’t hear the telephone because the water was running. You looked left, but the Promised Land was on the right.) James’s story suggests that we could look right at Grace and never see it, because of the tragic misprision that addles our vision, that sees our (potential) loved ones as familiar decor, part of our personal entourage, rather than as vibrant living creatures with whom life might be—might have been—shared. All that is what it means when we discover that we have never lived. It’s a late discovery, and it casts a terrible light on the long voyage we have completed prior to seeing. One’s past life scarcely disappears in this equation: on the contrary, it is out there in all its monstrous vacuous plenitude, yet fallow, empty, never made “real.”

I claimed that the mind is targeted, even though one might prefer to indict Marcher’s heart as the faulty organ, the blind instrument. But are we in fact equipped to give time’s passing its proper due? Are we capable of converting waiting into life? One of the nastiest wake-up calls I know on this topic is Kafka’s sibylline little parable “Before the Law.” In this haunting piece a man from the country arrives at the “Law” but is prevented entry by the doorkeeper on guard, who explains that he cannot be admitted “at the moment.” The man proceeds to wait. “There he sits waiting for days and years.” Small talk passes between the man and the doorkeeper concerning the doorkeepers farther down the line; bribes are proposed and accepted, “only to keep you from feeling that you have left something undone.” The man grows old, grows childish, starts to fade, approaches death, yet glimpses in the darkness a “radiance that streams immortally from the door of the Law.” Before dying, he poses one last question to the doorkeeper: How is it that no one during all these years has sought admittance here but me? The answer: “No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.”

At which point Kafka begins a kind of extended midrashic analysis of the parable, coming at it from all possible angles, trying to interrogate it for its hidden meaning about life, truth, and salvation. There is much talk about the doorkeeper; much talk about the man; much talk about who is deceived, who is not. But not a word about waiting. Remember the doorkeeper’s words when he accepts the bribes: “only to keep you from feeling that you have left something undone.” I want to suggest that something monstrous was left undone: the man stopped living; his life became only a wait for truth. Utterly unaccented in this story is the tragic notion that the (maniacal) quest for meaning and truth and salvation blinds us to the passing of time. I see John Marcher in Kafka’s story.

Everyone has heard the adage that no one on his deathbed bemoans not having made enough money or clinched enough deals; instead, one feels regret and remorse and perhaps horror at having shortchanged one’s human relationships, at having given all to ambition and not enough to love. It is a pass to which no one growing older can wish to come. But how to avoid it? Can you love enough? Can you see the wastage of your life? What does it take to get this right? When is it too late? Ingmar Bergman’s film
Wild Strawberries
seems to me entirely cued to these matters. In this haunting film, the old and venerable physician Isak Borg is scheduled to receive an honorary doctorate at Lund in recognition of a lifetime of selfless achievement. Bergman’s plot consists of Isak driving from Stockholm to Lund, with his daughter-in-law, Marianne, as passenger; it’s going to be a roller coaster for the old man, who is slated to make some awful discoveries about his life. Enlisting an unforgettable film arsenal of hallucinatory scenes that indict the doctor from every angle, we are made to measure the huge gap between this man’s surface manner and appearance (including his appearance to himself) and the nasty psychic reality that is unfurling shot after shot, coming into indicting focus.

Having seen and taught this film literally dozens of times, I find myself invariably on the old doctor’s side, as indeed are others in the film: in one key scene a gas station attendant (played by a young Max von Sydow) refuses to take money for filling up the doctor’s tank, and we realize that he is indeed a hero for many many people, making us wonder if Bergman is not being outright punitive in unmasking this kind old man. (It also matters that the old man is played by Victor Sjöström, a famous silent film director, in his own final years; we know that Sjöström was depressed, suffered through this film, repeatedly begged Bergman to let him off.) Finally, I cannot bear to see this old man discover that he “has never lived” or that his seemingly successful life has actually been the fraudulent thing Bergman seems intent on portraying it as. But alas, the film is unflinching on just this front. I look at the screen and find this man irresistibly winning and charming, but then Marianne informs us (the old man and me) that it’s just a facade: “You are an old egotist, Father. You are completely inconsiderate, and you have never listened to anyone but yourself. All this is well hidden behind your mask of old-fashioned charm and your friendliness. But you are hard as nails, even though everyone depicts you as a great humanitarian. We who have seen you at close range, we know what you really are. You can’t fool us.”

Ouch. What hurts most is that Borg himself is utterly stunned by her remark. It has never occurred to him that he might be a hypocrite. Of all those conceivably fooled by his act, he himself takes honors. But Bergman has a lesson plan prepared for the old doctor. It begins with the surreal opening sequences, where we see a nightmarish scene of a horse-drawn wagon with a coffin heading toward the old man, banging into a lamppost, causing the coffin to slide off, followed by the top coming off and a hand slowly rising out of the coffin: this is major rendezvous. As the doctor fearfully looks in, he sees the dread contents: himself as dead—not quite dead, however, since the hand tries to pull him down into the casket. The message is clear: death has come calling, your days are numbered, time to think about your final exit. Or grislier: you are dead; you’ve always been dead; now you can see it. With those happy tidings in place, the trip to Lund can begin, so as to deliver the next installments. With beautiful economy, the spatial trip through Sweden inaugurates a temporal trip through the old man’s past life.

You discover you’ve never lived
. Borg recaptures his past, but with a number of twists. Instead of the Proustian rebirth whereby all of Combray magically emerges out of a cup of tea and a dunked madeleine, the old doctor revisits family haunts, experiences the past coming back to life, but he is weirdly part of the action: an old guy looking in. First off, he sees his lovely cousin Sara (played by Bibi Andersson) betraying him (despite her best intentions) with his raffish older brother, Sigfrid, and we begin to hear the motif that will gather into an indictment: Isak is too otherworldly, too pure, too aloof. This initial scene has as much comedy as pathos in it, but when Sara is teased for kissing Sigfrid, still more data on Isak come in: he is refined, moral, sensitive, kisses only in the dark, talks about sinfulness, seems strangely like a child. Bergman has stacked his deck by inserting a “real” Sara into his road trip: a young girl (also played by Bibi Andersson) with her two boyfriends, who are hitchhiking south and join Borg and Marianne; this creates a lovely counterpoint, for we see the gentle flirtation between the old man and the young girl with the same name and face of his first love, as a kind of coda for the lost past. (We know that Bibi Andersson flirted continously with Sjöström during the filming, partly in response to Bergman’s urging, for she was able to get the old actor’s tired blood flowing again for the camera, and it shows.)