Aphorisms and Paradoxes

On a recent day trip to Chicago, I observed a pervasive mood of impatience and anger. Weary of the wastelands of cornfields I had driven through, at first I relished the city's crush of cars and humanity. Yet, parsing the cacophony, horn-blowing was constant to the point of absurdity. Any driver's minor mistake was met by ruthless honking from ten directions. Impatient taxis seemed to demand the death of pedestrians, honking at cars who refused to run over them at crosswalks. Meanwhile, the sidewalks were turbulent rivers of humans in hurries, all looking annoyed at having to dodge the rocks and rapids of each other. Annoyed myself, by day's end I regarded rudeness not as a trait of Chicagoans but as the inevitable result of living in cities, where everyone is always in your way.

We cannot live happily apart from our fellow men nor among them. We perish of boredom in the country and of fury in the city.

If I could be dead without having to die, fetched in sleep to my new home of nothingness, I would not mind mortality as much. Conversely, could I die without ending up dead, I would bear my disease or drowning bravely, swabbing my pain with my plans for tomorrow. But to exit life via life's most wretched experience is a poor favor fate has paid us. Getting dead and being dead, like gang members or annoying couples, are more tolerable individually. The problem with each is the other.

Politics is the complex process by which leaders don't make decisions.

Most of every day is not spent living, but maintaining the machine of life. Merely to make our motors run, we must power them down eight hours every night. We lose another eight hours in cubicles, working to earn money to eat, eating to get energy to go back to work. In the evenings, we all keep second jobs as janitors, clipping and scrubbing the ever-emerging chaos of shabby beards, shabby lawns, browning teeth, and sprawling toenails. Finally, for one blessed hour before bed, we get a book or guitar and do what we want instead of what we must. One hour of the day is the raison d'être of the other twenty-three. Who would buy a car that needed twenty-three hours in the shop for each hour's drive?

To the hazards all wars hold, World War II in the Pacific added the ocean's instability. A foot soldier in France, though fired at, felt the solace of solid ground. A bomber shot down over Belgium could parachute into a cornfield. War and water are two chaoses combined. On the sea's meadow, there is no trench to crouch in, no building to gather thoughts while shots pause. Battling midway between continents, the element is as frightening as the enemy. A fighter pilot sputtering through pierced and cracking air, wings burning, sees only blue below to match the blue above. His terra firma is a speck of ship deck floating on the deep. In modern naval war he glimpses the chaos before creation—air, water, and fire, but no earth.

Although I often yearn for the wide life of travel, traveling is a poor road to go seeking more wealth of experience. As soon as I reach my new coordinates, I feel the inescapable shallowness of travel. I have no friends in this exotic place, no history, no job, am a member of no gardening club or church committee. I do not go to dinner parties but watch them through windows on solitary walks. I have not entered life but left it. Traveler's anomie points my yearning homeward, back to the place where I am a node in society's network, linked to life by the rich rhythms of my routines, where every street and building remind me of something I did once, where my experience, if narrower, is deeper. The same desire to participate in life that led me from home, leads me back home.

The joy of traveling is to be where you haven't been. The joy of home is to be where you have always been. Thus we destroy the joy of traveling by attaining it, since visiting the unknown makes it known, but we deepen the joy of home by being home, since every year adds fibers to our roots.

We love where we live and lust where we don't. Home is our wife, travel is our mistress. We boomerang on brief adulteries to faraway places, seeking their elegance, fleeing their emptiness.

Last night I returned home from vacation. Not having checked the local forecast, and arriving after dark, I could not tell the weather conditions except for the temperature. This morning I woke to a gray, dreary sky, humid air, intermittent rain, and moderate warmth. This waking to unknown weather recalled my experience of weather in childhood, when I had no knowledge of forecasts. Each day was a distinct world divided by the curtain of night, and I never knew what was coming. Reversing unpredictably from dry to drenched or calm to blustery, weather had an arbitrary and absolute character—not part of a causal nexus but a fate handed down. I submitted to the sky absolutely, making its mood my mood, imagining life only within its limits.

In adulthood, broadening my knowledge has localized the weather. I anticipate cold or heat waves, recognize this overcast sky as a frontal system exiting the region by tomorrow. In dry weather, I am conscious of the rain falling in places I could drive to. In winter I think of Australia's summer. Great thunderstorms which once rattled the whole world now seem small because my thoughts fly to the storm cell's edge, where the clear sky eastward dwarfs the blackness behind.

There is a comfort in the memory of my childhood acquiescence to weather. I would like, again, to be ignorant of the weather, so I could wake surprised and submissive to each day, believing the here and now were the whole of life. Knowledge of other possibilities has fragmented my adult consciousness. I am nowhere, through being too aware of everywhere.

The more I read old books, the more I discover the source of the thoughts in new books. No writer is absolutely original. Every writer's ideas are mostly recombinations of others' ideas. A novel book is a novel subset of all previous books. Still, great and mediocre writers differ in how fully they fuse and transform their borrowed materials. A mediocre book has the consistency of vegetable soup. The still-visible chunks of others' thoughts soak in the watery broth of the writer's own voice. The writing follows no recipe except to throw in every desirable dish, which produces an undesirable dish. The book has no identity, through having too many. Great books are like vegetable juice. The blender of genius liquefies the ingredients of prior reading into a uniform drink, with a texture and taste no single part possessed. Out of many flavors comes only one, the author's. Lesser writers emulate what they read, great writers assimilate it—merging masterpieces into a masterpiece.

I never knew how vast the sky was till I drove across the Great Plains. On the East Coast, the sky is an irregular blue shape between rooftops and oak branches; in Kansas it is half the world. Beneath the sky are 360 degrees of ways to go, without so much as a hedge to hinder your progress. Yet instead of feeling free, I felt trapped by such boundless acreage. Surveying the fields, there is nowhere to go, because there is nowhere different to go. Drive a mile, and you find yourself in exactly the same location. Where do locals go to enjoy a picnic? How could they possibly choose? There are no clearings in the woods or pleasant overlooks to make you want to park your wagons here instead of there, only an infinity of equivalent spots. Mountains, coastlines, cities, and forests, which elsewhere create borders that turn land into locales, are missing from America's middle. Equidistant from the Atlantic and Pacific, the Appalachians and Rockies, New York and California, the Plains are the midpoint of everything, yet a thousand miles from anything.

Oddly, long periods of time go by faster than short ones. From the vantage of Monday morning, Friday evening seems hopelessly distant, yet on turning thirty, eighteen feels like yesterday. The hours creep but the years fly. Look closer and you see that the years fly because the hours creep. The slow repetition of days and weeks lulls us into thinking time is stationary, then one day we find the days have made a decade. The train left the platform too quietly to notice, and now we glance up to see our hometown gone, new country all around us.

Though I hope all humanity will get to paradise, I wonder what single place could be paradise for us all. The peace, light, and love that would please some would make others miserable. Could a fallen Special Forces Marine be happy to wake in a heaven of harps? If he could, then death is life's lobotomy, and what survives after death is not the Marine. If he is still the Marine, he would be happier in hell where he could wage eternal combat against the devil his master. For all to be blessed, some must be damned.

Riding in the caravan of the dead, a peculiar sight: cell-phone-talking teenage drivers, soccer moms in SUVs, and bankers in BMWs all pulling to the road's shoulder. Why this wide berth for death? Do they wish to get as far from the leprous corpse as possible? Is their swerving meant as pity, as in sorry for your loss, may I offer my side of the road? Are they startled to see the hearse—the last car they too will ride in?

They themselves do not know why they stop. Customs are a culture's deep thoughts, embodied in the thoughtless actions of its people.