The Local Yarn
What You Might Have Done
You had just gone into the den to grab your coffee mug, which you’d left there after breakfast; but when you saw the dingy paperback, your presence of mind failed you, and you paused. It somehow recalled the scratchy, stuffy days of your elementary education, and it rather sickened you. You looked out the window: it was raining. I have to get out of here, you thought. You might have stood there all morning, but in the rapidly thickening clouds of your mind, something told you to back out of the room and take a breath. And immediately the skies parted, you laughed at yourself, and you were home again, with twenty years safely between you and the starched collars of your youth.
This is what a drowning man must feel like when he’s gone down, down, and felt the water entering his lungs and the lights going out, and then been hauled up and given his life back by some brave stranger. You’re a little more grateful for having gone through it. Maybe when he’s got over it, the nearly-drowned man will go back every now and again, and have a look at the lake that nearly was his grave, and take fresh joy in the fact that it didn’t get him after all. That’s fine up to a point; but it isn’t healthy to do it too often.
But there are differences between you and the drowning man. You had friends at the bottom of your lake, people you knew and joked with and who had some good points about them. You can never go back and see them; for one thing your soul revolts at revisiting that episode in any way, shape or form; and for another, they are gone. It’s too bad they didn’t all turn out like you. They would have been happier.
And maybe in another five or ten years, you will go back into that den, perhaps to pack its contents into boxes for a move, and you will come across more dingy paperbacks and yellowed notebooks. Some of them are missing; you loaned them away, and truth be told you’re actually glad they were never returned. You will never read them; and someday the sight and smell of them may throw you into a gray reverie from which you never emerge. Listen! If you have any sense, you will burn them in the firepit and then take a short walk with your wife. Better a small loss of sentiment than the straightjacket.
One horse shot One rogue possum slain And one neighbors’ barn gone down in flames.
Soar
Though our labour soon devours all that lies within our powers
Soon it’s late and all our hours into past’s abyss have tore;
See, the light of Heaven’s fire pales both fame and funeral pyre;
Earthly glory, gain & hire lose the glimmer that they wore
Light of heaven pales the shallow grace and glimmer that they wore;
Now they sway us — soon, no more.
For we find in all the ages, men whose passing life presages
Life beyond our dusty cages, light behind that darkest door;
May we, as we end this chapter, freed from earth, our sometime captor,
Hail the advent of an apter sphere for all our souls to soar;
Hail, in death, the ageless God whose sight will make our souls to soar,
Dying as we lived before.
If you had told me a month ago that I would actually rather starve than cook a meal for myself, I would not have believed you. But having been plunged into a life of bachelorly self-sufficiency, I find that it is not that hard to get from not liking cooking to simply skipping the meal altogether.
It goes like this. I come home from work and go upstairs. Now, I might like a nice meal, I say to myself. (If I were normal I would merely think it to myself, but more often than not I end up saying it aloud.) But, what should I eat? I immediately consider the path of reasoning that leads to the most desirable end: a hot, tasty meal. However, a number of obstacles immediately leap out from behind my visionary steaming casseroles and boiled vegetables. It takes too long; I’d rather not do that many dishes afterwards; I have hardly anything in the cupboard because I’m too cheap to buy things I know I’ll never cook anyway; and most of all, I hate cooking.
So much for that idea. But now, I’ve got to have something else. The only alternatives to cooking are cereal and sandwiches. But I’ve just had a sandwich for lunch, and I’m starting to get sick of having cereal. From this point it is only a trifling logical hop to thinking that, of course, the simplest thing would be to just not eat. I’m not that hungry anyway (it’s always either that or I’m more tired than I am hungry), and it would probably make the next meal taste better, and I would be saving money anyway. So after a few links in a simple line of reasoning, I have arrived at such an aberration of thought, that the Darwinians might despair of my genus being around for many more generations.