I think of the Biblical injunction against the vain repetitions in prayer characteristic of the heathen; enjoying an irony that the savage, imitable Book provides. Even one iteration of praise is a vainglory if the god attested by Matthew the Evangelist does not exist.
Some handfuls of centuries later, Lev Nikolayevich, Count Tolstoy, sets forth a masterful work of prose in which the futility of life is thoroughly exposed; the eponymous character sensibly sends herself to the grim iron path of a train (it is left untold if she is reborn elsewhere as a dove). Then, somewhat inexplicably, Tolstoy turns attention to his alter ego for a conclusion; the aptly named Levin wrestles mightily with his small, complete, universe, eventually deciding to abdicate in this struggle. His final declaration: that he would continue to pray and hope, though he did not believe the impulse to be reasonable.
Life’s mechanistic terms (the water, the food, the avoidance of certain weather patterns and pains) make it an inevitability that more than one man will live a single life; some millions may combine to only four or five distinct lives in total. What does it mean to a leatherworker or farmer to fall in love, when the armies of whole nations have been fed to crows for the sake of a Helen or a Sita? Jesus the Christ is cobbled together and popularized by Saul of Tarsus as an admixture of Dionysus and Mithras; The Son manages to imitate or else plagiarize the Buddha on multiple occasions in spite of the separation of a continent and a millennium: the young Messiah’s now-legendary betrayal and eventual resurrection in the savage form of Medieval Christianity are variants or mimicries of those daggers that eagerly tasted the flesh of the aging Julius Caesar- the numberless holy blades that conferred godhood to Caligula and Caracalla.
At times I am shaken by an impression (a star’s thumbprint on my eyelids as I slumber) that all events of life are a rendering of what has come before: tomorrow, my finding a scarred nickel on the roadside is not only prefigured, as is the date inscribed, 1985, but I have already spent the coin or have left it forgotten for decades in a dusty glass jar; or while standing in a shower, washing off a woman as the steam furrows its eyebrows at the third frost of autumn, that each cascading droplet is the exact memory, or recreation, of a previous cleansing and that the tile shall seem very cold to my toes when I emerge.
The barest compromise available appears to be the best one. It is not that all things have already passed, nor that our lives are mirrors gazing into one another, nor even that every other living thing is an automaton while I am free of such oppressive strings; rather, it is true that nearly all that has occurred or shall occur is and was foreordained. The hopeless worship of a fictional god by a fictional character, celestial tyrants modeled on the Dictator and his dynastic descendants, the length of my beard, the dryness of the apricots that sit upon my desk: these things were always to happen. However,
Once in my youth I was walking in the forest behind my home and I remember that the leaves were in the trees though I do not know if they were dying; let us say that it was spring. Since invention is the order of the moment let us also say that it was morning, the particular rose-colored morning that paper mills make possible. I was playing an unambitious linguistic game. I said to myself, “Dawn, this rose in the air. Don, to put on clothing, or to assume a thing, as Ajax did before his lethal madness. Donne, the poet, with his grudges and his fleas. Dawn, the name of a woman or the feeling of knowing that a woman of any name shall never return.”
While muttering these and other words I passed by an enormous smooth stone, left by the floods that came in autumn. If I had stopped and rotated this monolith some seventy degrees, perhaps everything could have been different. I have not yet decided, but I may choose not to touch it upon my next opportunity, either. If such brutality as has preceded me was necessary in order for my existence, it may be unsafe to alter in any way the arc of history.
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