Gratitude and Death

 

Table in my old farmhouse

I woke up thankful to be alive on Thanksgiving morning and thankful to have Sunny Juliet by my side, and very thankful she is no longer a puppy, that last a major cause for gratitude. We have made it, she and I, through what seemed like endless years of puppyhood, and I’m sure she was just as frustrated with me as I was with her on many occasions, but she will be four years old in December, and our home life together is much calmer these days.

Always ready for fun!

Thankful for family and friends, of course, and I don’t say “of course” as if reciting a formula. Thursday morning, punctuated by a dog walk in bitter cold wind off Lake Michigan, was also punctuated by texts with friends and family members all over the map. Some sent photos. All in the midst of holiday meal preparations, many already surrounded by family guests (or hosts), we found time to connect with others many miles away. 

We shared food and many memories.

My friend Laura arrived in the afternoon at my place. Our first Thanksgiving together was in 1971, and there were many other holiday dinners between then and now, in one place or another, often with a group of mixed family and friends. This year we collaborated on dinner, and I was very thankful to be able to share another T-Day with Laura and also, beforehand, to enjoy delicious cooking aromas in my old farmhouse while exchanging greetings with others farther afield.

 

And a fine, banal evening in shul it was. There were the usual jitters about the quorum. Pointing to the local Jewish newspaper on the table, one man said, “Maybe we should read the obituaries and see who the mourners are.” Where there’s death, there’s hope. Another man looked at him and asked: “Are you in trusts and estates?” We all agreed that the shul should not have to depend for its services on its mourners. Death is a poor foundation for community. (But it helps.) Eventually there were ten and I said amen.

 

-      Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish

 

The author of the excerpt quoted above wrote an entire book focused on his year of mourning for his father, detailing traditional Jewish mourning customs over the years. He had returned, after years away, to his Jewish tradition in order to fulfill his duty to his late father by saying the mourner’s kaddish in the company of nine other Jews for eleven months following his father’s death. I was struck by the passage I quote here, especially the words “Death is a poor foundation for community,” because—always reading more than one book at a time—another book I was reading regularly at the same time was The Dominion of Death, by Robert Pogue Harrison, and it is Harrison’s contention that human rituals surrounding death and burial are the very foundation of civilization, the foundation of our humanity itself, because to be “human,” Harrison argues, is something other than merely belonging to a species. “To be human means above all to bury.” And to bury properly. The towns and cities that make up human homes have always originated, he says, as cemeteries. 

 

I will not attempt to do justice to Harrison’s rich thesis here but want to skip to something (again, as with Wieseltier) near the end of the book:

 

Humanity means mortality. Mortality in turn means that we repossess ourselves only in giving ourselves. For even receiving help is a mode of self-giving, just as the refusal of help is, or can beam a failure of generosity [my emphasis added].

 

      - Robert Pogue Harrison, The Domain of the Dead 

 

If I was, as my mother told me, a selfish child (and I think she was right about that), it didn’t mean that I wanted others to wait on me or help me. I was selfish but not greedy or demanding. In fact, our parents had drummed into us that when we were at someone else’s house we were not to ask for things, and so when we were at Uncle Jim’s house and he offered something (I don’t remember what it was), it felt to me as if accepting would be asking for, and I could only mutter awkwardly (I was an awkward child, as well as a selfish one), “I don’t know,” to which my uncle sensibly replied, “Well, if you don’t know, I don’t know, either.” And so I didn’t get it.

 

Why couldn’t he just give me whatever it was (maybe lemonade?)? I couldn’t ask for it! And accepting was as difficult for me as giving.

Most memories of Uncle Jim were very happy ones!

It all seemed so unbelievably complicated that it took me longer—long into adulthood—to be comfortable with accepting help or gifts or favors than it did to learn how to give. Even saying “Thank you” seemed to acknowledge a debt, and how could I ever repay the debt? I found it easier to say “No, thank you.”

 

Was I a strange and inward child who thought too much and created difficulties where none needed to be? Guilty! But I got over it. Finally.

 

My friend Annie was a bigger help than she ever realized. In the last years of her life, Annie needed a lot of help, and she managed to ask for it gracefully and accept it graciously. No annoying demands, no brusque refusals. Finally, thanks to Annie, I saw how accepting help could be a gift, too. It was certainly a gift she gave me.

 

Friday morning. Only very light snow here so far, and no blizzard expected in the near future. Thankful for a warm house, I bring down a few ornaments from the cold upstairs to decorate my little bookshop tree in Northport and then go outdoors into the cold with my patient dog girl. Another day—and we are still alive!

On-leash (hunting season), there is still a lot to sniff.

STILL COME HOME: Book Review

The novel opens with a young woman in Afghanistan daydreaming of an apricot:

…She wants the fruit. She wants her freedom. She wants to do everything she shouldn’t. She shoves back her purple headscarf and walks to the open window of her small, second-story apartment. She sticks her torso out and leans, hanging her head upside down. Her hair dangles like a black flag in the breeze. Positioned like this, she won’t have to look up the street at the remains of her family compound. She won’t have to wish she’d died in there three years ago either.  

-- Katey Schultz, Still Come Home

This morning I finished reading Katey Schultz’s new novel, Still Come Home, a story focusing on four main characters: Aaseya, the young Afghani woman in her early 20s; Rahim, her 40-year-old husband; Miller, an American second lieutenant stationed in Afghanistan; and Miller's wife, Tenley, back home in South Carolina. I don’t want to tell you very much about them, because you deserve to meet them as I did, as Schultz introduces them. Let me say only that their worlds and cultures and experiences are light-years apart from each other but that as a reader I was completely pulled into every scene, fully believing in their reality. 

This is a powerful novel. From beginning to end, there is no slackening in the tautness of either the action or dialogue. 

…A headache balls at the base of his skull. He watches the city face into shadows, block by block. Airborne particles of sand catch the sun’s rays, Mother’s Nature’s tracer fire. Within minutes, the horizon appears lit by a throbbing Armageddon. Four tours and it has come to this. The night before Miller’s last mission outside the wife, Chaffen’s voice echoing like a challenge inside Miller’s head: That’s how you’ve got to start thinking, in all directions.

Miller’s mind is fixated on responsibilities to his men and his family back home but tortured also by an earlier mission that went badly. Rahim, hungering for a future with sons of his own, has not escaped his own nightmare boyhood, and his present is confused and cruelly limited. So both men try to focus on tasks at hand and not think or plan or dream too far ahead. Their wives, too, can only meet each day’s immediate challenges and hope, dimly, that the future will be better. 

A poor, scrawny, mute, orphaned or outcast child plays a pivotal role in the story. 

…Flecks of dirt line his closed eyelids, and she can see a few fleas in his shaggy, dark hair. His lips are chapped, his earlobes bitten and red. Scuff marks fall in a line down his torso, likely from belly-crawling over rocks or wriggling through shrubs. At the bottom of his shorts, each leg pokes through the opening of fabric like a tent pole.

Such a frail and unlikely survival — so far! — in this country torn by endless war! We fear for Miller and Rahim and Aaseya but especially for Ghazél as the story’s tension amps up page by page. Does this child have a chance?

Describing the most barren landscape, Schultz’s lyrical sentences convey the love its inhabitants have for their home:

Rahim darts across the road, taking his weapon off safety, then leans his side against the embankments from shoulder to ankle, blending into the land as seamlessly as a scattering of dirt. The desert is amazing like that, the way it stretches and folds across the country like the broad, sloping belly of a giant. The way it holds almost everything a man could ever need, including his shape, until they’re practically one.

But maybe you think you don’t want to read a novel about war in the Middle East. 

Perhaps Afghanistan is the last place you think you want to envision with your mind’s eye. 

It’s too alien, too faraway, too nightmarish. 

What I’m telling you is that those “reasons” count for nothing. It is not only the American soldier and his wife back home with whom you will feel kinship but also with Aaseya (from the book’s very first page), Rahim, and Ghazél, and this story will bring home to you the truth of universal humanity like nothing else I’ve read for a long time. 

*. *. *

Katey Schultz visited Dog Ears Books in 2013 to read from her book of short and short-short stories, Flashes of War. Among her many awards, Schultz was awarded a Gold Medal from the Military Writers Society of America for that earlier work. I’ve been anticipating more from her ever since, and Still Come Home has exceeded my high expectations. Her connection to Michigan, in case you’re wondering, is through Interlochen Center for the Arts. 

Who Wants to Read About Habermas?

Sorry, I can’t help it, even though I know from experience how my readership plummets whenever philosophy shows its stern face. But it’s part of my life, and part of who I am, and that’s that. You are forewarned! Actually--please give this a chance, because my conclusion is that philosophy should be part of everyone's lives, and if it isn't, it's philosophy's fault. There--conclusion first, now back to the beginning.

Recently one of my old graduate school friends made a reference on Facebook to a Habermas essay, “An Awareness of What Is Missing.” The essay begins with a reflection on a friend’s memorial service, held in a church but with no religious expression—no prayers, no blessing, no liturgy--so the first natural interpretation of the title is that religious content is what’s missing from a memorial service. But this is Habermas, and he has another point to make, more distant and complicated. His concern is not with funerals but with the chasm between science and religion.

Across this chasm, he notes, as have many of us, there is little communication or respect. Tolerance, or the politically guaranteed freedom of noncoercion that we enjoy in the West, is an insufficient support for meaningful dialogue, and thus freedom itself lacks solidarity. In a different tradition of discourse, one might identify the lack of solidarity as the contradiction to be resolved if freedom is to survive.

Habermas says explicitly that “what is missing” is a common normative foundation shared by both science and religion. A positive foundation? (Noncoercion is negative, an absence.) A substantive foundation? What would it look like? What would be involved?

Here are the moves I see in the brief essay:

(1)      It is not enough for the liberal state to be neutral (noncoercive) toward science and religion.

(2)      Legal protection of different views is not enough.

(3)      The legitimacy of the liberal state itself demands normative foundations justifiable by various world-views within a pluralistic society, from within those world-views.

(4)      Both religion and science, therefore, must “open up” to recognition, for reasons of their own, to equal freedom for the other.

(5)      Neither religion nor science should be claiming an exclusive rational or revelatory perspective.

As far as I can see, that does not answer but brings us back to the question of what normative foundation the liberal state can and should provide as common ground for opposing points of view. The essay hints at a Kantian solution, with each participant acknowledging the equality and rationality of every other.

The very large question is important, as is, for many of us, the small, original question of how to pay recognition to the ending of an individual life. And yet—I am so unsatisfied with the essay. When philosophy (much poetry condemns itself to the same fate and in the same way) sidelines itself, relegates itself to academic-only arenas, what contribution does it make to the rest of the world? Very little that I can see.

I am not asking for a “dumbing-down” of the conversation, but I don’t see any reason why it cannot be conducted in ordinary language, either. Rene Descartes, David Hume, and Henri Bergson (Bergson in the 20^th century!) spoke to everyone, not simply to lecture halls of academics. (Bergson spoke in lecture halls, but when he lectured the hall was crammed to overflowing with non-academic crowds.) For me, this is what is missing. What is missing is language that speaks directly and comprehensibly so that nonphilosophers will listen and read and feel welcome in the conversation. When philosophy sits on its academic “high horse,” neither theologians nor scientists, neither people of faith nor atheists give it two seconds’ attention.

Is it any wonder that the most vibrant philosophical activity these days is taking place in the intersection of ethics, economics, and psychology? Writers at that intersection speak to us where we live.

Not long ago—perhaps in the New Yorker—I read an article about women on opposite sides of the legality of abortion question coming together in an exchange of views and a search for mutual understanding. As I recall the story, the women quickly put aside epithets when they met face to face. Speaking together, they came to respect one another. A fascinating outcome of the conversations was that very few of them changed their opinions: most, in fact, were more firmly convinced after the encounter of their original positions. Organizers, however, regarded the entire event as a success, since the aim was not to win converts to one side or the other but to find understanding and common ground. It seems...that the common ground the women discovered was mutual respect and humanity.

So might it be that mutual respect is an outcome of conversation rather than a necessary condition for the beginning of conversation? Or is neither a “beginning”? Perhaps, like thought and language, the two co-evolve?

If anyone has read to the end of this post, I would be delighted to have partners in this conversation. And please note that today's offering has not been proof-read for error. My battery recharging problem was not solved by a new power unit....