(3)

The weather lately has turned cool and mild here in my small town – much to my delight.  At night there is rain, falling with a slow and gentle persistence hour after hour; during the day the sky is full of roiling clusters of heavy grey clouds, the occasional chink of blue showing in between.  I've gone to the cemetery for three days in a row now, sitting under a tree with my legs stretched out, taking my ease in the quiet of its shelter.  The tree I've been sitting under lately is very convenient for the purpose of solitude, it being located in an older section of the cemetery that is seldom frequented by visitors.  I sometimes bring a book along with me for company, though I don't seem to get much reading done; mostly I just sit and look at the world around me.  I look at the black ants scrabbling about.  I watch the fat, heavy bumblebees droning along, at the butterflies cavorting.  Occasionally a fly zooms by.  Mosquitoes land on my arm.  They bite:  I scratch.

After awhile my attention is drawn to the tree roots growing beside me, under me, all around me; my eyes follow the length of them until they funnel their way into the ground.  The bark on them is cracked, scabbed over here and there with small, green patches of . . . what?  Some species of moss?  Lichen?  A fungus perhaps?  I don't know, and feel much too lazy to care.  The dirt surrounding the roots is, I notice, full of a minute jumble of refuse:  crumbling pieces of twigs and bark; yellow blades of dried-up grass; bits of woody seed casings; fragments of dead leaves; all of which can be found in increasingly smaller and smaller pieces, until at last they become all but indistinguishable from the dirt.  The roots themselves seem to have such an intimate connection with the dirt, to be so closely akin to it, that I find myself wondering what it is exactly marking the difference between them.  Obviously, one is "alive," the other not; but what is it, precisely, which defines this difference?  What, in other words, is this thing called "life"?  It's such a common thing, found everywhere and thus easy to take for granted – but what is it?  It has always seemed to me the mystery of mysteries.  I can identify, of course, the more obvious differences between living and nonliving things:  living things carry on a process of growth through the internal transformation of energy; grow in a manner which causes them to become organized in increasingly complex ways; maintain a consistent, self-regulating, self-contained organization; and reproduce.  I have read of the origins of life:  of how certain fundamental elements, created back in the dim recesses of time, combined to form amino acids, which then formed proteins, these proteins evolving into yet more complex molecules which had the ability to self-replicate – etc, etc.  I do not understand this process well, but it seems to me to have occurred under conditions so wonderfully fortuitous, and to have followed a development so amazingly improbable (though not at all impossible, considering that it took place over a period of billions of years) as to strike my layman's mind as being the miracle of miracles.  Life!  Just think of it:  at some point in an unfathomably distant past, tiny molecules made of elemental matter suddenly formulated themselves in such a way as to "come alive."  What strange genius was it that led to this?  My mind is too little to tell.  But the fact that the conditions which led to the formation of life occurred once and will never again occur on earth seems to me but one more reason as to why the care of this planet ought to be every human's first and foremost concern.  Should we not honor our parent?  It did, after all, give birth to us, a fact which ought to impress even the most diehard egoist.  Well . . . perhaps we shall learn to yet.  Right now we are more like a bunch of churlish teenagers, hell bent on breaking free of our parental bonds, whatever the cost.

As I sat under that tree in the cemetery earlier today, back propped up against its trunk, legs stuck out before me, I began to grow interested in watching the haphazard journey of an ant scrambling across the surface of a nearby tombstone.  Up and down, back and forth, blindly, frantically, it ran.  I found myself remembering how fascinated I was as a child by ants and bees:  I used to read every book written about them I could find.  The subservience of the individual insect to the collective whole of nest or hive intrigued me endlessly, presumably because I already understood at some subconscious level how like to that, and yet how different, my own relationship to society would be.  The ant scrambled back and forth, back and forth over the tombstone, compelled by some force not the least bit intelligible to it yet entirely at its service.  It must be, I thought, more or less the same for human beings as we scramble our way through life, tumbling in at birth all unknowing, chancing the elements, chancing fate, chancing death every moment thereafter.  I sat up then and looked more closely at the engraving on the stone.  It read:

EFFIE ADELAIDE MANSFIELD

1856-1909

Just that.  Just those briefly stated facts of name and dates were all that remained of a whole human life.  Perhaps the energy which imbued Effie Mansfield with life has taken on some new form – who can say?  Perhaps her essence lives again.  But the Effie that was is no more, and never shall be again.

I lay back down, watching the thick, grey clouds as they scudded across the sky, the birds as they searched for worms and bugs in the dirt, the wind ruffling the leaves of the trees and stirring up little eddies in the tufts of grass around me.  I mused about Effie awhile, and then amused myself by thinking:  "I wouldn't much mind being dead today.  To take a nice long snooze in the cool, cool shade of the earth . . ."

This is all I want, really:  to lie about on a little plot of ground somewhere in the shade of a welcoming tree, to look upon nature and observe its ways, to think my thoughts and wonder my wonders . . .  Life is too short for anything less.

Later, as I was making my way back through town towards home, I ran into an old coworker of mine.  When I asked him how he was doing and what he'd been up to lately, he told me that he had just received notice of his eligibility for low-income housing and soon planned to go out looking for a new place to live – an apartment, even a house perhaps, which he could expect to rent for very little money, the main portion being paid for by the state.  I was amazed:  it had never occurred to me to investigate such a possibility.  It came to me suddenly that it had never occurred to me to investigate any of the social benefits that might come with being poor and that, through them, it may in fact be possible for me to find a way in which to continue living the life to which I have now grown accustomed:  the life of a recluse, an indigent – a bum!  I've read of monks who lived in temples or in shacks, seeking with their begging bowls a subsidiary existence from people in nearby villages; but there is, of course, no provision for such a life in the town where I live.  Or is there?  Might I not work some menial job – my own version of "fetching wood and carrying water" – and seek alms from the state?  I see no reason why not.

I feel as if I suddenly know, at long last, how it is that I want to live my life, and wonder if it might not just be possible for me to do so.  To be a recluse, a bum, a layman's monk – this, in large degree, is what I already am; and this is what I want to continue to be.  It's true that society may not much appreciate my goals.  It's also true that society adheres to the principle that it is not obligated to support the goals of its individual members unless they are willing in turn to support the goals of the society in which they live.  But ask me this:  Do I care?  And I will reply:  Why should I, when society cares so little for all that I consider to be of the utmost importance, and requires me to support that for which I have so little respect?  We are working, it would seem, at cross-purposes; and if neither party involved quite trusts the other, which of us will admit that we are not without just cause?

INNOCENCE IS AN IGNORANT CHILD