Charity or rachmones,
properly given, according to the rabbis of old, should be such that not only
should the recipient never know who or why or even that it is give, but so that
it need never be needed again. Yet
thanks and gratefulness are required from both the man who is saved from
embarrassment but also from the donor who has been thus enabled to perform a mitzvah at the highest level. The two parties never know how much they have
helped one another. Each must assume,
however, that theirs is the greater gift.
Ignorance is truly bliss.
When a tram stops in Melbourne, all other
traffic must stay back at a respectful distance, so that passengers may ascend
or descend safely and cross the road. So
too in awakening from dreams, we patiently wait for the moments of rationality
and disappointment to run their course before we resume our journey to unknown
destinations.
Many painters welcomed the coming of
photography. They need no longer stare
into the pained, impatient faces of their patrons, Professional models, who
once earned their living by the ability to appear both dead and alive, resisted
this new technology. Only children,
loving to see themselves in a blur in daguerreotypes, cried out against the
snapshot and the high-speed camera. They would have to stand still throughout
eternity, always aware of how childish they are.
Never let an open toilet go by unused. The future cannot be counted on.
The original guinea pigs were rats, rabbits
and monkeys. The original scarecrows
were small boys paid to throw stones in the field. The original cuckoo clock was a foundling who
never knew the hour of his birth.
It is said that until the early nineteenth
century there was no concept of the normal or the natural. Either you played your role in life as best you could or pretended
to be a helpless beggar. I cannot see
this as a normal way of things. Nature
is never so abundant and extravagant.
In Arcadia we never heard of Paradise. We danced with other shepherds and
shepherdesses, as though there were no tomorrow, and yesterday seemed like a
dream we often visited in sleep. Pan,
however, insisted he was always at the centre of the game. Many caterpillars giggled behind his back.
Consciousness lacks continuity and we need to
sleep between the fragments of reality.
Raindrops, we now know, are flattened slipper
and disintegrate before they touch the ground, only a few joining the spray
that hovers over the earth. How water enters into the spoil remains a mystery.
Time is neither a mere measure of experience
between one moment and another nor the process by which we marvel at the
changes in our bodies or our minds; but it is the residue of anxiety and the
movement of our fervid imagination. If
we could do without time, the universe would return to the original state
before the calendar was invented.
Stories stretch out from once upon a time to
happily ever after, so it is said. We
seem to believe we can survive all accidents of fate, all fearful apparitions
in our dreams, and even transformations of our wildest inexpressible hopes into
printed images of expectation: like cockamaymies children lick upon their arms
and shoulders in afternoons of play. I
look back now, three quarters of a century, and answer: No. My story is not yours, and what you call our
universal brotherhood is something else and false to me. My narrative has characters I never met and
incidents I could only experience as absurd.
A visitor to a modern city, I stand in awe of
the complexity and lights of their life.
The passers-by are unlike I have ever encountered. Yet everything
swerves around me, rhythmically coordinated, leaving me stranded in my own
confusion. Can I be myself or read my
thoughts?
The first comic opera in the world has
finally been completed. It took over six
thousand years. The next is rapidly
falling into place, its characters and incidents slipping out of the original,
along with sparks of laughter. The world
is none-theless more petulant than ever.
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