For the Quiet Heart

It's been about a year since I finished Steve Martin's second novella, The Pleasure of My Company. I'd not read Shopgirl (or seen the movie on which it was based). But, I have read a number of Martin's essays, and his particular flavor of humor has always appealed to me.

The story is a first-person narration by Daniel Pecan Cambridge, whose existence is mostly related in the observations he makes from his Santa Monica apartment and the life he leads in its immediate vicinity. Via the force of his imagination, he fabricates relationships with those he observes, though it is apparent the constructs are wholly believed by Daniel.

He partakes in daily rituals and says things like: “But, my conventions, it turned out, could not be broken overnight, because they had been forged in my brain like steel. And nothing so simple as longing could dislodge them."

I must say, I felt a tinge of kinship with the character.

While I don't have the protagonist's savant powers, I do have what amount to attenuated variations on his insecurities and eccentricities -- less obsessing than fretting, less neuroses than psychological hurdle. I could easily see myself in circumstances similar to his: alone in a big city, largely lonely and ensconced in mental elaborations that stave off acceptance of reality, and, in fact, become a stand-in for reality. I could see how my desolate landscape of solitude would occasionally be broken by salient instances of genuine socializing or spontaneous larking.

So, I thank the narrator for acting as my docent to a parallel universe, as my Clarence-The-Angel earning wings by showing me a path of what might have been. And I hope this novella also becomes a movie.

Here's a passage that affected me:


In the deeper hours of the night, I began to
look at myself, to consider myself and my
condition, to measure the life that I'd led so
far. I did not know what made me this way.
I did not know any other way I could be. I
did not know what was inside me or how I
could redeem what was hidden there. There
must be a key, or a person, or a thing, or song,
or poem, or belief, or old saw that could access
it. But, it all seems so far away. And, after I'd
drifted further and further into self-absorption,
I closed the evening with this desolate thought:
there are few takers for the quiet heart.

-- Steve Martin,The Pleasure of My Company

Code for Nothing

This morning, over breakfast, I was admiring some lovely flowers in the center of the table.  I brought them home several days ago when my daughter was visiting during her late-in-the-semester spring break.  She's gone back to New York now, but the flowers have remained behind in Texas, bold and resilient.

Between spoonfuls of cereal, I was visited by a quote from Rivka Galchen's odd and fascinating novel, Atmospheric Disturbances:

"We get these wrong feelings sometimes,

feelings like articles slipped into our luggage

but not properly ours. I think of it like vestigial

DNA. Code for nothing, or for the wrong thing,

or for proteins that don't fold up properly and

that may eventually wreak great destruction."

Presidents & Parents

When Ronald Reagan died, I purposefully avoided information about the services and eulogies. I ducked coverage of his body lying in state. I dodged heated diatribes about the man who held the highest office in our nation during some of my most formative years. It was at a time when I was unwilling to give death its due, even by displacing it with focus on the life it took.

Near my desk, there's a picture of Dad with Reagan. It was taken before I was born. Now they are both dead.

My dad died the same week as Richard Nixon, whose presidency I have less memories of (though I've read All The President's Men, seen the movie, and tend to distill Nixon to his culpability in Watergate). And, mired in my own mourning, whatever events or coverage swirled around Nixon's passing, I was generally unaware.

A salient image remains from coverage of Reagan's funeral: news footage of Nancy Reagan (looking shockingly similar to my mother in her final years) touching the casket of her dead husband, who was taken from her years before his death by the decimating cruelty of Alzheimer's disease. 

It conjured the memory of Mom approaching Dad's casket at the conclusion of his funeral. The attendees had already filed out, and the pallbearers had yet to bear my father to the hearse that would drive him to his final resting place.  Certain images cannot be discarded, even if they are no longer wanted.

This recollection reminds me of my parents, of their funerals -- but, more importantly, their lives.

The Evil That Men Do Lives After Them

Years ago on a trip to Boston, I ate burgers at b.good and hopped the T to Faneuil Hall, where I found the Freedom Trail and figured I'd follow it a while.

But, then I noticed something nearby that drew my eye.

It was a capricious instant that spun me into a profound experience. Just around the corner, I approached The New England Holocaust Memorial, with its sextet of glass pillars reaching skyward.

Each pillar represents a concentration camp, and a walking path threads the base of each glass column. Steam rises from grates on the sidewalk in a creepy visual that evokes both the ghostly apparitions of lost lives and the smoky evidence of ovens and burnt bodies. The glass panels that comprise the pillars are etched with numbers representative of the numerical identification tattoos from the arms of the victims and survivors.

Walking through each symbolic figurative camp, one finds personal quotes and factual statements that are haunting days and weeks later, revealing that you can't possibly understand the horror of that scope of injustice.

"When my parents were sent off to the camp,

I gave my good shoes to my father

because I thought he'd need them

if he did physical labor.

When I saw my mother for the last time,

I hugged her and said I hoped

she didn’t have to work too hard.

I never dreamed they'd be dead

within such a short time of their departure."

- Jack Polak, MAJDANEK

* * * * * * *

"My younger sister went up to a Nazi

soldier with one of her friends.

Standing naked, embracing each other,

she asked to be spared. He looked

into her eyes and shot the two of them

They fell together in their embrace

-- my sister and her young friend."

- Rivka Yosselevscka, CHELMO

* * * * * * *

"Isle, a childhood friend of mine,

once found a raspberry in the camp

and carried it in her pocket all day

to present to me that night on a leaf.

Imagine a world in which

your entire possession is

one raspberry and

you give it to your friend."

- Gerda Weissman Klein, SOBIBOR

* * * * * * *

"I remember stooping down and picking up

a piece of something black near the

crematorium. I realized it was a bone.

I was going to throw it down again,

and I thought, my God, this may be.

all that's left of someone

So I wrapped it up and carried it with me.

A couple of days later, I dug it out

of my pocket and buried it."

- George Kaiser, AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

Humanity is at its own mercy. And evil is relentless, I think.