Golf, breakfast, famous people, and sex ― or not

Having recently read Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending and feeling it was one of my better book encounters in 2012, I decided to revisit  A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters. It turns out I did not fully appreciate it when I read it the first time ― about 20 years ago.  I thought I was quite intelligent back then, but I guess I was wrong: so much escaped me in my forties.

Anyhow, being moved by something you read is often the product of the state of mind you’re in when reading the book. Where you find energy in the book is often where it is in yourself. And in re-reading Barnes’s earlier work, I was taken with the half-chapter entitled “Parenthesis,” a meditation on love, as well as with the tenth chapter, entitled “The Dream.”

In that sardonic final chapter, a man gradually finds himself bored to death in Heaven.  Two angelic messengers (pardon the repetition ― assuming there is one) instruct him about his situation. It seems there are two groups in Heaven. One consists of those who want to spend it with God, but their numbers are declining ― alongside the definition of what constitutes a good time there. The other consists of those for whom heaven is whatever they want it to be.  It’s a toss-up between eternal praise to their Creator for the one group, and eternal rounds of golf, breakfast, famous people, and sex, at least for the protagonist.

It got me thinking of what I would wish for in Heaven or put another way, what would be Heaven for me. It’s not that I don’t like golf, sex and breakfast, well actually, I have no interest in golf, but the idea of its being heavenly to do anything one pleases didn’t particularly appeal to me over the long haul.  Eventually, yes, it would get boring ― like chalking up the number of books one has read in a given year. After a while, so what!

And I am not sure about the conventional religious view ― blinding light, choirs of angels and endless praise. For an introvert like myself, it seems overwhelmingly brilliant and too noisy, but then I am seeing it from the outside as it were. From the inside, it could be what the ecstatic union with “what is” feels like, rather than an actual place full of choirs and jewels located somewhere up there for us after we die; sadly, the literalists seem to have won the day in insisting upon the latter configuration rather than the former.

Barnes is not all that far off the mark when he says, “Religion has become wimpishly workaday, or terminally crazy, or merely businesslike ― confusing spirituality with charitable donations.” Some would say having any sense of Heaven is terminally crazy.

But nevertheless, I wonder what would sustain me over eternity?  The other night, plagued by insomnia, I had a personal whine-fest about 4:00 a.m., in which I mulled over how often I feel forgotten: the Mother’s Days and birthdays gone unheeded, the reneged lunches not re-booked, the parties not invited to, the omission from photos everyone else is in.  And while I confess to this self-indulgent whining, nevertheless it hurts to be on the receiving end of ― nothing.

I expect I am not the only one who from time to time feels forgotten.  One of my Facebook friends posted this plea on his wall recently:

Good morning wonderful family members today is Aunt E’s 93rd birthday, can you all take a minute to give her a call, she will tell me that she has heard from no one in ages...........love and hugs

Now even if Aunt E is totally forgetful and her relatives do call every day, she fears she will be forgotten and that is what is important, especially as you grow older: the sense that no one wants to remember you. Hence, I suppose, the popularity of grave markers, and not just for the family genealogist.

The urgent plea for personal remembering occurs over and over in our culture. Sarah McLachlan sings, “I will remember you. Will you remember me?”   Hamlet’s father’s ghost intones, “Remember me.”  Christina Rossetti asks only that her reader should “remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land …”

In September 1914, Laurence Binyon wrote of his battlefield comrades in a poem called For the Fallen, “At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we shall remember them.”  One of the most poignant parts of Remembrance Day is reading the names of the fallen soldiers.

Similarly in some churches (I’m thinking here of St. Thomas’s Anglican in Toronto), a list of the souls departed from the parish is spoken on All Souls’ Day. It may seem interminable until people you love have died, and you hear their names read from that list: they are remembered.

To be held in someone’s memory is a powerful comfort. At the crucifixion, the one thief asks Jesus only to “remember me when You come into Your kingdom.” Jesus answers, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  Being re-membered is being put together again: reconnected and present with the essence of life. And many Christians reciprocate by participating in communion for “the remembrance of Me.”

I’m not about to make any claims for the existence of a literal Heaven nor am I about to debunk the idea. But I am ruminating on what is means to be remembered, for as Laurence Binyon’s poem continues, if the dead are remembered, whether by their human survivors, or by the energy of the universe, or by God, it is as if 

To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

 

And the converse is also true, if we are not remembered while we live, we are as good as dead.  

I sometimes think that in remembering and being remembered, we are in something analogous to that eternal presence of Love, which, like the Higgs boson, makes everything matter (yes, pun intended).

We were forever blowing bubbles

A few weeks ago, I read The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.  It is about a middle-aged man’s recollection of events that happened many years before and how his memory did not jibe with what seemed to have really happened. Much of his life was therefore built on a misunderstanding ― and too much guilt. It was, as Barnes says, unsettling, both to the main character of the novel and to me, as it caused me to wonder about my own memory of things from years ago and what memory itself consists of.

In his Confessions, St Augustine ponders the question of memory and where it arises. Until I read that, I hadn’t given much thought to memory ― chiefly, I suppose, because I have never taken a course in psychology and have taken memory for granted.  Like breathing, it’s just something you do: you remember.

But I got a little jolt last week when I was getting things ready to give to the Diabetes Association. One of the reasons I like to donate is that they come and pick things up right off the porch and they take books! So I found a number of books I thought we could happily share with other readers. I was about to add an old atlas called The World We Live In to the pile when I got curious about its contents  ― always a bad sign when getting rid of books  ― and flipped through the pages.

To my surprise, out fell a couple of 45+ -year-old flattened corsages and then some photographs. They consisted of pictures of me and my good friend John Geddes at his family cottage.  

We were 18 years old.  In several we are sitting on rocks in a stream and on the back, I had written “at Piper’s Dam June  1966.”  I remember feeling rather risqué in my new two-piece swimsuit. The other images and their associations were lost to my memory, for instance, playing with a cat called Buttons.  

Thre is a photo of John's mother and an older women I'd identified as Mrs. Halpern sitting in lawnchairs. Then there was a structure which must have been the cottage.

It was something of a shock to come across these photos held safely in that book over many years and many moves.I couldn't remember taking them, although I had written on the back of them. I wondered about the rest of the story in those pictures.  So I looked it up: I have kept a journal from about the age of 14 to the present   ― although it is a bit intermittent during the years when the children were young.

I took out the old orange exercise book ― published by Gage with Math facts on the back cover ― for May 23, 1966 to November 1, 1966. I wondered if I had written anything.  There was quite a lot, as it turned out:

            June 16:

I’m going to John’s this weekend; I had a premonition about Fri. night so luckily I refused [a date] with G. It should be fun ― drive-in, barbecue, Mrs. Fells [our high school librarian], beach etc. I got a new 2-piece bathing suit at Mary Skidmore’s for $25! ― kind of a brown colour with flowers woven in ― enhances my hair.

June 19:

John’s cottage was fun. We went to see the harbour on Fri night and bought candy from Larry Jeffrey the hockey player at his booth (wow) & saw a ship and the lighthouse. John and I beat Mr. and Mrs. G at euchre after we got home.

On Sat. we went into Goderich and looked at the stores. John and I went to Piper’s Dam in the afternoon ― only ones there ― fun, awfully pretty but a fast current. In the evening we went to Mrs. Fells’ and Miss Wyatt’s [high school English teacher] ― then to the drive-in ― a double feature western and bikini picture.

On Sunday we blew bubbles & played with the cat, went to Seaforth for John’s grandmother ― to Black’s Point ― more bubbles & home after dinner.

The weather was warm and sunny.

 And that's it; admittedly there are a few more paragraphs  in which I confided to my journal very positive thoughts about John and subjected myself to relentless self-examination.  Those comments will remain in my journal. Well,  I will note our shared sense of humour,  as we blew those bubbles:  “I mean who else, 18 years old, would lie on a beach blowing bubbles over a bush at people lying (supposedly unawares) about 100 feet on the other side.”  

Then, at John's prompting (still chums after all these years, I'm happy to say),  I searched in one of my photograph boxes and found the pictures I had taken in 1966: 

They show John, then his mum, blowing bubbles; the Maitland River; Buttons the cat looking at a bubble; John swimming in the river; and  me in my hair-enhancing bathing togs. (Once I figure out how to reproduce them  individually, I'll revise this blog. My struggles to do this would take a blog entry by itself.)

So I have snapshots (literally and figuratively) of myself at the age of 18.  It seems so different from how I assume modern-day 18-year-olds spend a weekend at the beach! It is comforting but at the same time rather unsettling to have these journal entries about what happened so long ago.  

I wonder about a lot of things: how I came to be the way I am, how we all do, how much of me remains from that young girl, how much of any of us remains from our youth and how so much is lost to memory without these wonderful  prompts.


To see John's blog on this effervescent event, just  go to  http://johnageddes.wordpress.com/