Farewell for Now
“There wasn’t time, of course, although it seemed as though it telescoped so that you might put it all into one paragraph if you could get it right.”
—Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
My maternal grandfather, U. L. Martin, was a Methodist preacher in a miscellany of small south Alabama towns who retired in 1962. My grandmother played the part of the ideal parson’s wife during that forty year career. One of their appointments was in Camden, and when they retired, the good people of Camden invited them to end their peregrinations in Wilcox County, and provided them with a house. They lived there, as the world went on around them, and my cousins and I grew up, until 1985.
In November of that year I helped load the U-Haul truck with the select possessions they would take with them to Wesley Terrace, an assisted living facility in Auburn. I remember as we were about to leave, looking around and noticing a mother-in-law’s tongue in a pot by the back door. I grabbed it and today the progeny of that almost-abandoned plant live on in a dozen pots scattered among friends and family.
Speaking of potted plants, I’ve seen it enough times now it is a pattern: rip a plant out of its pot and throw it on the ground and it soon withers and dies. Granddaddy made it not quite three months. I remember him in his recliner in that sterile, far-from-home room, his head propped listlessly back where decades of hair oil had whitened and cracked the faux-leather, his glasses smudged and looking like something perched on his face, just barely able, or willing, to have anything to do with 1986. He died in February. Grandmother lived six more years. I was a pretty faithful visitor, but there was something listless in her depotted self as well. Something distant, out of focus. I would try to engage her in a conversation about a current topic, but within a minute she would be back in her girlhood in Birmingham. I thought about it then, and really think about it now: her past to future ratio was overwhelmingly past, and the present, once a bright light, was now a sputtering David Lynch bulb. Her parents were gone. Her siblings (and she was the oldest) were all gone. Her friends were all gone. The people and places that had defined and given meaning to her life were all no more.
Our peers, in time and place—and this is addressed to mine—are indispensable. Existence would be too lonely to tolerate life without them.
We are in a play on this earth—and plays have beginnings, middles, and ends.
* * *
In Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” the protagonist Harry, a novelist left stranded by a broken down truck with his latest wealthy femme sponsor on an African safari, is dying of gangrene from an infected leg.
He treats the woman, whom he doesn’t love and who considers him a “complete man,” cruelly, and as the odor of his wound attracts carrion birds and a restless hyena, he feels death drawing ever closer and, as only a writer would, thinks of all the stories he will never write. He wasn’t going to write them anyway, he cynically confesses, because doting wealthy women had already ruined his talent. Hemingway himself considered it his finest story, but I’ve always thought of it as a sort of sly cheating. Mind you, the frozen leopard at the western summit of Kilimanjaro, and Harry’s journey there in his last dream to join him, are symbolically masterful, and little touches like his jab at Fitzgerald (Julian) are entertaining, and if there were any way to like Harry, the story might be genuinely moving. But that’s not the point—the point is, the story is a gimmick for getting rid of some ideas he knew he would never fulfill.
Sort of like the attic-cleaning of my blog.
What do you do with a hundred ideas? Try to realize them all, or pick the best one and plow the others under as compost?
There are 200 million or more sperm cells in a human ejaculation. One egg. Powerball numbers.
Frogs lay 2000 to 20,000 eggs; of these, approximately 2% become tadpoles, 0.8% of tadpoles become froglets, and 0.1% of froglets become mature frogs.
The odds of an acorn becoming an oak tree are 10,000 to 1.
A National Geographic photographer takes 20,000 to 60,000 photographs on a typical assignment, of which maybe a dozen will be published.
There are more than 35,000 works of art on display at any one time in the Louvre, of which you have the capacity to really absorb maybe 5.
There are about 8 billion people in the world, so the odds of becoming Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos are 8 billion to one. About the same as being happy if you did.
* * *
The phrase “no man is an island” showed up in my head the other day and wouldn’t leave. That phrase, along with “send not to know for whom the bell tolls,” are so familiar, almost cliches, it took some effort to stop and actually think about them.
My thoughts are much engaged these days with the idea of interconnectedness, and the dimension, natural to human beings, if fogged in, where individuality and ego dissolve and we experience the repose of our participation in the whole where we are not playing these characters called ourselves.
It’s worth noting that “no man is an island” was not a poem but a line in one of Donne’s “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,” written as he was dealing with a near fatal illness, and I read the famous excerpt really for the first time. Not just: don’t wonder too much about who died—you’re next—or just, we’re all in this together—but a visionary realization of the singularity of reality and the illusion of separateness.
The alpha and the omega.
Thank you for helping me tolerate life.
November 10, 2022