"Raising his eyes, he saw more stars appearing, large and brilliant her in the mountains. The workings of the heavens were visible to hi, each orbiting light going its prescrived way and fulfilling its function. Notions he had had as a boy returned to him. Suppose he had wings and flew in one direction forever, would he come to the end of space? But how could space end? What extended beyond? Or was the material world infinite? But if it was, infinity stretched both to the east and west, and how could there be twice infinity? And what of time? How could even God have had no beginning? How could anything be eternal? Where had everything come form? These questions were impertinent, he knew, impermissible, pushing the inquirer toward heresy and madness.
He continued to walk. How strange and feeble was man. Surrounded on every side by eternity, in the midst of powers, angels, seraphim, cherubim, arcane worlds, and divine mysteries, all he could lust for was flesh and blood. Yet man's smallness was no less a wonder than God's greatness."(Singer 136).
This last paragraph is the product of man's difficulty comprehending the insignificance of himself so he projects his on self onto a greater being to fill the void. At least that is my belief, and this is how differentiate between his descriptions of the universe and mine:
I had an epiphany. My mind was transported. The universe transformed from a puzzlingly existential three-dimensional world, to an infinitely intertwining system of perfect elegance. The realization struck suddenly. My senses ignited. Awareness is entirely relative. My reality was once like a house I lived in from the time I was born. It took nineteen years before I accidentally discovered a door and wandered outside.
The epiphany came as a simultaneous, unified realization. There was no initial conscious ordering of logic or thought experiment involved. The understanding just appeared suddenly before me. Yet there are seemingly no words to appropriately describe it and encompass everything it contains. Explaining it is like trying to bang a nail into a very hard wall with a very small hammer. A description is a swing and a glancing blow, bending the nail or sending it flying, while the stubborn wall remains unchanged and blind.
Later in the novel after Wanda has died, Jacob of course has endured intense tragedy and physical exhaustion He has gone through a transformation, struggling through the loss of his wife just like his namesake Jacob of the Bible, he realizes this connection to the holy book. Like a whirlwind epiphany, Jacob realizes the name he must give his boy:
"Benjamin. Like the first Benjamin, this child was a Be-oni, a child born of sorrow.... The river's calmness, purity, and radiance refuted the darkness of the night. Set against this luminosity even death seemed only a bad dream. Neither the sky, nor the river, nor the dunes were dead. Everything was alive, the earth, the sun, each stone." (Singer 278).
This altered description of reality struck me personally. I previously had written this description myself:
The tall grass moves in waves with the wind. Air billows above the forgiving green blades, bending them nearly to the ground in fanning processions across the valley. The varying rush of the front tumbles past my ears. Like a constant blast of white noise, every gust deafens. The sun that was striking my face and arms from above begins to slip behind the fringes of a dark grey torrent of cloud. Yet light still glints from the ripples of a narrow creek, cutting deep grooves into the land. Even my body shifts in response to the current, swaying to the left with every gust, and returning after it passes. Just like the grass.
The only thing that seemingly does not move in this ordered chaos is the cabin. A flexing skeleton of its former design, it remains rigid, hollow, and floorless. But even this creation is in motion. Through the lens of a lifetime, wood floorboards are consumed from the bottom up. The spine of the ceiling arcs more and more with the pull of the earth. Panels weaken, nails rust, and generations of organisms are born, taken refuge, and die. A hundred winters and a thousand storms like this one have changed its image, but it still persists for now. Yet time will sink this cabin beneath the ground. Time will crumble every plank and nail. For everything in this system is in motion. Every element is apart of the whole. Every atom is a participant in this chaotic order.
There is a rhythm to it all. A story.
They may be quite different at a glance, but I believe both my own and the narrator's descriptions allude to a greater universal reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment