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‘We are sealed vessels afloat upon what it is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality. . . .’

Was it Virginia Woolf who taught us to adore these floods of reality, without which we merely navigate a sea of convenience with other people? But here it is Christmas night in Ohio and a crack is beginning to show. I stand by my mother-in-law with a soggy dishtowel in hand, pondering the holiness of conversation. She is talking about her last glimpse of Mildred. A hospital room. Mildred, laid low by one of those cancers which kill you in a weekend, can no longer eat, is sucking on a piece of ice, has a tube up her nose, and when Verna leans over the bed to ask if there’s anything she can do, Mildred shoots her a look, moves the tube aside, and says, Verna, I’d give the world right now for one of your Martinis. The next day, Mildred is dead. My dishtowel by now a saturated oblong, I fold it in three, hoping for a new dry corner. So when did Mildred pass away? I ask, and Verna says, 1965. What is a mortal being? A wind, a dream, a shadow, the ancient Greek poets tell us, but I don’t say this to Verna. I merely repeat, 1965!, in disbelief.

From the other room comes the sound of TV. It’s a Christmas special about war—they’re interviewing a soldier from some Army, I think Israeli, whose assignment is to show up at sites where a woman or a child has been killed and plant weapons on the body. I wring out my towel. Everything I want from a mother is entrail-exhausting, rage-flooded, shocked-alive, and structured like a shriek. All I have the courage to ask of her is this convenience. We wipe down the counter. We hang up towel and sponge. When I was little I understood the world to be made of paper, and that everyone should step carefully or go through the paper. I wanted a notation for that, for the going-through. I thought, I still think, this notation is stored somewhere, above us in a sort of mist or secret layer. I never realized Verna had been carrying the ghost of Mildred at the front of her mind for fifty years, like impossible antlers. The judgments we bring to bear on one another are not very sound, are they? Now Verna is scrubbing at spots on the stove with the hem of her apron. Come on, let’s watch TV, I say. I brought a movie. It’s Lubitsch—you’ll like it. 

‘We are sealed vessels afloat upon what it is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality. . . .’

Was it Virginia Woolf who taught us to adore these floods of reality, without which we merely navigate a sea of convenience with other people? But here it is Christmas night in Ohio and a crack is beginning to show. I stand by my mother-in-law with a soggy dishtowel in hand, pondering the holiness of conversation. She is talking about her last glimpse of Mildred. A hospital room. Mildred, laid low by one of those cancers which kill you in a weekend, can no longer eat, is sucking on a piece of ice, has a tube up her nose, and when Verna leans over the bed to ask if there’s anything she can do, Mildred shoots her a look, moves the tube aside, and says, Verna, I’d give the world right now for one of your Martinis. The next day, Mildred is dead. My dishtowel by now a saturated oblong, I fold it in three, hoping for a new dry corner. So when did Mildred pass away? I ask, and Verna says, 1965. What is a mortal being? A wind, a dream, a shadow, the ancient Greek poets tell us, but I don’t say this to Verna. I merely repeat, 1965!, in disbelief.

From the other room comes the sound of TV. It’s a Christmas special about war—they’re interviewing a soldier from some Army, I think Israeli, whose assignment is to show up at sites where a woman or a child has been killed and plant weapons on the body. I wring out my towel. Everything I want from a mother is entrail-exhausting, rage-flooded, shocked-alive, and structured like a shriek. All I have the courage to ask of her is this convenience. We wipe down the counter. We hang up towel and sponge. When I was little I understood the world to be made of paper, and that everyone should step carefully or go through the paper. I wanted a notation for that, for the going-through. I thought, I still think, this notation is stored somewhere, above us in a sort of mist or secret layer. I never realized Verna had been carrying the ghost of Mildred at the front of her mind for fifty years, like impossible antlers. The judgments we bring to bear on one another are not very sound, are they? Now Verna is scrubbing at spots on the stove with the hem of her apron. Come on, let’s watch TV, I say. I brought a movie. It’s Lubitsch—you’ll like it. 

I had been looking at the New Testament in an 1801 edition of Johannes Leusden’s side-by-side (Greek and Latin) version, which I’d found on my bookshelf in a fragile state that did not allow the pages to be turned quickly. Little flecks broke off. I opened it at random to 1 Corinthians 10, a letter of Paul’s about idolatry. The letter spoke of people who wandered in the wilderness eating ‘pneumatic’ bread and drinking from a ‘pneumatic’ rock – or so I was translating it in my head, the word for ‘spiritual’ being pneumatikos in Greek, from pneuma, ‘breath’. Can either bread or rock be made of breath? Anyway who can drink from a rock? A sort of dreariness, like a heavy smell of coats, comes down on the word ‘spiritual’ and makes religion impossible for me. The page is turned. Flecks fall.

Before turning the page though, I noticed that Paul’s text, in the verse following the pneumatic rock, was at pains to identify the rock with Christ (that is, God) and to explain that the rock was ‘following’ these people through the desert so they could drink from it. How very awkward, I thought. I wondered why God couldn’t come up with a better water arrangement for these people and why Paul couldn’t find a more graceful image of God’s care. Presumably Paul wants people to seek and cherish God’s care? But to visualise the longed-for Other bumping along behind your desert caravan in the form of a rock might just make you morose or confused.

Confused and morose myself, not least of all because of that continued knocking at the gate, and in need of a fresh idea, I opened the Bible again and found Psalm 119:81-3. This seemed to be another text about people in the wilderness:

My soul fainteth for thy salvation: but I hope in thy word.

Mine eyes fail for thy word saying, When wilt thou comfort me?

For I am become like a bottle in the smoke; yet do I not forget thy statutes.

And all at once I recognised it as a passage I had worked on before, at a time when snow was not my concern – I’d been invited to give a lecture on (as I recall) ‘the idea of the university’, a topic about which I knew little, and so began to compose a lecture more concerned with the word ‘idea’ than the concept of the ‘university’. I’m not clear on whether I ever delivered this lecture: I can’t find it among my papers. Three days before the lecture date my mother died. I fell to my knees in the kitchen. Astoundedness was like a silvery-white fog that seeped up and over all those days. I had visited her only a week before, the long train, then bus, then taxi trip. She seemed OK. Forbidden by her doctor from her nightly glass of Armagnac she’d taken to dabbing it behind her ears. The word ‘idea’ comes from ancient Greek ‘to see’. Was there a way to get out of giving that lecture, I wondered.

Psalm 119:83 is an outcry: ‘For I am become like a bottle in the smoke; yet do I not forget thy statutes’ in the King James version. In more modern versions, ‘I am like a wineskin shrivelled by smoke’; or ‘Though I am shrivelled like a leather flask in the smoke’; or ‘I am useless as a discarded wineskin.’ The notion seems to be that without God the psalmist or his life becomes dry, sooty, wrinkled and worn, dark and dismal, parched, disfigured, miserable, bereft of spiritual moisture. There is a strand of tradition that reads ‘hoar frost’ in place of ‘smoke’ but no one knows what to do with that. The same week my mother died my boyfriend left. (Beware the conversation that begins: ‘Do you think people should be completely honest with one another?’) We’d been together a number of years but he was young and closeness to death made him queasy. Do I blame him? I admit I was not a very erotic person at the time. And well, my quotient of astoundedness was full. He drove me to the funeral and more or less kept going. I more or less waved goodbye.

There was no question I had to get out of giving that lecture.

The odd thing is, I can’t remember if I did or did not (get out of the lecture). The chronology is a blur. I do remember sitting in an armchair, at the very brink of an armchair, hands fisted in my lap, facing the professor of religious studies who had commissioned the lecture. I was pleading for a cancellation or deferral. He sat tightly contained on the far side of his big desk. He was pale. Alarmed. He may have been a priest. Tears poured down my face. I told him of my mother’s outlandish little red car coat. He was not a chaotic person. A large feeling of cul-de-sac filled the room. Beyond that I can recover only a few mental screenshots of me speaking about bottles and smoke to a dusty lecture hall of people with crossed legs, but these may be shards of some anxiety dream, not a credible memory.

Historically the first instance of the noun ‘idea’ in ancient Greek is in an epinician ode of Pindar (Olympian 10:103) praising an Olympic victor ‘beautiful with respect to his idea’, that is, in his appearance. Plato’s use of the word to designate things like ‘the form of the good’ is familiar. Slightly stranger perhaps, Demokritos’ choice of atomoi ideai (literally ‘uncut shapes’) to mean the indivisible elements of his atomic theory. Best of all is Matthew’s phrasing in the final chapter of his Gospel (28:3) to describe the look of the angel who came down from heaven, rolled back the door of Christ’s tomb and sat on it:

ἦν δὲ ἡ ἰδέα αὐτοῦ ὡς ἀστραπή

(The idea of him was like lightning.)

‘And his garment shone white as snow,’ continues Matthew’s Gospel, reminding me to go to the door and see who was knocking – has it stopped? – but there is a sense of suspension in the night air, as of a person not quite turning away to go back on their own footprints through the deepening snow. Snow can deepen fast on nights like this. The reason I went to visit my mother, the week before her death, was a dream I had. A young man in red epaulets was ministering to a room of restless guests who lay fully clothed in bathtubs. Waking suddenly (3 a.m.) I knew the young man in red epaulets as the night clerk in the hotel where I stayed when I visited her. Strange choice for a psychopomp, I thought, as hours later the train glided west in a weak tarnish of dawn. There was ground fog everywhere, then afternoon sunlight (the bus) so deep you could enter it as a lake. Finally a taxi gliding past people in their kitchens.

The weekend was spent watching her sleep, oxygen shunting on and off. When awake she glared wildly, or ate small dabs of ice cream or, once, spent a few minutes studying a photograph I’d brought her (of myself at a posh artist’s retreat on Lake Como) then said, ‘Why did you wear your glasses?’ I was not with her when she died. I assume the young man in red epaulets showed up and that he let her wear her car coat. She loved that red car coat.

Last thing: one Sunday evening about a year before all this we were on the telephone, my mother and I; it was just after we sold the house and she’d moved to the facility, where she was allowed a small sensible room and a few possessions. As we talked I was watching snow drift down the dusk outside, counting it, one hundred and five, one hundred and six, one hundred and seven, when out of a pause she said: ‘It’s funny to have no home’ – funny being a funny word for what she meant. I say this now to remind myself how words can squirt sideways, mute and mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame, and all at once they burn all your clothes off and you’re standing there singed and ridiculous in the glare of the lightning. I hung up the phone. I stared at the snow for some time. I expect she did too.

He shakes his head, steps up into his space, banking on a little Irish courage. “You’re not boring, LaRusso.”

Daniel uncrosses his arms, looking a little wary. “How would you know?”

HARPER: Night flight to San Francisco. Chase the moon across America. God! It’s been years since I was on a plane! When we hit thirty-five-thousand feet, we’ll have reached the tropopause. The great belt of calm air. As close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening... But I saw something that only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things:

Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.