#nathan englander

Reading a Nathan Englander short story about a rabbi who has to be a mall santa every year for the money and he's SO miserable about it and he hates it so much and it's so funny

He misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That's right---something out of something. Because something out of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do that. But something out of something means it was really there the whole time, inside you, and you discover it as part of something new, that's never happened before.

“This period in your life, it feels like it’s forever. But, if you’re lucky, life is long and each of these forevers will oneday seem fleeting.”

At night he went on dreaming about it---not about the accident. About the coma. It was strange, but even though a long time had passed since then, he could still remember, down to the last detail, everything he'd felt during those six weeks. He remembered the colors and the taste and the fresh air cooling his face. He remembered the absence of memory, the sense of existing without a name and without a history, in the present. Six whole weeks of present. During which the only thing he felt within him that wasn't the present was this little hint of a future, in the form of an unaccountable optimism attached to a strange sense of beingness. He didn't know what his own name was during those six weeks, or that he was married, or that he had a little girl. He didn't know he'd had an accident or that he was in the hospital now, fighting for his life. He didn't know anything except that he was alive. And this fact alone filled him with enormous happiness. All in all, the experience of thinking and feeling within that nothingness was more intense than anything that had ever happened to him before, as if all the background noises had disappeared and the only sound left was true and pure and beautiful to the point of tears. He didn't discuss it with his wife or with anyone else. You're not supposed to get that much joy out of being close to death. You're not supposed to get a thrill from your coma while your wife and daughter are crying their hearts out at your bedside. So when they asked whether he remembered anything about it, he said he didn't, he didn't remember a thing. When he woke up, his wife asked if, when he'd been in the coma, he'd been able to hear her and Meital, their daughter, talking to him, and he told her that even if he couldn't remember hearing them he was sure it had helped him. It had given him strength, on the unconscious level, and a desire to live. That was what he told her, but it wasn't true, because when he was in the coma he really did hear voices on the outside sometimes. Strange, sharp, yet at the same time unclear, like sounds you hear when you're underwater. And he didn't like it at all. Those voices sounded menacing to him, they hinted at something beyond the pleasant, colorful now in which he was living.