Ah, how to start again? It has been nearly five years since I last wrote. The desire to write has been weighing on me. I have been happily married a year, I am in a new city, and I am soon to be a father.
The last three and a half years of wandering in the Great Desert of Capitalism has reset my mind, wiped it clean -- and maybe not in a bad way. In 2014, I was still in school, and my mind was still horribly addled with pseudo-intellectual bullshit and bad poetry. But it was already mid-2014, and all that was quickly ebbing as I inexorably drifted toward a corporatist career. Fast forward five years, and the waters of my mind have indeed dried up, like the Aral Sea.
I can't write anymore (or at least it is very difficult). I can only draft. I am a draughtsman of instruments of conveyance, bills of sale for small imaginary quanta of ownership over things too contrived to be real if they were not so contested.
Yet those long days and nights of plodding work, the agonies and anxieties of the billable hour -- they have, to my astonishment, endowed my life with rhythm. From my office in a tall building, I watched the sun dawn (actually, very rarely) and set (often), I observed cars crawling on their concrete routes like ants. And that mundane procession of sun-up and sun-down somehow engendered a much belated realization: the fact of mortality, not an abstraction but the fact, at last fully and acutely felt, that we live now and one day in a finite number of days shall die. Against the backdrop of this fact is presented the dazzling wonder of the eternal question: why is there something and not nothing?
Lila, as usual, says it so well:
“You still waste time with those things, Lenu? We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you'll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Do you want to see the string of pearls that Stefano gave me?"It is ironic that, of all possible inspirations, a "boring" legal career was what lifted the veil, was what made me see the fire, the lava all around us in this awe-inspiring Reality.
Set against Lila's agnosticism (but perhaps not contrary to it?), Thomas Merton writes a beautiful prayer in New Seeds of Contemplation:
Keep me from loving money in which is hatred, from avarice and ambition that suffocate my life. Keep me from the dead works of vanity and the thankless labor in which artists destroy themselves for pride and money and reputation, and saints are smothered under the avalanche of their own importunate zeal. Stanch in me the rank wound of covetousness and the hungers that exhaust my nature with their bleeding. Stamp out the serpent envy that stings love with poison and kills all joy... This then is what it means to seek God perfectly: to withdraw from illusion and pleasure, from worldly anxieties and desires, from the works that God does not want, from a glory that is only human display; to keep my mind free from confusion in order that my liberty may be always at the disposal of His will; to entertain silence in my heart and listen for the voice of God; to cultivate an intellectual freedom from the images of created things in order to receive the secret contact of God in obscure love; to love all men as myself; to rest in humility and to find peace in withdrawal from conflict and competition with other men; to turn aside from controversy and put away heavy loads of judgment and censorship and criticism and the whole burden of opinions that I have no obligation to carry; to have a will that is always ready to fold back within itself and draw all the powers of the soul down from its deepest center to rest in silent expectancy for the coming of God, poised in tranquil and effortless concentration upon the point of my dependence on Him; to gather all that I am, and have all that I can possibly suffer or do or be, and abandon them all to God in the resignation of a perfect love and blind faith and pure trust in God, to do His will.
As my dear friend the Catholic Lawyer often says, the sole purpose of these arduous billable hours is the mortification of the flesh.
For now, at least, the work is my plot of farmland in the tundra. My mind is not yet thawed out -- but patience.
