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Jack
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hello, this is Jack. Sometimes life throws you, snatches you out of midair, presses you with its grimy fingers and hurls you on a new course. You flap your wings, as desperate as something drowning as you hurtle from the path you chose into one you will need to find. You must adjust. And so you find yourself, as I did, with an agenda full of to do items, one that was already set, and you can't bring yourself to do any of them. I was supposed to be writing and talking about butterflies, of all things. A whole episode. Two butterflies, an Emily Dickinson poem, Wordsworth original music. The episode is half created and the rest is outlined. All I had to do was return from my trip to Paris, a spring break flyer to visit my older son who's studying abroad, and then sit down in my chair and finish it up, talk into the microphone for an hour or so, yet another episode to toss onto the pile. But I must adjust. Butterflies adjust all the time. They dart and direct themselves and redirect, flit and float and fleetly flee and fly. Bigger craft, like hawks and eagles, can overpower the wind. They determine their course of action and zoom, currents and other distractions be damned. Their ability to zoom, to zero in, is awesome. Butterflies don't live in that world. They move from one leaf to the next, one microscopic airflow to another, flying as if hopping, their thoughts seeming to change mid flap. They appear to us as erratic, unfocused, prisoners of the semi moment. They seem ephemeral, possessed of fragile, delicate wings, beauty that can be easily destroyed, twitchy and impermanent. I was supposed to write about these things. Instead I find myself thinking about Al. Al was my college roommate, the one with the shelf full of Loeb Classical Library books and a copy of the Compact Oxford English Dictionary. I had not seen either of these things before and had no idea what they were. My shelf of books was not even a shelf. I had brought to college a copy of a novel by Gore Vidal, because it was a historical novel that made it seem smart somehow, college worthy, and a copy of King Lear that I had never read. I had no idea what it meant to be a university student, let alone a scholar. And there was my roommate, Al, from New New Orleans, where he'd gone to a Jesuit high school. I had taken two years of Spanish and had already forgotten everything. Al had taken five years of Latin and four years of Greek, and he was ready for more. I don't think I even knew what that meant, Latin and Greek to study them. Except that Al was brilliant and I would never catch up. I hoped he would at least not mind being my roommate, and he didn't, or at least he didn't show it. We found some common ground. He was a fan of the Saints as I was of the packers, and both our teams had been miserable for most of our childhood. We laughed a lot together. We found our classes and studied and made friends and went to see movies, usually with a group of other kids, sometimes just the two of us. We found that we could rely on each other. At night we settled into sleep lined up in parallel, our beds a few feet apart, his head closer to the window and my head closer to the door, and we said the words that closed our day. It was never good night. There was too much else to talk about, things that had happened to us, people we'd met, comments made by professors. We laughed more gently now as sleep started to take over. Sometimes we talked about food, our favorite things to eat, how good it smelled, the walk past a hamburger joint or Harold's Fried Chicken Shack. Chicago winters were cold, especially for someone from New Orleans. We talked about how good it felt to come inside into the warmth of the classrooms and libraries and dorms heated by the university's underground network of steam tunnels, or the delightful surprise of walking over the grates on the sidewalk where the steam heat escaped its tunnel, blasting upwards into the biting air of winter, melting the snow and offering a second or two of relief as you passed. Those blasts reminded me of my grandparents house, the whole house heated by a single open grate in the living room floor, and Al and I talked about our families, our parents and our grandparents and my older sister and his younger sister and all of our friends from high school. And oddly, or maybe not so oddly, the number one topic was sleep itself. We talked about the different kinds of sleep, the gaudy luxury of Sunday afternoons on the sofa, sleeping while the football game was on in the background, and us hoping that the phone didn't ring, or the hard earned pleasure of staying up all night and then sleeping deep into the day, carefree, or being outside in the elements, soaked by rain or snow, and then coming home for a hot shower and crawling fresh under the crisp, clean covers. I've never catalogued my sleeping experiences before or since. I have no idea what possessed us to do that. Maybe it was the experience of having a roommate for the first time and sharing things you didn't even know you had inside you and didn't know that you cared about. Maybe it was a form of bonding. Maybe he was over there wishing I could talk about something more academic, something on his level. But he was willing to meet me at mine. Or maybe it was just an appropriate topic for where we were and each of our day long adventures a way of surrendering to the inevitable. Sleep was coming for us. Time to get ready, to prepare, to embrace its sweetness. Time to create another good sleep experience. To have another good memory to add to the growing list. No room in there for good nights and no need to say those words and cut things off. We could just talk about sleep until we drifted away. During the days Al and I formed a kind of odd couple relationship, I don't think people thought we were very similar. Had we not been roommates, we might not even have been much more than acquaintances. But we had this tie together. Our room, our conversations, our growing loyalty to one another. When I went out the door, whatever happened, I knew he'd be there when my day was done. He chose to support me and I him. We never argued about anything. We took on the world, often separately, but with an eye on the other. My eye was filled with admiration. Nobody was as brilliant as my roommate Al. People came to him for help with their Latin and Greek. And when he decided to become a history major, he was the best at that too. He was modest, like many smart people, because they know how vast the fields of knowledge actually are. He would be the first to list the things he wanted to know and didn't. The books he had not yet read, the intellectual doors he had not yet opened, the areas of scholarship he had yet to unlock. He was like a runner who was out ahead of the pack. The only one in a position to see clearly how much distance there still was to travel. In the years after college, there was a distance between Al and the rest of us. One that he chose without ever telling us why. Something had changed. We could only guess at the mystery of it. Wondering at the causes, smarting at the sting. It did not feel good to be rejected, and it clouded the memories of the Al we had known, the Al we admired, the the Al we celebrated, the Al we loved. He had others in his life. Now he chose not to include us. Life has a way of grabbing you in its grubby fingers, seizing you mid flight and throwing you on a new course. My son is now a student, as I was, and he's currently studying abroad as I did. I just went to see him in Paris, and it was beautiful watching him play basketball with other kids, watching him use the metro and the tram, seeing his dorm, his bathroom the size of an airplane bathroom if you could also cram a shower into one. But his and his alone. The joy and pride I felt seeing his new life and how he manages. I had no words, just smiles and nods and a pounding heart. On our trip he took his younger brother under his wing and the two of them enjoyed Paris together, and I could only take pictures, aiming through tears as they sat together at the restaurant side by side, or walked through the Musee d'orsay together, pointing at paintings that caught their eye or came out of a bakery in sync morning, baguettes in hand, smiling and eager in the butterfly metaphor, they had emerged from their cocoons, come into their own, as fully matured and capable, as beautiful as humans can be, ready for effortless flight. One breeze and they could be gone onto the metro and into another neighborhood, meeting up with friends, attending class, getting ready for life. On the last morning, my wife and I with our game faces on, as we've done whenever separations occur, like the time my wife went to a conference, leaving our then one year old overnight for the first time, and she wrote me an email telling me how she wept all the way to the airport, but then she had to put her game face on. Or the first day our son had hopped on the bus to kindergarten, a note pinned to his shirt listing his name and the name of his teacher, and we watched him eagerly, face forward, not looking out the window to see us on the sidewalk frantically waving goodbye while his younger brother burst into open tears. Our game faces were on then, too, and now, the last morning of our stay in Paris, when we knew we'd be getting in the car to the airport and flying back to D.C. a place that currently feels like an open pit of hell, we ate breakfast with our son, who would soon be traveling to Barcelona and Croatia and everywhere else, hopping around Europe, just as I had traveled to Switzerland and Sicily and Scotland, London and Munich and Madrid and Morocco. Once upon a time I asked him if he was worried about anything, and he looked surprised by the question. No, he said plainly, and I remember what it was like to feel that way. No kids to worry about, no bills, no disease, no bodies breaking down from age, no jobs to cling to like driftwood being tossed about on stormy seas. What a life. Classes are manageable to the point of being fun everywhere. People pop in and out, exciting people, adventurers like yourself, young people making their way. What a question for me to ask. Are you worried about anything? And what an answer he gave not just a no, but a surprised no. Worries are the last thing on his mind. There's too much life to enjoy. Adventurous excitement pushes worry to the side every time. I knew how he felt because I'd felt the same way at his age. I had made my friends in Bologna, lifelong friends, some of them, and at Christmas I didn't go home, but I stayed in Europe, traveling to see a cousin in Switzerland and the German friend I'd met in Munich, then up to London and Oxford, where my sister was staying on a one year work visa. I met up with Al, who was studying in Cambridge, having the kind of year I was having down in Italy. Only mine was a bit casual academically, and his was a year of superlative performance. By now, in our third year of college, our identities had formed and the roles seemed familiar to me. I was enjoying life, reading Dante and Keats and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, meeting people, making friends, sliding into new experiences. He was doing the same, but also exploring all the ancient history he loved and the ancient languages, and encountering professors and mentors who recognized in him their natural heir, an intellectual equal who would one day surpass them. As a student. I was like a puppy that the elders patted on the head. And Al was something else, a sheepdog being raised to take over, maybe soon to be given responsibilities commensurate with his ability and promise. I don't know if that metaphor fits, but for now, together we had life to enjoy, and for a week or so we did, as Christmas turned to the new year and we popped down to London and then to Paris with my sister and her friend, all of us in Paris for the first time, seeing sights, finding cheap ways to eat, finding a place to stay. Combined, the four of us probably knew about ten words of French. I had only taken Spanish in high school, which I'd forgotten, replaced by the Italian I could now speak. Mostly. Hal had only ever learned dead languages, and he used to shake his head at the idea of coming into a class where the teacher began by saying hola or ciao or bonjour instead of just hello, welcome to Advanced Latin. But although we couldn't speak the language, and we spent the day smiling and nodding and pointing and trying not to be rudely incoherent or undeservedly demanding with the people who sold us fruit and bread and served us simple meals, something about being in Paris filled us with exuberance in our little hotel room, which was about the size our dorm room had been, with a sink in one corner and a bathroom down the hall, so in that sense, even more luxurious than our dorm. We heard some noise outside, a crowd of people on the street, spilling outside of a nightclub. For some reason, we were inspired to throw open the window and shout out into the winter's night, sharing the conviviality of the people below and using our limited French. Oui, monsieur, Merci. Bon Dieu. Bon soir. Sacre le bleu. It was the kind of thing you do when the excitement of life's promise can no longer be contained. Let it out or die is how it felt. And so we did, words shouted out, meaning nothing, meaning everything. In the spring, Al came down to Bologna and we traveled together to Rome. And I got to show it to him the Colosseum, the Pantheon, Piazza Navona. And I, in turn, got to see it through his eyes. I took a photo of him sitting on a fallen column in the Forum, and it became a kind of pre Internet meme with all of our Chicago friends. Al is looking up in wonder, not posing, lost in thought, a rapt look on his face at home in the ancient world he so loved. I heard you have a really good picture of Al, people would say. And when I would show it to them, they would say, that's so Al. Everyone who knew him and loved him and loved what he was about, the passion he had for that world known only from books, and the expression on his face as he encountered its physical remnants. I remember him looking at the ruins, turning his body and pointing. And that must be. And. And that's. Oh, my, that's. He didn't even finish his sentences. He just pointed and clapped his forehead, stunned by seeing it all in person, walking in the footsteps of senators and statesmen, philosophers and poets, emperors and the common folk. I've been to Rome a dozen times at least. I've never loved it more than that day or felt its ghostly layers of history more keenly. But it was Paris that I was remembering now as it rained this spring. I remembered the gloomy December days where Al and I trudged through the fog, under the clouds, finding joy in the city. We read Hemingway and Sartre and de Beauvoir. We hung out in the cafes. We tried new things. Al ordered a steak tartare and the waiter said in English, you know zat ze meat is not cooked? A phrase we repeated over and over. We read somewhere that Sartre's favorite song was Old man river, and we did our best to sing it in what we imagined was his French accent. We read that the existentialists admired Faulkner Faulkner is a God, they said, and Al, as always, reckoning with his own past and present as a Southerner, and who had a poster of Faulkner as a young man hanging on the wall of his dorm, was taken by that. C'est un Dieu, he repeated. He told me he'd written an essay about being from the south that had earned the praise of one of his professors at Cambridge. I quite like your writing, the professor had said, and I, with dreams of being a writer myself, could only marvel at the praise. It seemed like such a stamp of legitimacy and such an unusual thing for Al, the consummate scholar, so at home in the world of history, to have written a personal essay delineating a vulnerability. The rest of the time he seemed so invulnerable, already fully formed, impressive and admired by all. 20 years old with decades of promise ahead of him. And as I saw my 20 year old son with his 20 year old friends in Paris, and I relived through my son's eyes the excitement of being young and on a European adventure, I thought about Al and how we're all just builders of memories, and how sad it was that Al and I weren't in touch any longer. But it was okay. We all have our own paths, we butterflies, and sometimes we fly along together in pairs, as Emily Dickinson observed and recorded. And sometimes we fly in flocks, and sometimes as individuals. Sometimes we soar way up toward the sun, and sometimes we come to rest perched on a leaf, maybe panting for breath. We've read great things and seen great things and shouted out small windows, unable to contain our exuberance. I spent time with Al when he studied in Scotland and again in Princeton as I came back from Taiwan and China and India and Thailand and Tibet with new ideas of my own. Experiences I was eager to tell him about, and which he received with his usual calm approvalthoughtful and measured, but excited for me. And as his academic arc grew higher and higher, I was as proud as if it were my own success. When he called me to tell me he'd fallen in love, I could barely find words for my happiness. When I did the same after more adventures, I could hear the happiness in his voice too. We'd come a long way in a short amount of time. Like butterflies, we had caught a breeze and had ridden it as far as we could, from the moments in the dorm where we could not bring ourselves to say good night because it felt so much better to talk about the day until the gentle surrender to sleep, to talk about the past and the present and the future, to speak into the darkness, knowing that we had an ear on the other side of the room, ready to hear words coming back until the silence settled in for us both. I returned from Paris a few days ago, arrived at 9pm, jet lagged. And by 4am the next morning I was awake and settled into my podcast routine, writing about these butterflies and Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson, trying to find the rhythms and the momentum with my mind still back in Paris, resistant to the idea of dc. What was I doing this for? Why this long haul, with all these episodes and all the nagging pains of paddling furiously through these books and writers and all the rest, accomplishing nothing special and wasting all this effort for no good purpose? Why? Why try so hard? Why miss out on so much? Why? Why let so much life go by? Why sit at this desk when Paris was out there? The beautiful majestic hum of Paris, the city of light and art, every atom in my body excited to be part of it. Why be back here in this little room, at this desk, caring about a poem? Why talk about butterflies? Why not be a butterfly as I once had been? Me and Al and all the people I'd known, excited by the world, flashing through it with color and magic. I heard a cry come from above. My wife was doing her own thing in her own study, her office, and she came down the stairs with news that had reached her by random chance. Al. My Al. He was gone. Gone far too soon. I caught up with the news. I had not known about him, about his life. Two children, a prestigious job at a university press, colleagues who admired him, causes he'd championed. And then a sudden rush to the hospital while in D.C. for work, and some final weeks in the ICU fighting for lifeless than five miles from me. And I had no idea he was in town. Not then, not ever. Decades of regret colored my sorrow and grief. Why, Al? Why did you reject us? I could have been there. I could have rushed to your room. I could have been part of this, part of your life too, as I had been before, long ago. But the grubby fingers of life had seized him and thrown him on a different course. And he had righted himself and gone off in a new direction. And our paths were not destined to cross. I had to respect it. I have to respect it now. It hurts. It doesn't feel like Al, like the Al I knew, the Al I loved and admired. But it is him. It must be. In our little butterfly brains we react to the world as we can, moving up and down and over and back, darting this way and that, finding our paths. And we have to accept that others are doing the same. We don't get to know what's inside their minds. We don't control their movements. We barely control our own. We hang on and ride the breeze for as long as we can. Sometimes with a partner, sometimes in a flock. And sometimes alone. And while we're here, riding the breeze, we have these treasure chests of memories. The ones that Al and I generated, the ones my son is building now. Glorious boxes filled with riches. Mine is filled with the conversations I had with Al. The things we laughed at, the joys we shared. The years of youth where we faced the world together. My treasures are as bright and shiny as they were when I first put them in the box. They're there whenever I open the lid and light comes pouring out. And they're there in darkness after the lid closes. Sometimes because I shut it. Sometimes because I can only surrender to the forces beyond my control. As the butterflies do when the breeze sets them down. When their delicate wings fold in on themselves. When it's time to perch. Time to rest. When it's time to rest well. And when it's time to rest forever. So I say some words I've never said before. I love you, Al. I really do. Good night.