Enough Of Play
Who would not remain a child as long as possible, to play forever….. My hand is raised.
That is not possible. The passage of time, the toll of aging –exacts a price. The bill for living is that sooner or later you must die. That is the way it is. The concert must end, no matter how magnificent, how transcendent; one, maybe two encore pieces, and the lights go down and the band trudges backstage exhausted. Conclusively we must all die in the end.
Often the saying is heard, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” You can’t stay here. Yes I know, feeling the sadness even as an transcendent eternity echos in memory. I’ve had that experience many times at the conclusion of a concert. The contrast between finitude, the inevitability of oblivion, the unraveling of everything; and the unbounded depth of endlessly articulated meaning, of eternity, is whispered.
This morning I awakened, with awareness of a sharp pain in my elbow as my initial sensation of the new day. I have a repetitive stress injury in my left elbow and it slowly grows worse. I have reached the point where I must seek medical care. Today I plan to ask my physician for a referral to a physical therapist. One’s body suffers the wear and tear of the years. And so does the idealism that enveloped one’s youth.
I offer a passage from Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. Harry Haller, the Steppenwolf, on the cusp of returning late in the evening to his apartment with the intention to commit suicide, stops at a public house, The Black Eagle, to sit and drink, to delay for a bit what he has decided he must do. There by happenstance, Harry finds a seat next to a younger female, who engages Harry in conversation. She has not been told of what Harry intends upon arriving home, yet she requests that he delay for a while to sit with her before leaving:
“Well, stay here then,” she said with a voice that comforted me. “Why can’t you go home?””I can’t. There’s something waiting for me there. No, I can’t—it’s too frightful.””Let it wait then and stay here. First wipe your glasses. You can see nothing like that. Give me your handkerchief. What shall we drink? Burgundy?”
While she wiped my glasses, I had the first clear impression of her pale, firm face, with its clear grey eyes and smooth forehead, and the short, tight curl in front of her ear. Good-naturedly and with a touch of mockery she began to take me in hand. She ordered the wine, and as she clinked her glass with mine, her eyes fell on my shoes.
“Good Lord, wherever have you come from? You look as though you had come from Paris on foot. That’s no state to come to a dance in.”
I answered “yes” and “no,” laughed now and then, and let her talk. I found her charming, very much to my surprise, for I had always avoided girls of her kind and regarded them with suspicion. And she treated me exactly in the way that was best for me at that moment, and so she has since without an exception. She took me under her wing just as I needed, and mocked me,too, just as I needed. She ordered me a sandwich and told me to eat it. She filled my glass and bade me sip it and not drink too fast. Then she commended my docility.
“That’s fine,” she said to encourage me. “You’re not difficult. I wouldn’t mind betting it’s along while since you have had to obey anyone.”
“You’d win the bet. How did you know it?” “Nothing in that. Obeying is like eating and drinking. There’s nothing like it if you’ve been without it too long. Isn’t it so, you’re glad to do as I tell you?”
“Very glad. You know everything.””You make it easy to. Perhaps, my friend, I could tell you, too, what it is that’s waiting for you at home and what you dread so much. But you know that for yourself. We needn’t talk about it,eh? Silly business! Either a man goes and hangs himself, and then he hangs sure enough, and he’ll have his reasons for it, or else he goes on living and then he has only living to bother himself with. Simple enough.”
—-excerpt, Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse p. 86
