Chapter 58
Let thy garments be always white and let not thy
head lack ointment. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou
lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity.
Get up! Get up! You're going home! Roll out of
that sack and cram your stuff into your barracks bags
and swing 'em on that truck waiting out in front.
You're going where the houses are built the way you
like to see them, and where the streetlamps go on
at night and where a macadam road winds around the
corner and its tar grows hot and sticky in summer
and trees lean over and cool it by breathing softly.
You're going to a place where lights go on when
you push a button and hot meals are served in
china plates and clean water runs at the twist of
your wrist and starched shirts come out of a paper
package and you can sit on a toilet seat in
privacy, and walk erect without fear and say good night
to friends and know that you will see them alive
some other time, and take your wife in your arms
without a schedule of train departures in your hip pocket.
Stop it! Stop it! You're crazy, you're delirious! You'll never
get back. How in hell do you expect to get
back -- across the sand and the sea and the cities
and the farms and the mountains and the plains and
the empty, barren swamps -- back? Jesus, it will take a
lot of crawling, even using her smile to find your
way in the dark. And what if you do get
back, what then? You can't make adjustments just by ringing
a doorbell. There will be moods. There will be attitudes.
There will be words spoken and words left unsaid. It
will be a peacetime war that will go on and
on and on and you will never really get it
out of you. People will see you behaving normally and
they will remark about how well you have managed to
fit yourself back into the community, and they will congratulate
your wife on her understanding helpfulness. But you have lived
in each other's mailboxes too long and she has conditioned
herself to your absence, and you, in turn, have found
her physical presence not entirely indispensable. And so
mmmthere will
be a little block of strangeness that will have to
be chipped and sculpted before you are able to recognize
once again the girl who had walked in your sleep.
It is a good thing that the human mind can
function like a digestive organ and eliminate what it chooses
to forget and let its diseased droppings harden and gather
dust in some hidden drainage ditch, and out of revulsion
idealize neat, antiseptic thinking. But there should always
mmmbe someone
to sit in judgment over your application to forget and
stamp it with approval, because only those qualified to forget
should be permitted to do so. All others should remember
and should be periodically reminded that when the world owed
them a living they sent somebody else to collect it.
Life is a magnificent purse of gold thrown in people's
laps, and all they have brains enough to hold onto
is a bent penny. Peace is an interval created by
killing those who disagree, and God is notified to take
out citizenship papers or be deported. They memorialize
mmmthe ruins
of faith while hope for the simple humanity of humans
is corroded in salt water -- sweat, tears and the sea.
People don't know how to live. They only have suspicions.
* * *
