To new generations, the secrecy of the past is often baffling. A secret is a woman laced so tightly into her velvet gown that she cannot breathe or speak. We show up in jeans. Carl Jung called secrets “psychic poison”: they isolate the keeper of the secret, require lies, breed distrust, and become the unwanted inheritance of a generation bewildered by the need to keep them.
No editor would let a resurrected Tom Wolfe write the way he once did. But it was that breathless spew, uncensored though artful, that let him reach us. Now we only get that much animation from rogue or ranting podcasters and columnists, and it comes soaked in instantly recognizable political bias.
Prayer attempts to control—or at least come to peace with—the uncontrollable. It is an aspiration but also an assent: you are believing in something, acknowledging something, hoping for something. You have given shape to what is amorphous and uncertain. Psychologically, prayer is a survival tactic.
Hope changes form as we age. We are no longer hoping for new things or adventures or lovers or careers. We are not “living for” any particular cause or project. We are simply living. Hope is now a compact with the universe: a resolve to keep trying, keep giving, keep reaching out. So when the world tells us it would rather we die already, that we are about to become a great deal of bother, why would we not bow out gracefully?
A marriage must be flexible. One is strong while the other flags, then you meet in the middle and run parallel for a while, then the music stops and you switch, fast as a game of musical chairs.
As soon as you can reach high, grab the shiny doorknob, and toddle outside, you see what your homeworld actually looks like. Odds are, it will be the first thing you draw: a box with a triangle on top, two square eyes to let the sunshine in, a tall door to let your friends in. It is your kangaroo pouch, familiar and comforting when the rest of the world is strange.
Why are any of us drawn to twisted or ironic amusements? And if my answer is dark, why would I want to document it? Still, now that I am looking at my predilection straight on, it unsettles me.
Everybody wanted a piece of Sister Wilhelmina. Not a relic; those days are over. But they wanted to touch her, know her, maybe leave with a CD of the sisters’ music or a copy of the biography that was hastily whipped up. Even people who held religion at arm’s length read the national news stories, hungry for awe. And who does not need a miracle?
He had flawless musical timing, comic timing, cultural timing. When he fell out of time, we sped away from him. We still say Satchmo’s name, Ella’s, Sinatra’s, Elvis’s, with reverence. But only a smattering of fans and jazz musicians invoke “Bing Crosby” with similar awe.
Adam, the first collector, got to label every other creature, creating the first taxonomy. Collectors ever since have catalogued their finds, documented their history, identified subtle differences. By the nineteenth century, people saw collections as symbolic worlds, full of clues to other places and other times.