Read The Return (Enigma of Modern Science & Philosophy) Page 13
Exhausted and mentally fatigued, I let my head slump onto the table. I had traveled to the brink and was overwhelmed by the intensity of thought necessary to survive. I had to escape. My eyes closed and my mind sought peace.
I found myself in a graveyard, standing silently before the grave of my father. I stared at the ground, at the weeds that had invaded the small plot and at the gray, old stone that was the only mark of his existence. His name had not been put on the stone and only a few survivors knew that this was his final resting place. I felt sad that a whole life had come to this, yet I knew that the life he had had was not the worst. He had hardships but nothing as bad as it could have been.
I had once visited the old town of Rhodes in the Dodecanese islands of the Aegean. On the walls of the mediaeval fortress I had met an eccentric Englishman who was spending his retirement in the sun charting the history of the battlements. He excitedly pointed out the great moat that protected the walls. He wanted me to imagine the plight of the poor Ottoman soldiers who vainly over the course of a year-long siege tried to attack the impenetrable defenses of the city. He painted a picture of a horrific reality for the hapless attacker who was subject to the threat of a rain of arrows, catapulted stones, cannon fire and the showers of Greek fire. The moat became a space of the universe where there was the terrible stench of death. The cries of pain and despair drenched the bloody air through the long days of battle and all through the moonlit night. Men howled in pain and desperation as they slowly died of their wounds. They had time left only to fill their lungs with the stench of decay and rotting bodies. The slight hope of escape was snuffed out by the sweeping disease borne by the swarms of flies hovering over the rotting corpses. I despaired at the thought that a life should end so futilely and in such terror.
As I thought of my father’s life and of my own, I realized that for all our sorrows we had lived in privileged times. A wave of love for him engulfed me and I wanted to see him again. I wanted to hold his hand and tell him of my life. I bent down and started to pull up weeds, one by one and place them in a pile in the center of the plot. They lay there like a mound of dead bodies in the moat.
A hand touched my shoulder. I looked around and saw a face that I should have recognized. She was much older now and the lines marking her eyes gave her dignity. She smiled calmly and her hand extended. I took it and recalled the decades of years that had passed since last I had touched this soft flesh. She withdrew her hand immediately as if the contact was too shocking. I left my hand, still reverberating from the touch, in mid-air then stretched it out and touched her shoulder and then her hair. She recoiled but not in fear.
‘Sorry!’ I said.
‘Don’t be!’ she replied.
She lent forward her face and I gently kissed her on each cheek as if we were a French couple just meeting on a Parisian boulevard. She still had that stately elegance that I admired. Her hair was still long but was coiled up in a bun that gave her head a sculpted look.
‘How are you?’ she asked simply, not expecting an answer.
I could have told her my life story. I wanted to retrace the past back to the days when we were young and carefree. Our bodies knew only the faint scent of longing and desire. We had only a mysterious wonderful future to look forward to. Such very special days were to be etched on our souls; times that were destined never to be repeated. We both knew that such bliss was lost in the past but the first touch and the passing kiss on her cheeks transported me there for the briefest of instants. She too had been taken back as she blushed with the intimacy of the experience.
‘You’ve changed from the boy I knew long ago.’
This was not a reproof rather a statement of fact. I could not lead her from the present moment all the way back to the speckled times of our youth. She had not voyaged with me on my troubled seas nor I on hers. Too much had transpired to even try to go there. We took up where we had left off.
‘Do you still have those romantic views of life?’ she asked.
I inwardly grieved for the life I had led. The expectations of a wildly positive youth had given way to the trials of a life not fulfilled. The toils of a life, spent surviving, was not a story I wanted to recount. I simply shook my head.
‘And you,’ I countered, ‘have you reached all those great goals that you always insisted were achievable. You chided me for my lack of ambition. Maybe that’s why I lost you. I was not adventurous.’
‘We were young. It was only a first love. We had to move on. And the answer to your question is no. I didn’t get to my goals.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. I’m sure you have achieved much more than me. I am still searching. That’s why I am here at my father’s grave. I don’t know what I want to find here but I feel that the past has some answers. Meeting you here convinces me of that.’
‘It is a curious coincidence.’
Her eyes caught mine and searched them for something. I looked away fearing she could see the barren world within.
‘I don’t normally hang out in graveyards, you know.’
She smiled at her own humor and I felt a smile break across my face. It was like a wave washing back the despair.
‘You do a spot of gardening,’ she said, pointing to the small pile of weeds.
‘Yes, but it’s more passive gardening than the active sort. I can pull weeds but I don’t seem capable of planting things that grow. That is the kind of gardening that I’d like to do. I’d love to sow seeds here that would bloom into a grand display of flowers. I’d like his resting place to be a small patch of Eden.’
‘To get things to grow,’ she reprimanded me, ‘you have to tend them. Love and desire are not enough. The best gardeners are those who work hard on their plots. Toil and sweat are what create a nice garden, not romantic yearnings.’
‘You continue to reprove me of my romantic yearnings.’
‘Life has not taught you that they are not enough, yet?’ she said in surprise. ‘You are still the naive youth you were. Head lost in the clouds and crazy expectations of what life has to offer. You must have had a lot of knocks along the way with that attitude. I learnt to cut my cloth from an early stage. It leads to a simpler if less exciting life. I found excitement was always accompanied by pain. Better the simple life. I settled for less. I became a pragmatist.’
I was disappointed at her admission. She had such potential and she sold it for the quiet life. How could she sell so cheaply?
‘I too was pragmatic for a while but I found I was dying on my feet,’ I said truthfully. ‘I had settled for a job and a family. I was to coast into middle age and have children and grandchildren. Become gray and die. But luckily I escaped. I left and started to search anew. The desires I had as a youth were not misplaced. There has to be more to a life than domesticity. I have set my course. It is a lonely course but at least it has a taint of some nobility about it.’
‘You were always seeking to be different,’ she said. ‘Different from others. You in ways despised the norm, despised others. That haughtiness was not attractive in you. At least not to me. I liked the romantic airs as they were harmless, even charming. But the dislike of others I couldn’t take.’
‘I tried always to set myself apart.’ I admitted. ‘I wanted to be more than the common man. I had set my sights on being a special existence. The routine of normal life bored me - even made me nauseous. I can remember retching once after being forced to endure some simple company for an excessive period. How awful is that?’
‘Indeed I can recall,’ she said with a small nod of her head. ‘It used to frighten me how easily you took a dislike to simple things and simple people. You were never destined to fit in. Most people felt you were pompous but I was one of the few who understood that it was more than simple pomposity but a driving force that led you to avoid the banal as if it were a contagious disease.’
‘I had to escape for my own good,’ I said. ‘The world was closing in on me. I fou
nd that I could hardly breathe. No-one understood me - perhaps not even you.’
‘And you never returned.’ she said simply.
‘No, only when I had to. For my father’s funeral. And then my mother’s. To return was a further death. Each visit sucked the remaining life blood from me. I yearned for the past yet it was leaving me further and further behind. The past was dying and I felt that I too was dying.’
Our conversation continued in an aimless way for some time until she said she had to go. We parted awkwardly not going through that dangerous cheek-kissing routine. Alone again, I wept silently from deep within as my hands tugged at the remaining weeds on the anonymous grave.