I am not a Philip Roth fan, but I recently read “I Married a Communist” — partly because the subject is similar to something I am writing myself, partly because my Significant Other has been reading a lot of Roth lately, and he wanted to discuss this one.
If it hadn’t been an assignment, I would never have finished reading the novel. First of all, it’s almost a classic example of “telling” not “showing” — most of the story is told in chapter-long monologues, as one character, Murray, is telling the narrator, Nathan, the life story of Murray’s brother, Ira (the Communist of the title), who happened to have been Nathan’s hero for a couple of years of Nathan’s adolescence. The long monologues were very annoying to read, and I had to force myself to get past the first chapter. However, I slogged through it, with the following payoff: the last three pages not only explained the reason for this particular structure but also contained one of the most beautiful thoughts about death that I have ever read.
After Murray finishes reciting his long tale about Ira (over six nights, thus six chapters), Nathan stares up at the night sky and muses on the magic of listening to the tales told over the radio late at night when he and his brother were children. (Aha, Roth is trying to recreate that feeling of listening to the radio in the dark through words printed on the page. Sorry, I would never have known that if he didn’t tell me on page 300 whatever.)
But Nathan’s next memory really touched my heart. His grandfather died when he was very young, and he couldn’t understand where his grandfather had gone. So his mother took him outside, showed him the stars, and said that his grandfather was now one of those stars in the sky. And as now old Nathan stares up at the stars, the book ends: “You see with your own eyes the vast brain of time, a galaxy of fire set by no human hand. The stars are indispensable.”
This clicked with something I felt when I was 20. I was out on the lawn, lying on my back and looking into the deep black night sky, sparkling with stars. And I felt connected to the rest of the universe, to all those stars/suns out there, tiny insignificant little me, connected to those vast star/suns, with their own beings on planets like earth, and we were all part of some vast living cosmos that had existed long before I did and would exist long after I was gone.
It’s only a small step from that thought to the notion that we become stars, that we are all part of a vast universe that heeds our wishes, desires, needs not at all. We tell each other stories in the night to make meaning out of all the meaninglessness in the universe, and the universe will go on without us. I find this comforting. How about you?
Tags: death, meaning of life, Philip Roth, universe
August 7, 2008 at 5:24 pm |
What’s interesting about your reaction to the stars and night sky is that I have the exact opposite feeling — I don’t at all feel connected to the universe, but an extraordinarily small and extraneous part of it. I not only don’t think the stars are “indispensable”, I know I’m not either. I’m important only to those who will truly miss me, and they are very few…since by “miss me” I mean those whose lives will really be emotionally affected in a strong way by my absence, basically my very close relatives (now that my parents are dead, it comes down to children, grandchildren, and brothers), and that’s it. In another generation, I’ll be a vague and distant memory, and then maybe a picture in a scrapbook, if they still have scrapbooks.
And the idea that the universe will go on without us isn’t even slightly comforting to me — not that I don’t want it to, I do, but to me it’s not a comfort if I can’t be there to be part of it. The connection with nature idea strikes me as very Wordworthian (do you know Wordsworth’s Lucy Gray poems?). Yes, I’m going to devolve into atoms that float around somewhere doing God-knows-what, but what does that do for me?
As for our tendency to “make meaning out of all the meaninglessness in the universe”, yes, I think about that all the time, but I see it as two-edged: when it’s done well, that human ability can be beautiful and even noble, but as an everyday process, it often leads to the basest and most arrogant deception and self-deception.
I guess I’m an old crank, as I’d suspected. I love nature (see Vancouver entry) but I don’t get existential consolation from it.
August 7, 2008 at 10:36 pm |
It is interesting that we feel so differently about this. I don’t know why I felt so connected when I was 20, instead of insignificant. Maybe it just had something to do with its being a beautifully warm June night with the faint scent of evergreens nearby and heavy aroma of roses further on and thick grass that I could lie on my back on and lose myself in that star-studded sky. (I will check out those Wordsworth poems.) Now I think I appreciate that feeling because it takes the pressure off me to change the world. (Some shrink I went to early on told me I had an omnipotence complex — I felt responsible for EVERYTHING.) If I’m just a tiny part of a huge cosmos, then I can’t possibly be responsible for everything.
I do agree with you, though, about the two-edged nature of making meaning. Religions are just some of those attempts to make meaning, and most of those stories are pretty meaningless to me, especially when each one tries to claim, from its very parochial stance, that it’s the only true story.