L'espoir

Last Memorial Day weekend, I was - as many of you know - attacked inside a restaurant while thirty or forty onlookers did and said nothing. In restrospect, it has always seemed both inexcusable and entirely reasonable that no one tried to help me. And this reason lingered in one form or another - a serious concussion, an increased fear of the city, a distrust of even those whose actions have warranted otherwise. I wrote obliquely of it in The Library's Grain (see #32 and #33).

This year, what had begun that day (and what had begun far earlier) ended. In a moment both greater and smaller than any narrative I could tell here, I was lost, and I was found. Death and birth, departure and return - time stretched out to encompass them and then swelled, splintered. Where there had been a line, a set of prints recording what had been done and was yet to be done, there was a field, an ocean - and each wave the temporary summit of a time willed into being its own.

And still, I am a child beset by questions. I am, like all who I know and love, a question itself, and my life not more than the effort to understand and answer that question. But the answer to that question may be that it is for another to answer. Call that other what you will. Call him, as my teachers and colleagues do, the Other. Or call him, as I will do anon and after, God. And call to him. And let yourself be called.