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And
why? Why another book in the morass of Self-Improvement and the self-published,
all those elegant novels remaindered and shelves of poetry unread? Why
Amos Townsend's ideas, when there are such game and handsome exegetes
for the world's mysteries as Richard Feynman and Brian Greene and that
bald man with the big glasses who can connect everything in the world
into a single theory? Psychics and expatriates and musicologists and postmodernists,
not to mention Harold Bloom, or Updike with his fifty novels (good ones,
too), all typing away while the world sleeps, or is sleepless: no. A book
by Amos would be unnecessary.
At 11:47, thinking of Updike, Amos smacked his own thigh in frustration
and performed the fourth-quarter of what he thought of as his Human Drillbit
routine, in which he turned from his right side to his stomach, and from
his stomach to his left side, and from his left side to his back, and
from his back to his right side, on and on, drilling himself closer, he
hoped, to sleep. Amos liked to consider himself a man with a cynic's smile,
more apt to turn it against himself than against the world, and did so,
on his back once again, staring at the shadows on the ceiling. He smiled
at himself and his own suffering. His suffering. Every evening of his
growing-up years he sat at the dining room table with his parents and
his younger brother, Samuel, in front of the cold fireplace, and watched
his father say a simple prayer and then look at his family with his habitual
expression: a closed-mouth grin, the barely discernible lift of his eyebrows
that said, Well, here we are again. And his mother had her own version
of it, didn't she? patting her napkin in her lap or straightening her
skirt, the way she pursed her lips and let her gaze fall to the floor.
A life within limits, that's what his father had taught him to live. The
elder Townsend might as well have taken young Amos by the hand and walked
him to the seashore--except they lived in southwestern Ohio--and pointed
to the shoreline and said, "Do you see? It's insurmountable." Best to
smile, and offer your neighbor an extended hand, and be thankful for your
roast beef and linen napkins. Amos remembered how, in the end, his father
spent almost every day with his face in his hands, sobbing dryly. No one
could unearth the reasons for his sorrow, and Amos didn't try. ("Isn't
it enough," Amos finally whispered to his mother, after watching her claw
at his father's pajama top for the hundredth time and beg him, beg him
to tell her why he wept so, "isn't it enough that he's crying?" His mother
had looked at him like he was a stranger, and surely he had felt like
one.)
Somewhere in those years at home with his parents, living the odd life
of a preacher's child (in which he was part of his father's pastorate
and part of his father, too, which granted him privilege in the congregation),
Amos learned to smile patiently at everyone in town--the members of Lost
Creek Church of the Brethren, kind, pious, hardworking people who were
committed to community life--but also at the conservatives of the town,
and the gun-owners, the cruel, florid men who attended the town's other
churches devoutly, men who, even holding open the door for a neighbor
at the diner or speaking to Pastor Townsend on the street, were inches
away from something guttural, some crassness or abomination. "All God's
creatures," his father used to say, walking home in the bright Sunday
afternoons of Amos's memory. Pastor Townsend loved, it seemed to Amos
now, the worst aspects of human nature, because the display of such validated
in him his long-held and hopeless belief in something Calvinistic. (Although
the elder Townsend would never have admitted such a thing--heavens, no.
The Church of the Brethren--the faith of Amos's father and of his father
before him--broke away from the Calvinists during the Protestant Reformation,
but Amos couldn't shake it, this feeling that a trace of the old world,
of the Old Man, remained.) Doom or damnation or pre-destination, all revealed
providentially through our unkindnesses and injustices and unchecked appetites--this
is what Amos learned to look for from his good father.
I cannot write a book and I will not write a book, Amos thought, drumming
his fingers against the mattress, but if I were to write it, where would
I begin? He would begin not back there in rural Ohio in his father's church,
although that would have been an interesting place to start, but in his
very own heart, in his second year in seminary, when he first read Paul
Tillich's Dynamics of Faith. It was a small book (compared to the rest
of Tillich) and the argument being made seemed deceptively simple: we
all have an object which represents our Ultimate Concern. For some the
object may be celebrity or personal power or money, or even something
like romantic love and family. Institutions, including Christianity, have
historically elevated the moral good to the status of the Ultimate. But
there is really only one ultimate, unconditional concern, and that is
for the Unconditional itself, what Tillich called our "passion for the
infinite." We grasp the notion of the infinite immediately and personally,
and yet it is seldom the object to which we dedicate our lives, and this
is where Amos began to feel nervous. We elevate the finite, which has
as its only power that of flux and decay, and when our ultimate concern
fails to achieve ultimacy, we live lives that are hopelessly broken, and
we know it.
On the day they were to begin discussing the book, Amos walked into the
classroom feeling both thrilled and sick, because how was he, how were
any of them, to go on, now that they realized who they were and how they
had been living? He watched his fellow seminarians enter the classroom
one by one, until all nine were there, fine people, all of them, but none
seemed to realize what they held in their hand, the localized nuclear
event. They chattered, they rearranged their bookbags, they set out portable
tape-recorders. One man systematically offered everyone a stick of gum.
When the professor walked in, a middle-aged and serious man Amos trusted
without hesitation, and put his book down on the desk and said, "So. Are
we ready to discuss Tillich?" Amos felt his stomach lurch sideways and
then turn over. It was the same feeling he had watching newsreels of bodies
being bulldozed into an open grave: the approach of the bottom line, life
irreducible.
They began to discuss the book, and Amos could see that his professor
took it as seriously as Amos himself did, the revolutionary idea that
even Beauty and Justice are only concerns of the highest order, and do
not achieve Ultimacy. God alone. Sola Deus. And who manages that, in this
hardscrabble and knocked-together life? Well, almost no one, Amos realized,
sitting there in class. His father hadn't, his mother hadn't, no one from
his congregation--those carpenters and farmers and quilters, sincere,
gentle people--had managed it. His professor had not, although he clearly
wished it possible. And it was then and there that the idea began to form
in Amos that there is a universal element in the human condition, something
alchemical, and it's nearly visible, it radiates off people in waves,
and you can see it everywhere, all the time.
His thinking was interrupted by Mike, a man in his forties who always
wore short-sleeved dress shirts washed thin. "Listen, I worked in middle-management
at IBM for sixteen years, and I can tell you, business people don't know
they're broken. They don't care about ultimacy or the lack of it in their
lives."
And then Anita, who had grown up in a series of foster homes, said, "It
seems to me that the farther away a person moves from thinking about what
does or doesn't achieve ultimacy, the happier he is. The happiest people
I know in the world are the cruelest. They rest in it, somehow." And on
around the table it went, one student after another disagreeing with Tillich's
proposition.
The professor asked, "What about when the middle-managers at IBM look
in the mirror first thing in the morning, or last thing at night? What
do they see there?"
"They see profit and loss," Mike answered, "and I don't mean metaphorically.
They see the company they work for."
Amos said nothing; his tongue seemed to have failed him. But he thought
one thing over and over, the way he used to think a single thought in
church on Sunday until he nearly choked on it: You are all wrong. You
are all completely wrong about this. We live lives that are hopelessly
broken, and we know it.
At 12:22 Amos decided his imaginary book needed anecdote: everyone loves
a story. But more than that, he would be remiss if, in making a claim
about the nature of humanity both broad and oblique, he failed to include
humanity itself. So he would begin with Steve and Lydia, because that
was where he first truly understood the idea, the nameless idea that rendered
him sleepless.
Could it have been ten years ago, or closer to twelve? Amos was not yet
thirty, and just out of seminary, when he was called by his district to
a small congregation in a town called Mechanicsville. Mechanicsville was
little more than two streets crossing, surrounded by farmland; the only
business was a general store that offered dusty loaves of bread and canned
vegetables. Most of the people who lived there worked in Dayton, fifteen
miles east, all the family farms having long since been sold to corporate
agribusinesses. The first time Amos drove through town his heart felt
leaden, and he could hear his father offering his perennial advice: Unhappy?
Can't get started? Lower your standards.
He sank into the little white cottage behind the church, put his books
on plywood bookcases, bought a tea kettle, took up his post. But Amos
was frightened every Sunday as he stood before his congregation (eighteen
people if the sun was shining), and felt he had no authority, God-given
or otherwise, nothing like what his father had provided on his darkest
day. Who was Amos to comfort the sick or the bereaved; who was he to give
advice or explicate the Scriptures?
And who were these people, anyway? All through the late fall and early
winter, in order to pick up his mail at the local post office, Amos had
to walk past the home of a man named Skeeter, and there was very often
a large dead deer hanging from its back feet (or worse, on a hook through
the gut) by a series of winches and pulleys on a tree inches from the
sidewalk. Amos's hometown had the only opera house in the whole of Ohio;
there were no dead animals in the trees of his youth.
The deer were hung to bleed, Amos knew, and he was able to take that in
stride, but he began to be bothered by the sight rather deeply. He began
to see the deer in his sleep (and certainly when he couldn't sleep), and
not so much the carnage as the details: a whorl of lightened fur just
above the thick muscle of a hind leg, or the delicate curve of a nostril.
They had beautiful eyelashes and their lips looked like velvet, and the
way they hung made them appear to still be running, or reaching with their
front legs for the safety of the ground. And he couldn't walk on the other
side of the street because on that side was a family whose name he was
never able to learn; they had a standing army of delinquent teenagers
and a vicious pit bull on a chain that could reach the sidewalk and then
some, a dog that was frantic to kill a grown person.
Excerpted from The Solace of Leaving
Early by Haven Kimmel Copyright 2002 by Haven Kimmel. Excerpted by
permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission
in writing from the publisher.
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