On Being Boring. On Being Infinite.

A hand clapped my shoulder.

"I'm here maybe two, three times a year," came a voice.  "But every time I'm guaranteed to see you it seems!  You're always here."  

He looked with some bemusement at my book bag, a tatter of careworn stitches. Dog-earred and whiskey-stained books. 

"Ah, and still studying I see!"

"Still," I said a little sheepishly, "and possibly always."

"Well aren't you the most interesting man in the world!" Sarcasm and affection mixed with another shoulder clap.

I have become used to this very confused remark.  But before I could respond--with what surely would have been a witty, and most definitely interesting, response--another voice interrupted.

"Getting your usual, hon?"

This was, of course, a terribly timed question.  Ignoring my friend's all-too-delighted smirk, my eyes, in what could only be described as a frantic act of defiance, searched for the most exotic-sounding drink on the menu. But my lips would have none of it.

"Yes, please!"  

I sounded much too cheerful, I noted.  Pull back slightly, I thought, I mustn't let anyone know I didn't want the exotic drink.

"Well," my friend smile wide, "I do hope you get to have some fun every once in a while!"

I wanted to say I have almost nothing but fun, but how to make someone else understand?

Studying is certainly a most horrible and insipid word; so tame and tiny, it chokes like the dust on dry Latin grammars; spreads the soul thin like the unwinding doldrum-hours of herding dangling participles and pendant nominatives into more respectable positions.

But such a parched word is unworthy.  I do not feel boring, even if outwards I look it.

I wanted to say I had been traveling recently; to Rome, Iceland, Gaul.  That I had seen the great civilizations of old, and conversed with mighty minds.  That eons passed before my fingertips.  

But to him none of this would make sense.  I had only been here.  Studying.

How do I describe it, then?

The infinite little hours of grammatica are but the loving patience of marking itinerary for long travel; of ensuring I have the tools I need.  For we live not in a place but in its descriptions, which we give to bring life to its intensity.  We eat not olives, but Italy:

In a grocer's window I saw a small tin of olives with the name Orvieto on it, and overcome by a sudden longing to be on the right side of the Mediterranean, entered the shop: bought it: had it opened there and then: and sitting down at a marble table in that gruesome light I began to eat Italy, its dark scorched flesh, hand-modelled spring soil, dedicated vines.

Moments all steal away, all their little details and emotions only ever present in their description, in our imagination, in our representation of words:

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine.  What flowering would there be in a such a garden?  Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water--peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking.  For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires.  To crave and to have are like a thing and its shadow.  For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweet as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it.  And here again is a foreshadowing--the world will be made whole.  For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it.  So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.  Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries. (Marilyn Robinson, Housekeeping)

Studying--to give that word a moment of life--gives the dune-stalk words to speak of lost love, the strength to carry the burden of a vanished moment:

What strange afters now, after everything; once when our bright laughter struck out, heavencrazed and returned to us redoubled, we would draw like lightning those looks from each other; every bright word between our smiling lips gossamer and fire-tinged lances whose heat only warmed.   

Graceful joy, you would run like lines of flight between ocean breakers and under the leaf-life of the trees, through the neighborhood houses as if to tell them they could not hold you there.  And I found you wonderful, I would admire your beauty, your smell, and you would laugh little melodies at the jokes I told.  Truly being here was glorious, and even you knew it.  You who would call me for comfort in the pearl-sable night, and I would come.  You who ask now for the hardest gift, which I cannot give with any joy.  In these afters, now only some distant varieties of quiet, all the hollow sea-reeds singing nothing.  

God gave me a gift for my heart’s wildness, for a little time; but like the mana I tried to keep it to myself, and it is ruined, ruined.

Reading is not the opposite of living.  It lets olives taste of Italy.  It lets the grass sing lament psalms.  Lets the soul take off its chains.  When I was sad so long ago I would sit upon a sunny porch and read Greek.  Perhaps it was not so long ago but only a little while.  Whatever time that time was, it was in my sadness when Greek would speak to me.  For I was sad but in his everlasting words Homer was happy; and I could drink in his little phrases, and was met on my sunny porch with his loud-roaring sea and rosy-fingered dawn. 

When then in the time I was sad, and the sun on my sunny porch would begin to sleep, Homer would speak of the rich wine-dark night; and in the loud-clamoring of the storms in the wine-dark of the midnight watch, the flashing teeth of the skies became but the dazzling-bolt of that cloud-gatherer, Zeus.  

So, when my mind was aloof under thunder and blankets, when I alone was lonely in suffering this war-like sky, Greek said, as the maestro of Homer's tongue, be still.  This is merely bright-eyed Athena, peering into the night.

When again, when I was sad and would read Greek as I was assigned, when skies were streaked with that speech of bright and jagged heaven; those moments were memorial.  Every page-turn of the lexicon was a little infinite moment, where I became lost in an exotic and lingual elliptic.  I would orbit another time.  So that when I was sad so long ago, sitting upon sunny porch or under smoke-dark skies I would find, I could no longer be in that moment sad, for I was not I but Homer's rhyme.

And of the academy: here are secrets sitting in the ordinary.  Where I travel with Darwin to the exotic Galapagos, or sit with Newton under his fabled tree.  To follow adventures in ideas and exploration, its like experiencing these histories oneself.  Striding giants' strides because I sit on the shoulders of giants.  I watch how the world--even still--has been shaped by Aquinas and Augustine; I hear Barth thunder and Bonhoeffer die.  I hear nails hammered on a Wittenburg door; the endless prayers of Carmelite nuns.  An adventure of spirit and idea.  Read Foucault.  Eco. LeGoff.  What wonderfully strange histories underlay our scrubbed and anodyne reason.  The marks of the world play out like a vast secret begging to be seen; like a shadow that has just turned the corner.  Like the swift glory of God who has gifted us an existence that mirrors him--"Scattering a thousand graces, he passed through these groves in haste, and left them, by his grace alone, clothed in beauty" (St. John of the Cross); but also a strange and terrifying puzzle of sin and rebellion, where adventure is met with tragedy--"I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint.  My heart has become wax and melts within me." (Psalm 22:14).

Both come together in Christ, the same God who declared the world Good, who was crucified and now asks us to follow him.  Christ is the great adventure, if we would only but relearn the language of His renewed world.  "What rot has reached the root of us," writes Osip Mendelstam, "that we have no language for our praise?"  Words now are sodden with overuse; they will not cling, they will not burn.

My bag is frayed because it carries fire.

In the stillness of study you become more mobile than any motion.

As my friend waved, and left, I sat as I am wont to do, and watched the secret paths of hidden things play before me.