I walked slowly back toward the Hilton, trying to sort through everything Friedman had said. The sun had drawn everyone outdoors again, and the beach was now full of people in bathing suits, though it was too cold to swim. As I watched them, something came back to me from one of Kafka’s letters, written at a vacation camp on the Baltic during the last year of his life. Next door was a summer camp for German Jewish children, and all day and night Kafka could watch them from his window playing under the trees and on the beach. The air was filled with their singing. I am not happy when I’m among them, he wrote, but on the threshold of happiness.
They were all out: the possessed matkot players, the only-barely-Jewish Russians, the lazy couples with young babies, the girls who, caught off guard by the sun, figured that their bras could pass as bikinis. Just as the inhabitants of Tel Aviv refuse to believe in the need for central heating, so they also seem to insist on going around underdressed, in T-shirts and flip-flops, always unprepared for the rain or surprised by the cold, and at the first sign of sun they rush outside to resume their usual positions. In this way, the whole city seems to have agreed collectively to deny the existence of winter. To deny, in other words, an aspect of their reality, because it conflicts with what they believe about who they are—a people of sun, of salt air and sultriness. A people who are, in that moment of sunbathing, of forgetfulness by the sea, as related to missiles as a man is related to the flight of a bird. And yet isn’t it true of all of us? That there are things we feel to be at the heart of our nature that are not borne out by the evidence around us, and so, to protect our delicate sense of integrity, we elect, however unconsciously, to see the world other than the way it really is? And sometimes it leads to transcendence, and sometimes it leads to the unconscionable.
How else to explain myself, then? Explain why I went along with Friedman, refusing to heed all the obvious warnings. One often hears people say that it’s easy to misunderstand. But I disagree. People don’t like to admit it, but it’s what passes as understanding that seems to come too easily to our kind. All day long people busy themselves with understanding every manner of thing under the sun—themselves, other people, the causes of cancer, the symphonies of Mahler, ancient catastrophes. But I was going in another direction now. Swimming against the forceful current of understanding, the other way. Later there would be other, larger failures to understand—so many that one can only see a deliberateness in it: a stubbornness that lay at the bottom like the granite floor of a lake, so that the more clear and transparent things became, the more my refusal showed through. I didn’t want to see things as they were. I had grown tired of that.
Every Life Is Strange
How it happened, for example, that one afternoon, a few months after his mother died, Epstein stood up to get a drink from the kitchen, and as he rose, his head suddenly filled with light. Filled as a glass is filled, from the bottom to the brim. The idea that it was an ancient light came to him later, when he was trying to remember how it had been—trying to remember the sensation of the level rising in his head, and the fragile quality of the light, come from far off, old, and which, in its long endurance seemed to carry a sense of patience. Of inexhaustibility. It had lasted only a few seconds, and then the light had drained away. At another time he would have chalked it up to aberrant sensation, and it would not have struck him much, the way hearing one’s name called from time to time when no one is there to call it does not strike one overly. But now that he lived alone, and his parents were dead, and day by day it was becoming harder to ignore the slow drain of interest in the things that had once captivated him, he had become aware of a sense of waiting. Of the heightened sense of awareness of one who is waiting for something to arrive.