"Life is a pain in the arrears" a friend of mind once punned, and I think of that line as I watch my fellow humans go about this debit-and-credit business called living. I can never quite figure out why we survive as a species. Everyone knows deep in their pith that life makes sense only because we have to be connected to one another. Yet we work like demented brick layers to wall off the milk of human kindness until it evaporates. I'm not speaking here about racism or religion or any large social or historical perversions. I'm thinking more about those small daily erosions we practice on one another, those little jibes and incisions that fracture our compassion, leave us in a sweat of meanness.
The other day I was hanging around the shopping plaza across the street from where I live. A family comes to shop there often, a mother with three children. The children are probably five, eight, and twelve. They are always in perpetual argument. I watch them come across the parking lot, the mother tugging one or the other child forward, the oldest tagging along just outside arm's reach. From a distance it's a mime of quarrel, everyone mouthing at one another. Within earshot their barbs and accusations rope them together like mountain climbers.
This seems to be their normal manner. But one day, as they were making their way home from Woolworth's, the eight-year old was bumping into the mother when, quite by accident, their feet tangled and the child fell down. The mother walked on, yelling over her shoulder for the child to hurry up. The child just laid on the asphalt and cried. The mother continued; the oldest child kept to herself; the youngest one daddled on the edges. The child finally picked herself up, but instead of walking along, she stood there and worked herself into an ictus of rage. I could see it clearly from where I stood: her shoulders tensed, her body contracted, and though I couldn't see her face I imagined it twisted and cannibalized, skewed by her vaulting anger. The mother ignored her, as did the other children; the child eventually gave up and followed.
We can be so mean, so careless with one another's lives. We can mortar-and-pestle love until it has no scent or taste or body. We can end up spending our lives in a vigor of revenge, putting one another into arrears because others in our lives have used our flesh for their own profit. We can also be kind; this butchery is not ordained. But most of the time, it seems, we want to squander one another, death by inches preferable to kinder, more patient lengths.
I see the quartet disappear down the block, knowing the child's ledger is already started, already full.
In Praise Of Pleasure
Smoking