The Second Coming

You can get all A's and still flunk life.

My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.

How did it happen that now he could see everything so clearly. Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself from some dark past he could not remember to a future that did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. Is it possible for people to miss their lives the way one can miss a plane?

It has taken me all these years to make the simplest discovery: that I am surrounded by two classes of maniacs. The first are the believers, who think they know the reason why we find ourselves in this ludicrous predicament yet act for all the world as if they don’t. The second are the unbelievers, who don’t know the reason and don’t care if they don’t.

He had passionate and insane views on every subject. She was certain that one reason he had taken up dentistry was so he could assault helpless people with his mad monologues.

Ninety-six capsules. Three a day could give him tranquillity for thirty-two days. Then he’d be too weak to move anyhow and yet live long enough to get rid of the drug. This way everybody wins. God, if he exists, is not affronted. If he doesn’t, Sutter gets the one million.

My experiment is simply this: I shall go to a desert place and wait for God to give a sign. If no sign is forthcoming I shall die. But people will know why I died: because there is no sign. The cause of my death will be either his nonexistence or his refusal to manifest himself, which comes to the same thing as far as we are concerned.

Didn’t Jacob, a Jew, require an answer of God by hanging on to him, rassling him until God got fed up with this Jew (what have I done to have picked out such a nagging stiff-necked people?) and gave him what he wanted. How odd of God to choose the Jews. God no longer makes appearances as a rassler, but I have my own way of getting at him. I shall do this by waiting him out.

Most Romans worked and played as usual while Rome fell about their ears. But surely it is fair to say that when a man becomes depressed, falls down in a sand trap, and decides to shoot himself, something has gone wrong with the man, not the world.

There is one sure cure for cosmic explorations, grandiose ideas about God, man, death, suicide, and such—and that is nausea. I defy a man afflicted with nausea to give a single thought to these vast subjects.

P.S. I wish there was a way to tell my daughter Leslie goodbye but there is not. Perhaps you will do it for me if it is necessary. If the result of the experiment is positive, then she and I will have found common ground. I will acknowledge her Lord. If not, and you do not hear from me, I ask you to choose a time at your convenience and convey this message to her: that even though she never seemed to need me, I am sorry I was such a rotten father. No doubt the fact that she never needed me sprang from her perception of my unavailability, coldness, shutoffness. These awful distances within a family—was it always so?

The first sign that something had gone wrong manifested itself while he was playing golf. Or rather it was the first time he admitted to himself that something might be wrong. For some time he had been feeling depressed without knowing why. In fact, he didn't even realize he was depressed. Rather it was the world and his life around him which seemed to grow more senseless and farcical with each passing day. Then two odd incidents occurred on the golf course. Once he fell down in a bunker. There was no discernable reason for his falling. One moment he was standing in the bunker with his sand-iron appraising the lie of his ball. The next he was lying flat on the ground. Lying there, cheek pressed against the earth, he noticed that thinks looked different from this unaccustomed position. A strange bird flew past. A cumulus cloud went towering thousands of feet into the air. Ordinarily he would not have given the cloud a second glance. But as he gazed at it from the bunker, it seemed to turn purple and gold at the bottom while the top went boiling up higher and higher like the cloud over Hiroshima. Another time, he sliced out-of-bounds, something he seldom did. As he searched for the ball deep in the woods, another odd thing happened to him. He heard something and the sound reminded him of an event that had happened a long time ago. It was the most important event of his life, yet he had managed until that moment to forget it. Shortly afterwards, he became even more depressed. People seemed more farcical than ever. More than once he shook his head and, smiling ironically, said to himself: This is not for me. Then it was that it occurred to him that he might shoot himself. First, it was only a thought which popped into his head. Next, it was an idea which he entertained ironically. Finally, it was a course of action which he took seriously and decided to carry out. The lives of other people seemed even more farcical than his own. It astonished him that as farcical as most people's lives were, they generally gave no sign of it. Why was it that it was he not they who had decided to shoot himself? How did they manage to deceive themselves and even appear to live normally, work as usual, play golf, tell jokes, argue politics? Was he crazy or was it rather the case that other people went to any length to disguise from themselves the fact that their lives were farcical? He couldn't decide. What is one to make of such a person? To begin with: though it was probably the case that he was ill and that it was his illness - depression - which made the world seem farcical, it is impossible to prove the case. On the one hand, he was depressed. On the other hand, the world is in fact farcical. Or at least it is possible to make the case that for some time now life has seemed to become more senseless, even demented, with each passing year. True, most people he knew seemed reasonably sane and happy. They played golf, kept busy, drank, talked, laughed, went to church, appeared to enjoy themselves, and in general were both successful and generous. Their talk made a sort of sense. They cracked jokes. On the other hand, perhaps it is possible, especially in strange times such as these, for an entire people, or at least a majority, to deceive themselves into believing that things are going well when in fact they are not, when things are in fact farcical. Most Romans worked and played as usual while Rome fell about their ears.

The name of the enemy is death, he said, grinning and shoving his hands in his pockets. Not the death of dying but the living death. The

own death is what you really love and won’t be happy till you have, what then? Then we’ll know, won’t we?