All My Days Are Saturdays

7. Unnecessaries

77 7 Unnecessaries “Oh, no, not so early,” Vicki said walking into the kitchen. “Don’t start the worry watch.” I have long worried excessively. But sitting at the table that morning and ruminating over a bale of granola topped with fields of berries—black, rasp, and straw—I thought my brow was smooth and that I looked at peace with the world. I had put the dogs out, and they had returned safely from wandering the yard and were asleep in their beds. The radio was silent, and because I don’t subscribe to a paper, news didn’t blight breakfast. Moreover the sky was blue and cloudless. Along the driveway peonies bloomed in great white and scarlet chalices, and in the dell squirrels bounced up and down the hickories like furry Slinkies. Actually, when Vicki appeared, I was mulling a statement I’d read in Edwin Muir’s Latitudes, reducing and leveling, if not stripping away, meaning and thus worry from life. “Everything,” Muir wrote, “exists as a perfectly unnecessary thing: we ourselves, philosophies, literatures and states, as well as butterflies and planets; it is only after they have come into existence that we make them necessaries.” 78 All My Days Are Saturdays Worry would vanish if everything were really unnecessary. But life as the page paints it is artificial. Peonies blow. Cloudless days suddenly become stormy, and squirrels scamper onto the road and are killed.“Are you worrying about the stock market again?” Vicki said. “No,” I said, “but I should.” Domestic matters are the source of most of my worries, the stocks, for example, bought to provide for Vicki’s old age. In Reveries of a Bachelor Donald Mitchell mulled marriage and the single life. “Can any wife be prettier than an after-dinner fancy, idle and yet vivid, can paint for you?”he asked.“Can any children make less noise than the little, rosy-cheeked ones, who have no existence except in the omnium gatherum of your own brain? Can any housewife be more unexceptionable than she who goes sweeping daintily the cobwebs that gather in your dreams?”I go to bed immediately after eating, and the after-dinner fancies I experience are soporific, their doings not nearly as vivid as the color Vicki splashes quick through my waking hours. To me marriage has brought much happiness. However, many other aspects of life seem unnecessary or of doubtful worth. I’d think better of religion if theology were nearer to God than to corporations. In the theocratic states of America one must be a groaner, or at least learn how to groan, in order to succeed. I grew up an Episcopalian, thinking , as Goldsmith put it in the Bee in the eighteenth century, that enthusiasm in religion “prevails only among the vulgar.” In fact I admire gentlemen sinners. Unlike the doings of zealous Pentecostal circuit riders , the hankerings of gentlemen rarely lead to bloodshed. A doctrinaire and stridently underbred professor of theology, an old story recounts, described the destruction of the Canaanites as occurring “so that Israel might possess the land.” When the professor finished, a student raised his hand and asked,“Why in heaven’s name did the Lord create the Canaanites ?”“He created them,” the professor answered smugly, “in order that Israel might have something on which to whet his sword.” Unlike the professor I am incapable of fervor, and the shaded and the flimsy have long satisfied me. I do not want to stride into the clarity of hard noon and discover that the diamonds in my hands are gravel, the cinnamon I smell is dried dog’s dung, or that the celestial music I hear is the braying of donkeys. If I were young again, I would pay more attention to the natural world and wouldn’t study history as closely as I once did. The justification that the study of history enables societies to avoid reliving the past Unnecessaries 79 fails the test of history. Life is repetitious. The past becomes the present and the future. Evils perpetrated by one generation are repeated by the next, albeit often refined or, as apologists explain, civilized or enhanced. Even when historians call attention to long-standing abuses, little is done. “The world’s sympathy is generally as effective,” an old statement declares, “as standing on a bank and asking a drowning man if he is wet.”Furthermore most historical knowledge...