FEAR AND TREMBLING

1 9 R F E A R A N D T R E M B L I N G J O H N K O E T H E I had to read it the summer before I left for college. I had a job running a miniature merry-go-round With dinky airplanes instead of horses, across the street From the zoo and the natural history museum, Where I’d read a book that eventually changed my life, Although I didn’t realize it then. It was all about Not being sure and being sure. It was about the sun of faith Obscured by the cloud of not knowing. It was about being great. And after fifty years I’m reading it again, and after fifty years I’m back in San Diego for my high school class’s fiftieth reunion, Herbert Hoover High School ’63. If you had told me then What I’d be doing now or who I’d be I wouldn’t have believed you – Time is unimaginable until it passes, like the individual life With which it coincides. And as for God, I didn’t believe it then, And yet it still made sense to me, and doesn’t now. It was a metaphor For being free, since listening to God meant listening to yourself. A life is made up out of everything it can and can’t imagine, Had and didn’t want, wanted and couldn’t have – all of it there In the yearbook for God to see. I wear a nametag with my Picture circa 1963, carry a drink and wander around the lobby Of the Lafayette Hotel, glancing down to place each face Before moving on to the next one, staring into a hotel mirror At the image of that distant boy who turned out to be me. Maybe I make too much of things. Kierkegaard did, Hung up in a no-man’s-land between sacrifice and murder, Between morality and mystery, conjuring up possibilities Where there were none to see. My Moriah is a fantasy 2 0 Y Of living in the present, of inhabiting the interval Between the settled past and the illusion of the future, Which keeps receding. The tale may be superstitious bullshit, Yet what resonates is the absence of anxiety, the sense Of purpose, the uncertainty. Greatness is the underlying theme, But it’s invisible: greatness is the absolute, and it remains unknown. I know the story that came true is not the one I set about to write, Though it’s the one I meant, the one I learned in high school. Standing around a swimming pool, listening to pre-Beatles rock ’n’ roll, Then flying back across the continent to tell my tale to anyone Who’ll listen: it’s complete except for the conclusion, Which remains unwritten, since it’s inconceivable. What’s left Is wonder, wonder and waiting, canvassing the possibilities: Respite or catastrophe, anonymity or validation – the abrupt angel, The finality, the stayed hand; the ram caught in the shrubbery. ...