“Have you found a new book?” he asked.
She smiled to the question, humored in attention and care for a interest dismissed by most of the world. She took a draw from her morning coffee, warmth in trace moving across lips, tongue, then down. She waited for reside of the feel before responding with answer.
“I haven’t yet,” she answered, “still looking for something that hits me.”
“What do you want in a book?”
“I don’t know,” she paused, “Something different than every day, something outside of normal, something safe to read that I wouldn’t want to live in extremes that story writes and tells; an adventure without the risk…”
“But you’re an adventurous person.”
“Not with my life…” she countered.
“Everything has a risk, and possibility for reward, and sometimes fictions—when consuming in mind—spill over and what we absorb as only fiction, after, manifests as truth in happened life.”
She mused, “Maybe, can’t say I’ve ever seen it live that way.”
“Maybe not…” he paused. “What do you value in a story?” he asked further.
She took another drink from coffee, uncrossing, switching, then returning back to cross-rest of jeaned and high-rise boot covered legs as she sat in conversation at shared table.
Leaning into him across the space, she shared, “I like a story that makes me feel something. I have enough of monotony and numbing in what life gives daily. I want an escape, or an enlivening—maybe that’s the better word—something that makes me feel something I don’t get when I wake up or live the rote routines life seeks to set. I want something different, something that makes me feel, even if it’s dark or disturbing: a change and effect—that’s still something.”
“May I share a passage from something I read a while ago?” he asked.
“Sure,” she anwered. “What’s it from?”
“Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, by Walker Percy.”
He opened a Kindle, found the book, then passage he had saved. He read:
“In a post-religious age, the only recourses of the self are self as transcendent and self as immanent.
The impoverishment of the immanent self derives from a perceived loss of sovereignty to ‘them,’ the transcending scientists and experts of society. As a consequence, the self sees its only recourse as an endless round of work, diversion, and consumption of goods and services. Failing this and having some inkling of its plight, it sees no way out because it has come to see itself as an organism in an environment and so can’t understand why it feels so bad in the best of all possible environments—say, a good family and a good home in a neighborhood in East Orange on a fine Wednesday afternoon—and so finds itself secretly relishing bad news, assassinations, plane crashes, and the misfortune of neighbors, and even some secretly hope for catastrophe, earthquake, hurricane, wars, apocalypse—anything to break out of the iron grip of immanence.”
“Inescapable dullness, and impersonal, of the immanent,” he ended. “Is that what you feel?”
“Sometimes,” she answered.
“He talks a little later of the means by which man—writers especially—escape from the immanent and attain temporary elevation into transcendence and full-lived moments and spirit.”
“And what are those?”
“I can’t remember them all, but the ones off the top of my head, there is: pretending to be something other than what we are—imitation and role-playing of a part; drugs and drink—sometimes elevation, but just as often annihilation of the self, to assault and change the living numbness with either chemical stimulant or killing away into deeper darkness. There is geographic escape: travel—escape from one’s daily life for temporary adventure into a different that—by being ephemeral in its nature, and never knowing a place, like person, long enough to know its faults, will always hold a romanticism in alienness long after adventure and moment ends. Then there is physical escape: sex; what more body and spirit raising act than transcendence in passion—variety in acts, expression, partners; medium of magic and portal to transcendence or hollowing darkness depending on spirit in which it is given, shared, and made; going home: return to an ideal and comfort that we have preserved and saved in our mind as safe-haven when all else seems to fail—a farm, small town that changes with less haste than places of concentrated and reactive people. Maybe the safe-haven holds, or maybe it is found to be no different than any other ideal when put to test—a reality and not a dream; something imperfect—even in its goodness—that requires something more to sustain soul-peace and attainment to something more. When these fail, there is the great escape—suicide. ‘Suicide, though strangely enough, though the direst of options, is often the most honest, in the sense that the suicide may have run out of other options and found them lacking.’ One can hide from the world forever, and remained lost in art and mind, undivorced from dream and ideal by refusing access from, or return to, the outside world; and last, the final medium: God.”
“And how does that work?”
He searched for another quote, “You get real. You get honest.”
“By seeking an idealized Being invented before science proved different?”
“He speaks to that too.”
“What does he say?”
“You’ll find it should you choose to read, but the transcendence of God as medium, whether real or affective imagined, comes in understanding that every other medium is only that—a medium, not the source—and that if we really desire lasting transcendence, discernment of Truth—especially ours—we must surrender our illusions and hold open to revelations God, the Universe—whatever label you want to give It—shows in signs we may discern. It is by God, we are shown, and empowered to live and be our True Selves.”
“You don’t really believe that?”
“I believe many crazy things, absurdities my rational self would have avariciously dismissed and disavowed, but openness discerns differently as Truth.”
“And what are your beliefs on the other mediums?”
“I’ve tried all but one, and conscious disavowal of the one left seeking of the final, God, as last resort. Beyond It, only one remains consistent.
I’ve traveled the world. I found no place that touched the dream of an ideal—and so there I went to make a life.
I no longer drink. I know who I am and no longer desire or entertain being someone I am not. I quit drink when the darkness became more powerful and common than transcendence. I am down to God and physical escape. These two, for me, remain windows to a transcendence: inspiration and elations.”
“What made you think of this book?”
“I just thought, if what you’re wanting in a book is something that makes you feel—that is different than one’s living normal and every day—maybe it’s one you’d like. It’s one of the strangest I’ve ever read, parts even more so on second and third times through. On first reading, I had to message the friend that led me to it to make sure it was the same book the first quote came from. It was definitely NOT what I was expecting.
And it stayed that way: weird, different, open-ended for us to choose our own multiple-choice answers as self-help books like to write, and both a challenge and opportunity to discern how we view ourselves, life, the world, and the ultimate fate and course of man. I won’t explain it all away, but it’s a mind-bender with weirdness, humor, and thoughts that still, then move, a heart.
The ending is one of the most interesting pieces, and I wonder which you’d choose.”
She listened. It was a conversation of kind rarely found; the kind of magic books, in their expression and guiding of thought, afford to those who seek, read, and share. His descriptions, sharings, leadings piqued curiosity for rest that it might hold, and wanting to know, she asked again.
“What is the book again?”
He smiled, “Lost in the Cosmos: The Last-Self Help Guide.”