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Brighton, England
Friday, June 29th, 2007
https://adamkhan.net/rambles/only-the-rustle-in-the-trees
Maddie my dog is gone and in my confusion I sort of believe that if I go back, or sideways somehow, I’ll have her again. I guess I’m proud as well that 21 months after her passing I still live under the shadow of that day. Perhaps that’s nothing to be proud of; perhaps that merely reveals that I have far less going on in life than a 37-year-old man should. When my father was my age his son was having his Bar Mitzvah.
Yes, I do believe it is foolish to be so cut up about Maddie. I loved her, she loved me, but lamenting it does no good. Acceptance of her passing is near — if indeed it hasn’t already happened and I’m simply holding on to it as the thing to be morose about. We all, like twinkles on a sunny day’s waves, shine briefly. That I do know to be true. Other perspectives are futile. Grief, loss — these are the great teachers surely. Understand that what one has will pass. Blair as the incumbent prime minister talking with Ted Heath at a gathering of former PMs, years of the job behind him, years of it to go, but there it is, suddenly over now.
There really is nought to do except look forward, and have special times and places to remember those whom one personally loved and venerated. And try to learn the lessons of grief: Whatever one thinks one possesses — a companion, good health, certain surroundings, a frame of mind — will pass. What won’t pass: I guess that’s the question.
One thing that seems not to pass is my love of swaying trees, and I’m confident that both the wind and the trees will be here until my time too is done, and that unless I’m both blinded and deafened I shall be able to lie beneath them and hear and see and feel their sway. Beyond that there seems to be little except passing comforts. Genesis. Nietzsche. Joyce. Melville. Telly binge-watching. And yet, it seems to make a difference to me under what regime a tree grows. Britain? America? Israel? And so the cycle of futile thoughts makes another round.
Hypocritical and self-indulgent: I want to cover up the telly here in the new living room because, well, it’s a telly in the living room, hinnit, and there is no other living room, and the path of least resistance to engage the brain, thereby mind, thereby self, thereby soul, is to switch it on. And once Irit, instigator of the tellied home, retires to bed, I of course indulge in a night of British telly watching. Hours have passed. News. A documentary on what prime ministers do after retirement. Commander in Chief with Geena Davis.
