He hated electric lights, they say.  As if he knew, that one day there would not be the candlelight, for quiet monastic reflection, but that the electric lights would one day come to be in the form of screens, out of which one would draw as much distraction as good, in a way costly to the creative process, which is holy.  He was in his Karamazov phase, I would gather, his long religious pilgrimage in words.

It was as if he knew that one day the distraction would be great, and that the screens, the electricity, the lights, if you will, would  themselves be an eye, inhuman, staring, spying at us, having insinuated itself into all of life beyond the monastery and the quiet thoughts and spaces for them.



I went down to the see if I could see the Pope coming to visit St. Matthew's Cathedral.  Summertime, I had the morning off.  I walked down to Dupont Circle.  As it turned out he came up the side street, coming in from the west on Rhode Island Avenue, so I didn't see anything but for the crowds.

I got back.  I turned on the television to watch the Pope's Mass live on tv.  I hear a knock at the door.  Thump thump thump.  Quiet, but audible.

There had been talk of him taking me down to GW Hospital for my surgery, and epididemal cyst, an encroaching little lump.  Earlier in the day, exiting the old house, as I came down the stairs, Hey, G., he was coming up the steps from the basement with his wicker laundry basket.  My brother had called just a few days before, and it seemed like the thing to let him take me in, as he was, is powerful, and knew people down at the hospital.  Okay, fine.  Sure, sure, of course.

I'm watching the Pope, subtitled, and G. has a point to make.  He comes in.  He's standing in the living room.  What's the point?  he asks.  And now I see, he is unhappy, and maybe I'm unhappy too.  And he's right, in many ways.

Lets's just wrap this all up by the end of the year, okay.

My blood runs warm.   Oh, this again.

What are you going to do?

Well...  I think for a little bit.  Well, I guess I'm just a religions.  That's ...  ah...  what it's about, for me...  

I cannot reconstruct what I said. but it was something like that.  A shrug.  What do you want me to do?   I'll go off to a monastery or something...  A shrug, perhaps.   He repeats what he said earlier.  Great.  Summer.  G. is wearing khaki shorts.  Blame.  Shame.

I'm a writer, yes.  The situation is not ideal.  Here I am with all my books, and my possessions, the whole enabled thing.  I'm a contemplative.   Quite natural, that one can't really fall into a particular camp, but getting both Jesus and Buddha.  Almost a duty, not to take sides.

But that takes years, to really get it, the necessity for the quiet, for the forest...  poverty is no surprise. Manual labor, monkish tasks, no surprise.

An intuitive thing, to find the Christian pattern within, as something true and steady.  The work of the Father who sent me.  Not your own.  How could it be your own...

There's even a sense of humor to the Universe, how it manifests Jesus types in bums like me, who must grow more and more self-aware...  less self, more the grand oversoul, or whatever it is.  A life of quiet contemplation, even in unsuspected quarters...