Whirling Words

A Benign Renegade

Prologue

On a muggy tropical morning about three thousand years before the sequencing of the human genome, in the wetlands north of what would one day be called the Gulf of Mexico, a young man shouldered his hunting gear and, perhaps against the advice of his elders, set out on a solitary search for game. On the second day out, he followed the spoor of a wetland deer. Near nightfall he stepped too confidently onto a spongy patch of earth, broke through the ground, and plunged into a subterranean waterhole. Already fatigued by the long hike and stunned by the fall, he felt his way around the sides of the pool until he found a narrow shelf just above the water level. He dragged himself out of the water, and there on the ledge he lay down to sleep.

The next morning he took stock of his predicament. The shelf where he had rested was about three body lenghts below ground. The opening through which he had fallen was half a body length in diameter. From there the earth sloped concavely down to the ledge where he crouched. The young man could imagine only two ways out. A flood might occur, raising the water level of the pool to the level of the ground surface; this had a likelihood close to zero. Someone might come along and find him; this had a likelihood only slightly less remote.

For a few days he scraped earnestly at the overhang of the waterhole, hoping to undermine more of the ceiling so that it collapsed into the pool, allowing him to scuffle out of the hole. But he had nothing to eat, and soon his energy reserves were drained. In the end he lay down on the narraw ledge and awaited death. There the anthropologists found him three thousand years later.

That young man's fate has haunted me for years. Now, again, it rushes into my consciousness as I look around my room, four walls and a skylight squeezed into a corner of the landlady's attic, my monk's cell, as my daughter likes to call it. Of course, unlike the young man in his underground grave, I have a way out: a door that leads to a hallway and then a stairs and then another door that opens to an entire city and a planet and a galaxy. And yet now, knwoing my end is near, I share his perspective.

A few days ago I completed my seventieth solar year. Following my usual practice, I celebrated my birthday by submitting myself to the indignities of a medical exam. And now I know that soon I, too, will pass into what Rabelais named "the great perhaps." Of course, I've known all along that the end was a question only of when. But now I'm learning, as I suppose that young hunter-gatherer on the subterranean ledge learned before me, that nothing quite focuses the attention like a specific death sentence.

Among the manifestations of my newly concentrated perspecitve is a curious urge to leave a record of some of my life experience. I know this isn't novel. I also know it is foolish and arrogant. But I seem to have taken on the persona of a doomed tenor in a Verdi opera or the ill-fated protagonist of a Sophoclean tragedy: smitten by a fatal blow or a taste of some deadly brew, the hero pauses in his death throes to declare himself on one or two points before succumbing to the lethal stroke or the venomous draft. Verdi and Sophocles, of course, could pass off their heroes' behavior as dramaturgic convention. I have no such excuse. But then, as I go eyeball to eyeball with the Grim Reaper, I find myself very little concerned with convention.

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