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I do not know what he dreams about. Perhaps baseball. The glory of contact. It is possible, I suppose, that he dreams about the things he fears. I pray there are no monsters, but there is always the shadow of loss, monstrous in itself, impalpable, seductive, life-sustaining, its presence the strange gift of all who have something to lose. I watch him while he dreams and I wonder what he might fear losing, or what he has already lost. Can loss haunt those who have not yet lost a thing? Or is there no such time as a time before loss? What strange brilliance is this, that nature should equip a child to imagine a world in which the things he loves are gone? Is this how we learn what love is, by picturing a room where it’s no longer there, and understanding at once that we do not want to live in that room? Why do we remember “Bambi” and “Old Yeller” and “Frosty the Snowman” all our lives? The sun comes out and nothing’s left but a corncob pipe and a button nose. In literature, as in life, the sting of absence underlines the worth of things. We all learn this the hard way sooner or later, but the genius of human anxiety – and the dreams it provokes, and the stories provoked by the dreams, and the new dreams provoked by the stories – is that it allows us to feel the sting of loss even when we do not experience an actual loss. If we hope to understand the grand and fragile nature of life and love and happiness, our minds offer us a school of imagination much more appealing than the school of hard knocks. One morning last week my son woke, sprawled as usual between my wife and me like the crossbar of the letter “H”, and lay quietly for a long time. He stared at the ceiling, striped with sunlight that had snuck through the blinds. He followed the movement of illuminated dust. He rubbed his eyes. “Daddy,” he asked, “why are we not ever going to play baseball ever again?” I answered quickly. “Of course we’re going to play baseball again.” Reassurance, of course, was just what he wanted. But I’d missed an opportunity to give him something more – interest in the things his mind was seeing. “What makes you say that?,” I asked. Too late. He just smiled, and looked at the ceiling, and kept his darkest dreams to himself. Greg Blake Miller writes from Las Vegas. |
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