Tell Me

What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

I’m reading Camus’ The Stranger with one of my students, and it all comes back to me — swinging in a hammock on the front porch of the little house where I lived in Chapel Hill. I was nineteen years old (ways like a baby child sang Otis), an English and French major, had piles of books to read — swinging alone in a hammock reading Sartre’s La Nausée and having the distinct feeling of falling through the net, falling through the net endlessly even while swinging in the Carolina air, hot and humid. The books turned my head, turned me toward. The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it, wrote Camus about Sartre’s novel. Yes, we are home from the hospital and Sophie is doing ok. It’s all so much, it’s all too much. Too much. Trop. Tonight as I readied Sophie for bed, drew the blanket up to her chest, positioned the mask over her trach, draped just so the blue tubing that connects the mask to the compressor and delivers cool mist, the whoosh and the buzz and the whirr that is not white noise but the noise of nothing of falling. Her breath. I brushed the hair from her face and wondered — what? Tell me what will help you what will give you ease what will make you happy tell me, I whispered even as her face, eyes closed turned away. I will open my mind and you can tell me in my dreams, your dreams. Tell me.