There is Only One Misfortune  

8

 

His wife Helen supported him and nursed him and believed his explanation over the doctors’. She was an extraordinarily beautiful woman, gracious, personable and generous. I was smitten from the first time we met. She gave me bags of groceries whenever I visited and I had a standing invitation to dinner. We had our own long conversations about our parents, our childhood, and especially R.H. Blythe, the greatest translator of Japanese poetry and an early western exponent of Japanese culture who wrote his best book while in a Japanese prison camp. So, while Dan and I were colleagues, Helen and I became friends.

I was the first person Dan had ever told about the experience besides Helen, and it was never clear how much she understood. (His own father was convinced he had found the root cause of Dan’s mental problems when he found the Communist Manifesto from a college course among Dan’s books.) I was Dan’s conduit, facilitator, straight man, sidekick.

For me, he was a consolation prize. I was a loser in the vision lottery. “And your young men shall have visions” went a warning from Ecclesiastes often quoted at the time. I seemed to be constantly meeting young men, young women, middle-aged men, and middle-aged women who had had visions (having nothing whatsoever to do with drugs). The visions seemed as random and plentiful as rain. I stayed dry.

And by the time I met Dan, I suspected that if there ever had been a chance for me, I probably lost it after methedrine. I was always aware that intellectual investigation was sublimation, a substitute, yet I compulsively pursued it, in part because there was nothing better to do. So I was a prison inmate, a lifer, who became an expert on travel.

The death of Yaweh in the Holocaust, ended all possibility of belief. Nihilism could not be avoided with a creed or a philosophy but only with an experience. That can only be given. Like Dan’s.

He told me only a little about a few of the many inexplicable occurrences in his experience. He said that telling more would dissipate power. Often when I pressed him for a particular detail, he would listen far into himself and then come back with a decision, usually no. But, at about five and a half hours into the eight of that longest day, I decided not to accept no and pushed him with great effort to a definition of God.