Читать онлайн «Waiting for Columbus»

Imagine a man standing on a rocky shoreline looking out to sea, pondering the question, the same question we whisper when we look up at night into a star-crazed sky-swirls of light millions of years old-everything moving away, or toward, or around: What’s out there?

This man is an average guy except for this need he has when it comes to the ocean. He is a man who will go out of his way to stand on beaches and look out to sea. He will pull over to the side of a highway or a road, he will get off a train or disembark a bus and then stand at the edge of whatever ocean is there with his awe and wonder vibrating. Often, depending on how he feels, he will hum Barber’s “Adagio for Strings. ” He thinks he remembers this music was one of the pieces played at JFK’s funeral. He could be wrong about this, but it is easy for him to imagine this music: a military band playing stately, painfully, marching in front of a long line of black vehicles. It is the perfect music for the funeral procession of a president, and it is the ideal music for oceans. Oceans are big enough to handle the sorrow of Barber’s “Adagio. ” Sometimes the first notes of this music are just there, in the back of his throat, waiting, ready. He begins to hum the first note and the following notes seem to know what they must do to make the melody.

It’s raining. He’s wearing a ratty dark-blue baseball cap that’s seen better days. It’s pulled down to his eyebrows as protection from the rain. He shakes his head, marvels at the redundancy of rain while standing next to an ocean. So much water just there in the rising and falling swells, in the ebb and flow, in wave after wave-so much water and yet it rains. He smiles at the ocean.

This is a desolate, rocky place. Its rocks seem old, as if they have been written down in an ancient, forgotten language. He read somewhere there were fossil beds along this shore.

He glances up, squints through the streaky gray sky, and drifts back to the only question that matters. He knows he is not the first to stand in wonder at the edge of an ocean. Human beings across the spectrum of time have stood at the edges of things they couldn’t comprehend and drifted in the mystery of not knowing. We no longer think of oceans as frightening, mysterious, or forbidding. Not today. We have lost our deference and awe for oceans because we are no longer dependent. We fly over them, look down from 35,000 feet, maybe notice a glint of sunlight, or the way color dances.

But this man can easily conjure up respect and even fear. He can easily muster a meditation on courage. He looks out and feels the ocean’s coldness-understands the uncaring green and gray, the undulating deep heart of it. It takes courage to face the unknown with gusto. He wishes he didn’t know about oceans. That way he could be certain that he has the courage. But you cannot erase your own knowledge, he thinks, so this rumination is only a game played by an idiot who fears the unknown.