I have just finished The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. His Mars series told me more about how a world system can be created than any other source. This book, The Years, has caused me to look more deeply at my own life, my actions in it and my mortality than any other. Here is part of a review in the Independent: where you will find a synopsis as well
"Robinson can write action and adventure as well as anyone, but in the end this is an ethical fiction about the true purpose of humanity. His supple, thoughtful prose is always up to the challenge, whether exciting us with ideas, thrilling us with spectacle or presenting us with moments of elegy or quiet passion. It is not just the reader who, in section after section, recognizes the same characters in new guises. They discover each other time and time again with delight, sometimes meeting twice in a life after early death and sometimes waiting almost until old age for that fulfilment. After years of rice and salt come moments of happiness and celebration"
The book has brought forward a number of important questions for me.
Why have I met a handful of people who mean so much to me? It seems as if I have known them before. Did I? By the way this group does not include just those that are good to be with but also "enemies" who stir my stumps. At 53 I now know that I am not immortal. My father died aged 55. Is this all that there is? If so - am I living my life to the full? If not then what can I expect? What changes should I make?
I have been thinking a lot about how I will live the back end of my life. If I had read "The Years..." at an earlier time it may not have had this effect on me.
I am drawn also to the example of Siddhartha in Hesse's book and to the final character Bao in "The Years ..." Both had been in the world and had "done" a lot. But both found at the end of life, that doing the simplest things, rowing passengers across the river, baby sitting or teaching a few students, gave them the insights and a connection to eternity that a more active life had not. I am already feeling the signals. In doing the most mundane tasks that, before I had seen as chores, such as mowing, painting the shed and above all walking the dogs, I am finding that I pay more attention to the world and find myself slipping into it. Melding into it even. On a good day as I do these mundane works, my outline will fade and parts of me will fall into the larger world giving me a sense of what it may be like to be reconnected to the universe and making my death less frightening.
I also find this in teaching. As I go on, I feel more ignorant. I am the one who is getting most of the lessons! I am the one who is being rejuvenated by my students. And so I am reconnected to their energy and naivety and to their future that will outlive me.
I am only 2 years away from the age of my father's death. 3 of my closest relationships have cancer. So the question of my life has moved to the top of my list and is unlikely to go away. I feel pregnant with opportunity and ironically less afraid than ever.
It's some thing about acting simply and "seeing" the world as it is I think. Here is how Lester Noll describes the ending of Siddhartha which I think contains a great lesson for me.
"The wound (the knowledge that his son rejected him as he had rejected his own father) continued to hurt as Siddhartha ferried people across the river. But where he had felt a distance, even an aloofness from them, he now shared a sense of life with them. One day he happened to glance into the river and saw the reflection of his father in his own face. His own father had died, probably long ago, without ever seeing his son again. The river laughed at him. "Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred, and the same sorrows were undergone," it told him. He went to Vasudeva, sitting in their hut weaving a basket. He told him what he had just seen. He told him, confessed to him, all that he had experienced when he followed his son to town. He felt like Vasudeva was more than a kind old man listening to his tale but rather more like the river, even like God himself. He continued to talk but he was understanding that this new realization meant an end and a new beginning.
Vasudeva took him by the hand and led him to the river. There was more to hear than the laugh. Siddhartha watched and listened. He saw his father, Govinda, Kamala, Gautama, all flowing by in the river. He heard the suffering and desires, the laughing and woe, all mixed together in thousands of voices, all flowing by in the river. And the combination of all the good and bad, the events and emotions, together, in their integration made the single sound Om.
Vasudeva saw his friend's recognition. He saw Siddhartha had surrendered to the stream of life. As he rose, Siddhartha knew his friend must leave. They bade farewell and Vasudeva walked off into the woods, "into the unity of all things," leaving Siddhartha alone, "with great joy and gravity."
In his old age, Govinda ( his friend who was always seeking the path) was staying at the pleasure garden Kamala (the mother of his son) had given to the followers of Gautama. While there he heard about the old ferryman that some called holy. He did not recognize Siddhartha. Rather, he asked if he was, like himself, a seeker. Siddhartha kindly suggested that, perhaps, the venerable Govinda was seeking too much and not seeing that what he was seeking was right in front of him. Siddhartha then revealed his identity to his old friend and invited him to stay the night in his hut. In the morning when Govinda was about to leave, he asked Siddhartha if he might tell him what his doctrine or belief was. Siddhartha reminded him that even as a young man he distrusted doctrines. He told Govinda that he has had many teachers in his life but the last and best were his predecessor, Vasudeva, and the river. "Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom." He went on to pick up a stone and explain that that stone would one day be dirt, then perhaps a plant and then an animal or a man. And a man will one day become a Buddha and, in that, God. One can love that stone, not just a stone but as all of those other things, but one cannot love words. Words can only express part of a truth, leaving the remainder either unexpressed or misrepresented. And thoughts are very much the same as words, both are unreliable. But things, Govinda interjected, are illusion, Maya. "If they are illusion, then I also am illusion, and so they are always of the same nature as myself," Siddhartha replied. He told Govinda that the most important thing in the world is love, that we are "able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect." But, Govinda told him, Gautama preached a similar doctrine but forbade his followers from binding themselves with earthly love. Siddhartha replied that is just the reason he so mistrusted doctrines.
Govinda did not fathom much of what Siddhartha had told him but he did regard him as a holy man and so, before leaving his presence, he asked that Siddhartha give him something he could understand to take with him. Siddhartha told him to kiss him on the forehead. Although this seemed an odd request he did so and when his lips touched Siddhartha's forehead he saw, suddenly and wonderfully, many things. There were human faces and animals, death and birth, experiences and sensations, in changing streams, flooding his consciousness, merging, transforming, in time and out of time. How long it lasted he was not sure but he found he had tears trickling down his face as he bowed to the ground in front of this man "whose smile reminded him of everything that he had ever loved in his life."
© Lester L. Noll
17-Nov-2001
1:39:31 PM 
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