Everything Fits

“The nuns taught us there are two ways through life, the way of Nature and the way of Grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow.

Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.

Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.” 

― Terrence Malick, "The Tree of Life"

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Dear Kate,

When we tell each other stories, we are searching for what is true in our personal life, yet assuming they are universally meaningful, reconciling not only us the tellers but also the listeners to a shared reality, a cosmic togetherness, mitigating estrangement between the Self and the Other, assuring the identity and value of everything our words speak to, speak about, and speak for.

At least the assumption should be there, ideally, or why else are we telling about ourselves to someone else?  There has to be some vision of togetherness for me to trust an effort is worth the while.

"What is the point of the story?"  As a listener that's what we want to know.  "Where do I fit in your story?"

You could say my job is listening to people telling me stories.  The assumption in their telling, though, is usually that: You don't need to find yourself in my story.  It is about Me.  You don't need to fit.  I am telling you all these so that I can use you to get to the next chapter I am seeking to write about Me.  You are as valuable as my story needs you.  (That probably explains why I am raising my voice now.)

Selfish people, you say, they must be in dire need of attention and help to be so self-absorbed.  Not necessarily.  This past weekend I sat there for close to an hour listening to someone with enough money in his bank to live at least thrice over the same abundant life he has been living.  He spoke about science arcane to me in a manner just as ungenerous, that, at the end as at first, there was no point to be made, not to me, and ironically, not to him the storyteller either: we waited together for a Word that didn't arrive.  Losing sight of our togetherness, he lost sight of himself.

One of the most ambitious cinematic efforts to tell a story of human togetherness has to be Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life."  I will let you be the one to say whether he succeeds, whether the movie achieves its ambition to speak about mankind's togetherness with sights and sounds cosmic and personal.

Somehow Malick believes the meaning of life, the togetherness of all creation, has to do with the reconciliation of mankind to each other, an openness to transcendence, to speak in and out of love without compromising justice, to speak about and speak for everyone without objectifying anyone, that in the Word's utterance everything is clarified without being demystified, forgiven but never forgotten, made whole and made home.

What is the point of me telling you all these?

Yours, Alex