Closed Doors


Dear Eugene,

I walked with Sumi just now, going our usual route.  Around my neighborhood.

Door after door, my neighbors behind them.  I know many faces, but I hardly know anyone.  One can get used to the remoteness, the indifference, and forget it is a disease.

One time I was talking to a lady--she said she is old but I think she can take me down in the ring--and she had her finger going down each door from where she stood, going, "Well, she's dead...and there used to be a couple but the man's gone; I dunno about the lady, haven't heard from her...and the next door, well she's dead...and next to her, well, dead too..."

She's among the first generation moving into this neighborhood.

Yesterday talking to a friend I recalled what Arthur Eddington once said, "We often think that when we have completed our study on one, we know all about two, because two is one and one. We forget that we have still to make a study of and."

It is a cruel thought but I see each Facebook post like a door, opening a way of knowing a person by closing every other way.   To make the world see my little kid landing a kiss on my cheek is to say one day when he grows up and tries to land a fist on my other cheek you bet your access to that crucial moment in our family life will be shut.  For whose sake?

It can't be for God's sake.

If we speak for God's sake, our words would be filled with insufferable agony and unbearable joy, sex and violence and more sex and more violence.  Like the Bible.

Yours, Alex

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