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NIGHT THOUGHTS

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AN ILLEGAL DAY IN THE HISTORY OF A SOUL

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THE SHORT, HAPPY HISTORY OF A WRITING LIFE by David Eide:

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LOOKING BACKWARD

I'm afraid we've entered interesting times again. Three things stand out. One is the internet and no one knows the implications of the beast. It could be one of these slow turning, half-burning epochal changes that the living are ignorant of. The second is terrorism; frightening because of the equation: mass weapons, dangerous weapons meet people who have nothing to lose. And the third element is China.

The mind, marvelous and secret, finds the way to deal with it all. Between ignorant simplicity and the grinding down by complexity exists a happy medium. All one can do is say, "these things shaped me, they helped produce an identity for better or for worse. They weren't the only things but they played a role without question. They gave me a sense of orientation as far as history and where we might be."

Of course, there is always life running below the crazy world. The life of people, of family, friends, of work, of play. Of gambols and competitions, entertainments and tragedies.

Our life is destructive of the past; people inherit that belief, it is as common as salt and yet they hardly know where it comes from.

My region offers a rich variety of life and I am fortunate to have tasted a good deal of it. I felt conflict but rarely shame. Some conflict I had contempt for, other conflict stayed with me for a long time. I loved the art of building things. That is the only tribe I truly trust and have loyalty with.

The fatal disease of any individual or group, political or otherwise, is to live in the past. Know the past as well as your own hand. Know it in all its diversity and complexity. Know it. But live fully in the present and expect the present to move into the future better than you found it. Find the patch of green that permits this.

There are crooks in every profession, including the intellectual and literary one, who are going to try to limit you rather than open windows and doors into splendid places.

The writing life is filled with moral lessons. When I reflect on my youth I see that I didn't appreciate how good, bad, and ugly human nature could be. And that throughout the writing life I tried to emphasize the good, acknowledge the bad and transform the ugly. I tried to. I failed on more than one occasion. The bad gets under the radar and self-assessment is always needed. Faith is needed. And when the writer understands how frail, how weak he can be; how foolish he can be, in reflection, then he forgives others and tries to emphasize the good. And the good is there without question. This is a question between the writer and his sense of the living universe. It is not something between the writer and his family or cohorts or anything of that nature. So, in that sense God is real.

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