The Journey Westward: Part One

Last night as I settled into bed, I began to review my weekend, a particularly good one in which I went skiing, saw a movie, had brunch with a friend, dinner with another friend, and attended a house-warming party. For an introvert like me, it was a pretty active few days, with plenty of highlights that I could assemble into a story whereby to shape and preserve a comfortable self-image, creating a weekend personal history that lulled me into what I expected to be a pleasant sleep.

I was wrong. Sometime between 2 and 4 a.m., I woke up, disturbed by a dream, the details of which I don’t remember, except that it was obviously inspired by an extremely trifling event that had occurred earlier in the day: a group of colleagues were talking outside of my office about a party they had attended over the weekend. One or two hours later, when I finally fell back to sleep, I was still thinking about that one small event, bothered by the fact that I hadn’t been invited to my colleague’s party, even though I wouldn’t have gone if I had been invited, and doubly bothered by the gap I perceived between my own life and the lives of my colleagues, almost all of whom are married with children and whom I apparently know so little about—whose stories I’m barely familiar with, whom I affect so imperceptibly. I felt alienated. Though my memory of the night’s remainder is faint, I have a feeling that my dreams continued to explore and develop that one small event, an event that I barely paid mind to when it occurred, but which my unconscious couldn’t let go of and invested with enough importance to disturb my sleep.

In the novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera writes about how in the twentieth century the European Blackbird moved from the forests, its native habitat, into the cities. In terms of historical significance, such an event, a radical transformation in the relationship of one species to another, is far more relevant than the Israeli invasion of Palestine or the British withdrawal from India or the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, events that merely altered relationships among members of the same species. Nevertheless, you’ll not find a single history book, or many books period, that mention the exodus of the blackbirds. The exodus of the European Blackbirds is not part of Western history, not part of its self-definition.

The personal histories we construct are no different than the histories we construct of nations and continents: what we leave out is often far more revealing than what we include.

As I get older, I find myself trying again and again to recall those moments from the shadow side of my history—paths I almost took, women whom I almost made love to, actions I thought about taking but never did—the millions of stories that have never been told, blocked now by the surface events of my life, memories concealed by memories. I long to go back to a time that existed before realization, to the woman whose promise was never tarnished by prolonged interaction, to once again be worthy of a grace I earlier failed to recognize, to find the treasure and return to innocence, to a time before I knew disappointment or satisfaction, before history, to take up space once more in the countless zones that the light never landed on.