Self-Identity#2 - Another Life and Neighborhood

A Journey into another Life and Neighborhood

A Book – An Autobiography, a Fiction, or Just Telling Lies

Something more than a book review written by Daniel McDonald

 

It had arrived.  I had been working long hours and my doubts about my writing project had begun to mount.  As my opportunities to focus on writing slipped away, my confidence in the whole project waned.  Something wasn’t working as I tried turning words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into an article or an essay.

I am mostly a lazy writer.  I write about the impressions made upon me in the few things I read, in the movies I watch, or as life occurs to me.  Still, I knew when I began to work on my writing project that some research would be needed even if mostly I just painted the dots of my impressions on the canvas of book pages or a blog screen.  I had envisioned writing about a movie that had impressed me.  The movie had impressed me so I wanted to know more about the director and screen-writer.  I found a bit on the web, but not a lot because the writer and director was young, a rising star perhaps; talented but still building her own work.  She had begun well in my opinion.  But there had been something about this movie.  I felt like maybe the leading actresses were more than women playing parts.  It seemed as if they were throwing something of their own souls into their portraying the part of “Jeanne” this fascinating person that had so captured my attention as she spoke fluent French and Italian translated for me into English via subtitles beneath her image.  There was something about the actresses in this film that suggested to me that they weren’t merely playing a role, but were investing their hearts and souls into the life of a character with whom perhaps they themselves identified even if only mostly in their inner fears.  What is an actress?  Is she somebody that remolds herself to play a new character with every film or theater presentation?  Or is she someone who envisions herself in another character and fills the character with a life?  We can imagine a movie where everything is the same; the same lines, the same director, but the leading lady is played by a different actress with different ways of showing the emotions, of expressing the lines, of interacting with the other screen performers.  Is it really the same movie with a different leading actress?  There are similarities but the performer even if playing a role is investing herself into the role.  One of the actresses of the movie that had so deeply impressed me had herself written a book.  It had arrived.

It was packaged in a white envelope with the words “Royal Mail” stamped on it.  I had bought it through a famous online bookstore, but it had come from a used bookstore in a different country from my own.  The envelope had a “Royal Mail” stamped on it expressing that this package was sent off from a postal station named Buckingham.  Was this station in the same city with the palace and the guards?  It was a ninety, or was it a ninety-five cent used book?  It was a slim paperback not a Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy novel.  The shipping easily cost more than the book.  The things you will do for a cheap book you want quickly.  I still hadn’t gotten used to the e-book experience.  Somehow I imagined that a book was more meaningful if first you ran your fingers across the covers of the book and felt the pages and opened it up and glanced inside just to catch a paragraph completely out of context like someone with a religious question and an unused bible looking at the big book, says a haphazard prayerful “God lead me to the answer.”  He then opens up the book, presses his index finger to the page and imagines that whatever it says, it is God speaking to him.  That is what we sometimes like to do with a new book in our hand.  We open the book and turn to a random page and ask, “What does she have to say to me?  What is her writing like?  Am I going to like this book?  Is this little paperback book going to be wonderful, trite or horrible?"  I had read in a blurb that it was a novel, a fictional novel, and yet an autobiography.  I guess it was supposed to reveal something of the author’s life while hiding it in jumbled history, using occasional fictional stories, all to give a feel of a life while keeping that life and those involved with that life hidden so that a piece of their lives could remain private.  Was it a novel, a piece of fiction, an autobiography, or just a celebrity writing and selling a book that hardly anybody but a mother and brother would have read if it weren’t for the fact that this was a celebrity with a following of adoring fans?  Maybe the whole idea of blending a fictional story and one’s autobiography in a book with the words Telling Lies serving as the English translated title had intrigued me more than any book I had thought about reading for a long while.  It had arrived.

I opened up the envelope and put the book aside purposefully for later in the evening.  I wanted to prepare myself to read it.  I wanted to get the chores out of the way.  I wanted to be able to relax and give this little paperback book my full attention.  Finally I opened the book, and like one does with a new book I thumbed through the pages and glanced over a word here and there.  Hopefully it is something quite subconscious the way a book lover caresses the pages of a book before he starts reading it.  I suppose it says something of human nature how a book lover, whether a modern soul that has been with scores of lovers or a monk that has been with none, caresses the pages of a book he has longed to read.  I think it part of human nature to fidget and play with those things we love before we get into them.  A child that loves ice cream invariably makes designs in the ice cream with his spoon all in anticipation of eating his delicacy.  A wine drinker sniffs to capture the bouquet of a fine wine, and then holds the first mouthful for a moment in her mouth as if by instinct showing her love for a fine wine.  I attended the ritual of running my hands across the book and along the edge of the pages, never thinking about it until I wrote these words and realized how we lengthen out the period of anticipation for those things and experiences and persons we truly love.  It is not enough for us just to do something we love.  We wish to celebrate our doing of the thing before we do it with some sense of anticipation.  One can imagine Freud and his ilk announcing this is all “sexual.”  That is not the right word to convey what is taking place.  The right word is “sensual.”  Sometimes the two are equated, but sensuality has to do with physical-ness including but not limited to sexuality.  The little child playing with his ice cream is an example.  It is something that Archbishop Cranmer understood during the Reformation in England.  The English reformers made sure that not only were the laity given the wine/blood of Christ to drink from the common chalice, but it was placed into the parishioner’s hand leaving the priest’s hand so that the believer momentarily took the cup of Christ into his own hands before drinking of the cup to be enjoyed by the entire parish.  Anticipation is a familiar ritual prior to participation in anything we love, even for our love of books.

The little booklet had arrived.  Finally I felt focused and ready to discover what this book written by a French actress had to say.  There was a familiarity with its content, a familiarity I had left behind more than thirty years earlier in my life.  But I knew it as soon as I had finished two or three pages.  The writer wrote like a full-fledged Existentialist.  Maybe she didn’t think of the writing as an Existentialist work, but it had that distinct feel.  I hadn’t read an Existentialist work since I force fed myself at least part of Sartre’s Nausea. It was assigned as part of a philosophy class on Existentialism.  I thought it had been named perfectly, for with every page I read of Nausea I felt like if I read another page I was going to gag and throw up.  I suspect that if I had read Nausea a few years earlier, in my dark dreary days of high school I would have enjoyed it and considered it a masterpiece.  I had loved Camus’ The Stranger and imagined it one of the best pieces of literature I had ever read.  But I had become a Christian by the time I read Sartre and had begun to believe that this sort of philosophical relativism was what was wrong with the modern world.  I was doing battle with its tenets and its presuppositions.  Perhaps I did so mostly because if I had not become a Christian I knew that I would have surely become an Existentialist.

The word Existentialism seems so big and foreboding to those who have never been introduced to the concept.  But the concept of Existentialism is rooted in the simple word “exist.”  An existentialist believes, well one of two things.  He may believe that all there is to life is existence; besides one’s own existence there is no other meaning in life.  That is a sort of negative view of one’s existence, that one is an existentialist because if life has no actual reason, then there is nothing to live for but whatever you choose to live for in life.  But I think, there can be a more positive sort of existentialism.  I think, at least at points, the writer of the little paperback I had in my hands wrote with a more positive attitude.  Such an existentialist does not think of existence as something little with no accompanying meaning in life; but something great and full with all the meaning one needs in life.  For the positive existentialist, life is all we have, but that is something mighty and grand for as long as it lasts.  So the negative existentialist seems to move from one dreary scene to another, whereas the positive existentialist seems intent on enjoying one more wonderful slice of life.  The negative existentialist accepts that there is no meaning in life, or in existence.  The positive existentialist, on the other hand, wonders how anyone can even have time to think that anything can be more meaningful or wonderful than the reality that we exist, have life, and can decide what we want to do with life.  For the writer who is a negative existentialist life comes without meaning; but the positive existentialist treats life as its own full meaning, for which no other meaning really needs to be sought in connection to our having the opportunity to enjoy life.  From my Christian vantage point the negative existentialist has accepted a fatalistic view of life.  But the positive existentialism has determined that there is something akin to grace, well at least opportunity, presented to us when we have the opportunity to live.  There was a bit of both attitudes in the writer of Telling Lies, but often you felt that for her, life was something mostly to be enjoyed and explored.  Jesus, in his own day and time felt that there were some not yet followers of him whose understanding of life was nearer to the understanding of God’s kingdom than others.  I do not imagine the Existentialist who has no faith in the Christ to be a Christian, but when someone begins to imagine that life is truly something wonderful to be experienced, then they have almost embraced without even thinking about it, an idea of grace, of the gift of life based on nothing we have ever done, except that somehow we were given the privilege to live.  It is a view of life that to be really true must presuppose some sort of unknown God that has given life as a gift that really is worth the taking and the living.  That would not make one a Christian, but I could almost imagine Jesus saying to such a one that how they viewed life as a gift and privilege to be enjoyed and experienced was an understanding that placed them near to an understanding of the kingdom of God.  Certainly many of us who are Christians could be reminded of the greatness of grace by seeing an unbeliever who felt a love for life simply because they had been granted the opportunity to live.  We might even think ourselves wretched to the core as we so often viewed life as merely something to be endured as we counted our burdens, in a life we saw through the lens of bitterness more than pleasure.

Of course we are speaking of one isolated attribute understood and exhibited by one who is not a Christian, but whose virtue is an important part of the Christian life.  The Christian may sometimes be reminded of grace by someone who lives a life in which belief in God does not factor, but in which gratefulness for the opportunity to live is innately expressed.  When a Christian finds that he or she lacks joy and feels the Christian life to be a drudgery or lives as if oppressed then perhaps we need to be reminded that we have life and that we have a Christian life to explore and enjoy.  But it is also true that Christianity is not a faith where people are expected to be happy go lucky all the time.  We are expected to grieve for sins and to hurt with people hurting and to feel grief and anger at injustice.  The man or woman, who has no place for God in their lives may be a fairly happy person because of their attitude that life is to embraced and enjoyed.  But that sort of life may fall very short of a Christian life when there is little or no sorrow for sin, little feeling for the sorrows of others, and not having the struggles of living obediently to a God whose righteousness far surpasses anything any one of us can manufacture from our flawed human conditions.  Incorporating one facet of a Christian life into a life may not make one Christian, still an imperfect Christian can learn something about a virtue he or she thinks important in life from someone not Christian that reflects a virtue we value.  One who loves life and yearns to live as if life is a precious gift surely exudes something close to the meaning of grace.

Oh pardon me.  Have I drifted off from telling the story I was telling you about the little paperback book by the French actress that arrived in the white envelope with “royal mail” stamped upon it?  I’ve been talking about existentialism, grace, and hardly said a word about the book by the French actress.   I need to be a better host and tell you about my reading of the book instead of all this other stuff.  The French actress presented her story, about herself sometimes I think, a bit fictional at other times, a blend of fiction, fantasy, autobiography, and if her title says anything sometimes just a fun little lie with a wink of an eye as if she knew her own story as an actress is to present the lie, to play a thousand times a life as if her own that was never her own, and then to present it as if it were not her own only to steal a bit of the role to take a chance to put herself into that role and claim it for a line or two all for herself when she was being paid to be presenting someone else.  That is the life of an actress she says, the life of someone who has learned to lie and to be good enough at it that you see not an actress but the character whose role she presents.

It did not take long at all, as I began to finally read starting with page one, moving to page two, and then page 3, yes I know not a very original way to read at all, but sometimes it seems to be how you get the most out of reading a book.  You read each and every word and let the author’s words guide you to what the author was trying to say, even if invariably we prove to be bad readers who simply discover some nugget of insight, or precious joy that we find worthy of remembrance for what was something about us and not something really in and of itself the author had to say.  But as I read the pages one after another, I find myself happily saying, “She is a pretty good writer, this French woman that I always found so deeply attractive because of her eyes.  Her eyes, they have a slight Asian look to them even though she is European.  I noticed them when she played Princess Isabella, and then when she appeared as Elektra King in that Bond flick.  I noticed them a little bit in “Don’t Look Back.”  Now I began to think, this actress with the slightly Asian eyes also writes pretty well.

She writes, sort of as if she were a hostess taking you for a walk in her life, in her neighborhood, in different scenes of her life.  She makes you feel it is her life, though she also wants you to know that she is presenting someone else’s life.  Then she wants you to know that this is what the life of an actress is like.  It is her life.  It is also a life that has been bought by a producer and a director; bought and paid for so they can have the actress present someone else’s life for an audience to see and understand.  That is the life of the actress, a bought woman playing someone else’s life, who learns to look for a place in the script where the person who happens to be an actress can actually steal one part of a scene as if she is playing herself while being paid to present someone else.  That is her little way of stealing a moment to call her own even while being paid to be someone else.  Somewhere near the end of the book she will say she doesn’t much like actresses.  Is she there speaking of the fictional character whose life she is presenting, or of other actresses, or a little bit about her own life into which she was carried from one role to another beginning when she was a young teenager and somehow continuing from one movie and presentation to another until she somehow became a fixture at Cannes, like an American actor or actress might become a fixture at the Oscars?  Like a lot of lives, her life sort of unfolded the way it did, or at least the life of the person who is the character of the book being presented by the French actress taking on the role of author in Telling Lies.  It was a book offering scenes and remembrances of life that the author was kind enough to describe to me as if I was taking a walk with her and she was showing me the painted and photographed scenes of her life.  She wanted you to be able to walk into the scenes and walking with her, feeling and seeing your away around, smelling, hearing, tasting and thinking as you made a journey about her life and neighborhood.

I enjoyed each passing scene.  The writer seemed to be escorting me around her world.  It was the world of an ordinary human being that took her dogs for a walk, and watched them sniff the ground in the way of a dog.  She pointed out her dogs walked with a routine often repeating the same sort of adventures they seemed intent on taking the day before.  She often sort of let her dogs lead lead her about the neighborhood, but invariably they repeated a similar journey every day.  Is that something common to all living things, seeking adventure while finding comfort along the way by maintaining rituals and routines?  There was the smell of a bakery, but on Sundays that smell would not be present.  On Sundays, you know life takes on a different feel.  There is hardly any one working, people move at a slow casual leisurely pace.  A few people are making their way to church, but for most Sunday is special simply because it is Sunday when the pace is leisurely and casual.  I have to think to myself, how interesting that here in Europe, (that is where she lives and where she took us in her book) how few people go to church and yet how many count it a different sort of day, whereas in America even in the God-fearing red states it is a day to rush, to shop, to squeeze in as many activities and can be done before going back to work on Monday morning.  In secular godless Europe, the shops are mostly closed, and pedestrians moving at a slower pace may nod on Sunday that would have expressed nothing on other days of the week.  But no scene lasts long as the busy actress picks up her pace again takes you to the next scene as if you are moving forward in flashes of a film moving from frame to frame.  Maybe while you were walking along a sidewalk and saw a child on a Sunday in your own present time, the sight of a child became in the next instant an image of the actress in her own childhood before she had ever stood in front of a movie camera, when she was just someone's little girl in some city or town or village somewhere in a France made up of commoners.  She was offering to let you feel the soft touch of a gentle flower peddle she was feeling with eight year old fingers.  But then she almost broke down, as if she was at confession and you were a priest in the confessor’s box.  She told you the horrible story.  It was a butterfly she had caught with her fingers.  She felt the gentle wings, and then she just took the butterfly into her hands and crushed it.  Then she realized that the creature which had been alive in her fingers was now motionless.  A wing had been broken and torn from the butterfly's body in the midst of her actions.  Seeing the motionless creature, a sense of guilt filled the little girl.  She tried putting the wings back on, hoping that if somehow she could get the wing back on the butterfly’s body, the butterfly would suddenly be alright and able to fly away from the little girl’s hands.  But there was no way to restore the butterfly’s precious life.  She could only clean her hands as if the deed had never been done.  Somehow though, she understood that a child like may be innocent, but adults not so much.  As an adult she liked children, she liked their innocence and curiosity and naturalness.  She said she was glad for children because they helped her when they were around to be less vain, and more careful not to let her sometimes cynical feelings about life ruin the innocence of their childhood.  Then just as quickly you were back thinking about the bakery, and it was now no longer Sunday, for you could smell fresh bread, and she presented you with delicious looking freshly hand made croissants.  Or you were at a restaurant and you were judging whether or not the spaghetti and meatballs were really good, or just mediocre as you partook of them.  Then there was a delightful moment of her telling you of her joy of drinking a favorite red wine, she preferred the red wines she said.  She told you of how she would let a really good red wine rest upon her tongue, swish it about in her mouth, and then let it slowly drain into her throat to enjoy every bit of flavor in the wine as long as she could before it was consumed.  I felt like an honored guest being taken along the journey of her life, or was it a fictional character’s life she was presenting, or was it her playing the role of a character, or was it all a story she wrote simply to give people so kind to buy her book a story in which they could find themselves doing different things from eating croissants, to drinking wine, to taking dogs for a walk, to remembering a child’s horror of killing a creature she was simply touching one moment and then killing the next, never to be able to raise that poor creature to a renewed life.  All this was part of a continual life lived in varied scenes of varied times in a life remembered in fragments and all jumbled up until it was an autobiography, a novel, and sometimes something of a fiction created by a mind’s fallible memory.

This was life as was the familiarity of a person walking into an apartment building.  It was a person you had never met, but still you knew the sound of their walk near that same time every day when they came home probably from their work.  There were one or two memories of sexual encounters, including the first time when she was too young and felt like a piece of baggage being thrown about by someone using her to have a good time and then seeing herself in the mirror afterwards and wanting only to cry.  From the trivial to the sublime to the difficult and back to the pleasant this was life.

I felt honored to be walking with her in the scenes of her story.  She was a good hostess, but sometimes a rather opinionated one who let you know that she found very things at all impressive in life.  There were moments when you knew she was letting you know if she didn’t like something about it, she wouldn’t be shy to tell you what a lout you were.  I sort of tried to be on my best behavior, but that especially didn’t impress her.  I sort of realized finally that there was a bit of fickleness in both her good and bad impressions.  That is sort of when I realized I had no way of telling if an action by me was going to be met with a frown of disapproval or with a smile of someone happy because I had just committed a faux pas and didn’t even realize it and that sort of brought devilish joy to her soul.  I wasn’t the one to inform her, but I think she knew that I sometimes looked at her and thought, you know you are absolutely narcissistic.  I wanted to tell her that life wasn’t all about her.  But she would have asked me as I told her that, why did I buy her book, was it about the thoughts I would read, or was it because I wanted to see if I could get a bit of a view into a famous actresses' life who I probably had a thing for when seeing her on the screen.  I guess most of us are more narcissistic than we want to admit, and that was the charming thing about her.  She was narcissistic as anyone could be until you got the feeling that it was an act to hide herself as much as anything actually real about who she was.  Which is the most narcissistic act, the way you act like everything is about you, or the way you act that way to keep what you want hidden to remain hidden?  I wonder, if Narcissus, the Greek goddess that fell in love with herself seeing her own image in the water, fell in love with her image because she had a hidden flaw that she wanted to keep covered by falling in love with that image of herself that she saw and wanted to hold on to as if possessed by the thought that if she let go of what she adored in herself it would all disappear?  All in all as much as occasionally she, that is her very demeanor sometimes grated on me; somehow I realized she had gone out of her way to invite me to join her for a journey of her life, neighborhood, impressions, and feelings.  I was amazed that she could grate on me one moment and simultaneously I would just be grateful to be able to journey with her through the pages of this book.

Our journey together was coming to an end.  I was almost finished with the book she had written.  I noticed her eyes once more.   I had seen them in the movies, those slightly Asian eyes.  I had thought of them as exotic, romantic, and even beautiful.  But now as we walked about a Parisian neighborhood I noticed them in between moments of conversation and felt a startling realization.  I had always looked upon her eyes and saw mystery and mystique; but suddenly I realized something about her eyes I had never understood before.  I don’t think she thought of her eyes as either mysterious or full of mystique.  I have no doubt that she had discovered in life some confidence that could enable her to use those eyes to put someone in their place, or to invite someone to another place; but mostly I realized as I caught her looking across a fence to a scene off in the distance she thought of her eyes as instruments with which she could take in one more sight and scene in this world in which she had been born and found herself given the opportunity to live a life.  Those slightly Asian looking eyes, were for her how she would see one more scene before she was finished with this world.  Her eyes had always seemed unique to me, but only as for me to see as for their shape and somewhat exotic beauty.  I began to understand that her eyes were connected to a soul looking outward from within a body, trying to take in scenes with which to investigate, explore, study, and draw conclusions about life.  I understood that our walk together was coming to an end.  I could almost see her facial expression change as we returned to her home.  Her home came into sight.  It was a flat in a rustic part of the city, an apartment in a modern part of a city where the new rich lived, an old home in a quiet neighborhood of vintage France.  It was a home not really able to be imagined, but it was the destiny my hostess quietly moved for it was her home.  Here she would rest and repair for another round of life on the morrow if she had the opportunity.  We would soon be parting, for she would go home and I would return to my distant continent across the sea.  She was coming home, you could see it in her eyes.  We came to the sidewalk leading to her home.  I knew she had been gracious.  She enjoyed sharing a part of her life with others.  But now you could see it in her face.  She wanted her privacy.  We would go our separate ways.  I would likely never see her again except on a movie screen.  But what was I thinking or imagining?  I was just coming to the end of a book.  One cannot live in a book can they?

I imagined some concluding conversation with some witty final words based on an exchange with her existentialist outlook.  I would thank her for taking me on a journey of a life; her life or a fictional character’s life.  I would try to tell her how I felt like I shared humanity with her.  I would imagine her being unimpressed with the thought of humanity, an abstract category in the midst of actual living persons.  She would contradict me and tell me how "humanity" was just a worthless word describing an abstract category with which to bury and leave forgotten the real people that surrounded us.  I would feel a bit of shame for saying the “shared humanity line” with her.  I would thank her for how through her book she showed me her neighborhood or a neighborhood like one she imagines where an imagined character lives.  I would imagine her then sort of being less defensive, less put out with me so that she would say something of how she just thinks humanity is such a big term so difficult to grab one’s thoughts around.  She would conclude, with softer words that for her humanity has the face of her cleaning lady, of a neighbor's child, of people she works with.  She would say, "I don't understand humanity, it is so distance.  I can barely take in my neighborhood.  I guesss I really do believe in humanity, but I can't deal with it, so I take a walk in my neighborhood or try to play a role of a character in a movie.  I feel like I should be connected to humanity but it's too big for me."  That is what I would imagine telling me in our dramatic last moments before going our separate ways.

But then I think of how my Dad would have told me how to handle a moment if I had seen her mingling with friends at a restaurant.  I would have said as a child, "Dad is that . . .?"  He might have said, "Perhaps, it does look like her, but she is not here for us."  I would be wondering if I could get an autograph.  My dad would insist, "I think she wants her own life, let's not bother her."  He would have focused his eyes elsewhere maybe hoping that in some strange way she would realize that he focused his eyes elsewhere and thus did something special to give the celebrity a moment where no one pestered her.  He might imagine that she noticed his not noticing.  But even if she never noticed, he would be happy knowing that he had let her have her privacy when he as much as I would have enjoyed getting her autograph and showing it to the guys at work.  But he felt a sense of honor in doing the right thing as he understood it, and especially in showing his little boy the right thing to do.  So we would have left the restaurant having given the lady a chance to be just a lady with her friends.  So after thinking of the two endings possible to our taking a walk in her life and neighborhood, I simply said "Thank you, I count it a privilege to have taken this walk as you have shared with me some of the scenes of your life."  Instead of trying to imagine her saying any words, I would leave the story unfinished as if I had no right to say her reply.  I had come to the end of the book, and to the end of our imagined journey through her life and neighborhood.

I shared my perceptions and imaginations about this experience with a friend.  He wasn’t religious like me.  But he thought about life constantly, and had probably really read a lot more about life and the differing perceptions of life than I had.  He said to me almost bluntly, “The people I know are like this person.  They don’t have great ideas about life, but they want to see one more thing, experience one more thing, feel one more thing, and that is how they understand life.  They understand their lives through their experiences, that is how they understand life.”

Had I been so religious for such a long time that I could not understand this any longer?  I will be indebted to Sophie Marceau, or her fictional character, or some of her well told lies to remind me of some important truths about life.  I decided that to remember this book, I would put it back in the white envelope with “Royal Mail” stamped upon it.  I would put it next to a book by Dietrich Bonhoeffer entitled Life Together.  I would keep it there.  Why put it next to Bonhoeffer’s work?  I guess because both of these books from differing perspectives reminded me of what it meant to live human life.  I won’t say that Sophie Marceau has written a classic.  But at least I understand that her slightly Asian eyes are not as important for their beauty as for their function.  They allow the soul of a person within the body in which her soul resides, to see the world in which her body and soul resides.  I’m not sure how valuable of an insight that seems to those of you reading what I have just finished writing, but I think it may be the most important thing I have written in this article.  Her eyes may happen to be beautiful, but mostly they are the instruments through which her soul sees the world and something bigger by far than the world, her own neighborhood and her cleaning lady, who she describes as being part of her family even though both are careful to remind themselves that both have their own families not to be confused with their working families.  We haven’t understood life if we imagine the world somehow to be bigger than a neighborhood, a family or more real than a cleaning lady.  Maybe I might read it again someday, or would that be like saying to a date with whom there was no chemistry that I enjoyed an evening with someone, only to know that likely I will never call on her again?  But that doesn’t mean I didn’t actually enjoy the time in this book with another human being, who like myself wants to see one more sight, and after that probably another one, until our time of seeing and exploring, learning and understanding comes to an end.  The psalmist would ask in the midst of all this, “Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."  The end of our days will be coming upon us, but until then we will look at this world with our eyes, feel this world with our senses, think about what we have discovered in this world, and make our conclusions be they faulty or filled with wisdom.  That seems to be the lot of every man and woman in this world of ours from an actress calling Paris her home to a warehouseman residing on the American plains in a locale once known as Indian Territory.