The Fixed Point of our Spiritual Constellation: The Fault in Our Stars

“Identity is an assemblage of constellations.”

--Anna Deavere Smith, 2011

Last weekend, the Times published “New York City in Haiku”, a series of short poems from people of all ages that described certain aspects of living in America’s greatest metropolis. One submission from a 14-year-old Manhattanite reads:

Face seen across tracks,
We stare, and a train passes,
Face gone forever.

That feeling—of life lines converging for a fleeting moment only to separate once more, perhaps indefinitely—is common to all humanity, not only on the subway platforms of New York, but in towns big and small across the country and around the world.

Even these ephemeral connections are like manna to our souls. As recently detailed by behavioral scientists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder, these interactions with “strangers” (even mere eye contact!) generally produce a more positive experience than remaining in solitude. Social beings, we are.

But as beautiful as these short-lived convergences are, they cannot replace the sentiment felt when, against seemingly all odds, life lines not only converge, but dance in parallel motion, flirting, bumping up against one another, and eventually fusing together in a double helix bond.

The protagonists of John Green’s latest book, The Fault in Our Stars (2012) (a NYT bestseller that is sure to sell a few more copies when it is released as a major motion picture on June 6—see trailer below), are lucky enough to form such a bond—lucky being an odd word to use in reference to teenagers suffering from the scourge of cancer.

Lucky they are, though, in that their shared affliction—tragic as it is—led them to one another. “Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross…there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.”

Those “stars” or “constellations” in our lives take many forms—friends, siblings, parents, classmates, neighbors, competitors, strangers. Amidst the many uncertainties of life, the protagonists in Fault find that the “stars” inexorably orbit (and are pulled ever so slightly towards) humanity’s “black hole”, which is to say, closer to death and oblivion.

Nevertheless, one particular star seems fixed—to be trusted even when all the other measures of direction fail. As Augustus Waters says to Hazel Grace Lancaster:

I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.

One of the magical aspects of parallel lines is that even though we know that they go on forever, never to converge, perspective plays tricks with our minds, convincing us that far on the horizon, the lines, having ever so deliberately sidled up beside one another, touch.

And maybe that’s the greatest lesson of Stars—that for all those passing glances on the subway platform, life lines going far and wide, there is an Ultimate convergence that our shared mortality forces us to confront. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the infinity of love shines brightly, beckoning us home.

The Limits of Language: Longing for Home and Love

“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.”

-- Ludwig Wittenstein, 1953

“Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.”

--Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkh (aka Rumi), 13^th Century Poet

Bay State Brahmin is a blog about politics—a topic that easily lends itself to the written word. However, thanks to a few masterful pieces published over the past week, the limits of language have been weighing on my mind.

The first piece is a column titled “In Search of Home” in which Roger Cohen of the New York Times tries to answer the question, “If I had only a few weeks to live, where would I go?”

Cohen references an essay in the London Review of Books in which James Wood asked the same question of Christopher Hitchens before Hitchens was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He told Wood that he would not stay in America, but would return to Dartmoor, “the landscape of his childhood.”

Wood goes on to write that, “The desire to return, after so long away, is gladly irrational, and is perhaps premised on the loss of the original home…Home swells as a sentiment because it has disappeared as an achievable reality.”

That may well be true, but Cohen’s description spoke to a sentiment beyond what can be expressed through the language of loss. The landscape of Hitchens childhood, Cohen wrote,

…was the landscape, in other words, of unfiltered experience, of things felt rather than thought through, of the world in its beauty absorbed before it is understood, of patterns and sounds that lodge themselves in some indelible place in the psyche and call out across the years.

The second piece was Jessica Rassette’s essay “His Promise Would Not Be Denied,” for the weekly must-read “Modern Love” in the Times.

In describing her then-ex-boyfriend (now husband’s) response to her insistence that their relationship was over, Rassette wrote, “He loved every footprint I left behind. He kept his dreams of us tucked away, hoarded them like those gas-station receipts he jams into the back pocket of his jeans. He loved and longed. He waited.”

The two pieces may be about “home” and “love”, respectively, but they are really about the same thing. They are about a challenge that everyone faces many times in life—of what feels right to one’s soul; of where (and with whom) one’s destiny lies.

Someone once told me—in reference to my love of both New York City and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts—that it was imperative that I be honest with where loyalties lie and that to be truly at home in one place or the other required almost every piece of my heart.

I didn’t know how to respond to that idea then, and I must admit that I still don’t today. Language—as it often does—fails to provide a useful instrument. How could I express the tingling of my chest when that distinctive sign comes into view, welcoming home sons from Hatfield to Hamilton?

How could I express the feeling of turning the corner of 43^rd and 5^th Avenue at twilight—the Chrysler Building illuminated above—and walking on air through Grand Central Terminal as the ghosts of generations of my family propel me forward, whispering in my ear that I belong under all those stars?

In Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “To be great is to be misunderstood.” But I don’t think that Pythagoras, Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton were alone in this scourge. Instead, it seems to me that to be human is to be misunderstood, or, perhaps more aptly, that to be human is to lack the tools necessary to be understood—except, that is, for the “tool” of love.

As Rassette notes, “Tom and I might glance at each other with a weary look that means, ‘Do you love me?’ Neither of us ever has to answer.” 

In the end, if “speech is a river,” Rumi wrote—a flowing dialogue of the inner-workings of our mind—then “silence is an ocean”—a seemingly bottom-less repository of secrets out of sight and far from earshot.

Silence—those thoughts unspoken, dreams unrequited, tragedies unseen, sentiments unshared—is the “dark energy/matter” of our world, weighing us down while powering us forward, to an end we know not of.