TWO CHAPTERS FROM A SHORT STORY

THE SCHOLAR’S PREDICAMENT

I

When he was 25, it occurred to him to ask his grumpy, anti-introspective grandfather an unlikely question,
“Gramps, do you dream?”
“You really want to know?” his grandfather asked.
“Yes.”
“Yeah, I dream.”
”What are your dreams like?”                                                           
Frowning, he said, “They’re the silliest things I ever saw.”

Now, at 75 himself, Professor Pescetto, former head of University of Texas’ Philosophy Department, thought perhaps he had had taken his dreams too seriously, having spent his life preoccupied with the words of deep thinkers, whose lines kept playing themselves over and over in his head like existential marionettes. He often recalled Berthold Brecht who said, “He who laughs has not yet heard the terrible tidings.” Still, he found himself wanting to have a good laugh in spite of the shortcomings in the modern world and in himself. Maybe there was a role after all for the silliest things.

Today he found himself longing for that elusive experience of happiness at Eeyore’s Birthday Party, an Austin tradition since 1963, celebrating ironically the moping donkey. Gathered in a large park were hundreds of scantily clad, mostly young people having what appeared to be an exceedingly good time. He himself was dressed as an aging yogi with mala beads, yoga pants, and a dark t-shirt with a red heart within a big gray elephant on the front. He felt ridiculous.

The professor, as a last resort, now was a late-comer to the study of yoga. His teacher often said, contrary to the professor’s usual perspective, “It is better to see God in everything, than to try to figure things out.” But he had a hard time with that.

Suddenly, he was distracted by a troupe of topless unicyclists. They were singing “Imagine” by John Lennon. His heart lifted and then sunk again as he thought of Lennon’s tragic assassination and heard the awful line from Kafka which often floated through his head, “There is infinite hope…but not for us.”

Just then one of the unicyclists rode toward him, fell off laughing, and planted a kiss on his bald head. He smelled some strawberry-scented lipstick and started laughing. He really couldn’t figure this life out and at that moment it was quite a relief.

“Yea,” he thought and smiled, “I dream.”

II

That night Professor Pescetto lay in bed, recapitulating the day’s events. As usual some dark thoughts crept in, but soon were replaced by the opening bars of Bach’s Italian Concerto, running over and over in his head as if bearing some urgent musical message.

Pescetto was raised by parents in love with the possibility of a peaceful world, graced by the beauty of the arts, yet their family didn’t dependably manifest that peace or beauty toward each other. He recalled his childhood, where he sat for hours and hours cross-legged on their living room carpet, listening to his mother play the Italian Concerto over and over, vainly waiting for her attention while being bathed in the world’s most beautiful music.

That night he dreamt he was at Les Deux Magots café in Paris sitting at a marble-topped table across from the famous philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre exhaled from his pipe, then asked, “Professor, you have written four books, taught thousands of students, received all sorts of accolades, but what are you really about?”

Pescetto then felt something deep inside and said, “There is something in me that knows something,” he said and added, with a smile, “but I don’t quite know what it is.”

In the morning he awoke and dressed, donning a beret in honor of Sartre. He walked to Quakenbush’s, his favorite café near the campus. The radio played classical music and, with his first cappuccino of the day, he savored again not having to figure everything out. In his mind Gabriel Marcel’s words appeared like an existentialist billboard, “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.”

As he bathed in this newfound respect for mystery, the front door of the café opened. And, as if upon divine cue, there was the girl with the strawberry lips from yesterday. He doffed his beret, hoping she would recognize his bald head. Sure enough, she looked over, at first blankly, then with a big smile of recognition on her face.

Now from the radio came the opening bars of the Italian Concerto! Emboldened further by providence, he swept his hand in invitation to the chair facing him at the table. She sat down and they had a wonderful conversation about the mysteries contained in everyone’s history.

She said, “It’s like an awesome, wild mash-up of tunes, rhythms, and lives.”

He said, “It’s like Gustav Mahler, who said, “A symphony must be like the world, it must contain everything.”

She said, “Maybe it’s a silly symphony.”

She reached out her beautiful hand and he his as well, their palms meeting, and in that moment at least, thankfully, at that table, there was world peace.