It is probably artificial and stupid to talk about the “greatest moment” of one’s life—in fact, to talk about the greatest anything is ridiculous,1 when it comes down to it. But there was one moment in my life during which I thought, This is the greatest moment of my life, although not in those words or any words, being too overwhelmed with the perfection of my experience to think in any particular words whatsoever, especially since the perfection (I use the word loosely) of that exact moment was due at least partially to my having just prior been told to “shut up.”
I was on a bench in Toledo at the top of a very tall and steep bank, so that before me was a winding river with the ruined turrets of some ancient fortress acting as a resting place for birds too last to fly across in one go; and green and gold fields on the far side, with more castles and towers in the distance; and old men in overcoats and carrying Walkmans and smoking on their way home from work in front of me. I was expounding (blathering eruditely) on some topic or other (something about Alzheimer’s research, I think), and my companion (who I was probably in love with), who had been leaning her head back on the bench so that she faced straight up, interrupted me suddenly, saying, “Chris, shut up and look at the sky.”
Of course when a girl (who is four years older than you, and you are only twenty) you are probably in love with gives you a command like this (which essentially amounts to carpe diem, doesn’t it?) you obey her; and I obeyed her, and leaned back my head as she had leaned back her head and looked up at that unremarkable gray sky until my neck hurt and the sky became remarkable; the fissures in its clouds were deep, as deep as the secret gorges that the Greeks would climb down to visit Hell; the clouds were the same clouds that I had looked down on as a child from a high mountain in some national part somewhere and thought, If I just drop down onto them I’ll sink deep and forever into their softness2; and I felt I was about to fall up into them and through their crevices to whatever was above (which, of course, would not be the temperaturelessness of space, which provides nothing and by doing so causes you first to explode, then to suffocate and probably, eventually, to cook in the energy of your own biothermal reactions); and when you are about to travel to the next life without the unpleasantness of dying, you really do feel liberated from a few things, and you can truly relax as you have never relaxed before, forgetting everything about this world—the pain in your neck (until it becomes too bad), the bench, your flight home, the old men walking past, how the sun will set soon, the girl sitting next to you (not completely, of course—not her; is she thinking about you?).
__________________
1 For reasons not just ideological, but pragmatic, astrological, chronological, philosophical—reasons that are embedded deeply in the core of the existence, etc.
2 And they were the same clouds, really; for what is sameness when our bodies can replace (eventually) every molecule and yet we are the same person as much as a person can ever be said to be the same person that he ever was. And for all I know those particular clouds were in fact the exact same collection of molecules, each made of the exact same collection of atoms, etc.; that is, as much as we can ever speak of “particular clouds,” in that there is really only one cloud in the world, and it has existed for all of our time and will continue to exist as long as there is a single water molecule that has the kinetic energy to break off of the scrummy mass of its identicals and hurls itself through nothingness until it collides with some bit of air and is sent crashing meteorically back to bestow its piss-and-vinegar spirit onto some other lucky bastard. And that is the tragedy of clouds, which look so discreet and simple from far far away, but that, like many things (all things, really, although admittedly more dramatically than, say, a person), up close turn out to have neither borders not substance. Which is basically why it was good that I chose not to throw my young self off that cliff.
second draft
