(posts) Raymond Carver's poem, "Reading"

Reading

Every man’s life is a mystery, even as
yours is, and mine. Imagine
a château with a window opening
onto Lake Geneva. There in the window
on warm and sunny days is a man
so engrossed in reading he doesn’t look
up. Or if he does he marks his place
with a finger, raises his eyes, and peers
across the water to Mont Blanc,
and beyond, to Selah, Washington,
where he is with his girl
and getting drunk for the first time.
The last thing he remembers, before
he passes out, is that she spits on him.
He keeps on drinking
and getting spit on for years.
But some people will tell you
that suffering is good for the character.
You’re free to believe anything.
In any case, he goes
back to reading and will not
feel guilty about his mother
drifting in her boat of sadness,
or consider his children
and their troubles that go on and on.
Nor does he intend to think about
the clear-eyed woman he once loved
and her defeat at the hands of eastern religion.
Her grief has no beginning, and no end.
Let anyone in the château, or Selah,
come forward who might claim kin with the man
who sits all day in the window reading,
like a picture of a man reading.
Let the sun come forward.
Let the man himself come forward.
What in Hell can he be reading?

 

another word about "Fear and Tembling" by Søren Kierkegaard

Abraham's trek to the lonely height of Mount Moriah took three days; for three days an ass jostled there, carrying Abraham and his long-wished for, unconditionally loved son. The journey would end in the father's sacrificing Isaac. What if Abraham had resigned himself to the loss, to living the rest of his life having used his own hands to saw through Isaac's throat? And, worse still, what if, having accepted and prepared himself to perform that horrific act, what if God called it off, and let Abraham keep Isaac?

Abraham would be forced to live with the child he had already sought to kill.

The amazing thing--where faith is found--is not in the fact that Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son; no, it was Abraham's knowing that he would not lose Isaac, no matter what happened on Moriah.

Through faith I don't renounce anything, on the contrary in faith I receive everything ... It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole of temporality in order to win eternity ... Through faith Abraham did not renounce his claim on Isaac, through his faith he received Isaac.