Michael Scott Alexander - Making Peace with the Universe: Personal Crisis and Spiritual Healing

In five minutes the plane would be landing on the exquisite Italian island of Sardinia, playground for Europes richest people. Id been asked in three languages to put away my electronics and to store any loose belongings. I stared down at the yellow pad sitting on my lap. Its open page contained the sum total of my notes regarding a speech for a wedding ceremony I needed to help officiate that afternoon for my friend Sanjay. The page was blank, reflecting my heartfelt thoughts on the subject.

Another page of the pad contained my practical thoughts about marriage. It held the telephone numbers of half a dozen Los Angeles divorce lawyers. I intended to call them from JFK while waiting between flights to return home. My own marriage was an insoluble disaster. Insoluble. Disaster. Thats all I could think about it, and I thought about it constantly. On Sardinia, I hoped to muster enough courage to move forward with my life. Perhaps a lovely few days in the Italian sun among friends and intoxicants would hush the swirl of rationalizations that prevented me from declaring victory and just getting out. High hopes for a friends wedding, I know.

I shoved the pad away and closed my eyes for landing. My two beautiful young children stared back at me from beneath my eyelids. So did my beautiful wife.

Ill think of something, I told myself. I have to.

Who am I? Let me try to explain.

A rental agreement I filled out in my last year of graduate school asked how many years of education I had completed. I swallowed hard before writing down twenty-five. That was twenty years ago and Im still in school. These days I teach college. My subject is religion.

My strange obsession started at age eighteen when I discovered a class in my college catalog about the book of Genesis and began studying Hebrew and Aramaic with a man whose academic specialty had been a single biblical worda hapax legomenon, a word that occurs only once in world literature. The joke is, the word still cant be translated and probably never will be. An unknowable mystery compounded by the aura of the remote human pastI was hooked like a flounder. My more reasonable classmates turned away after a semester or so, but I couldnt. The more abstract, the more unknowable and, above all, the more impractical for real life, the more I poured my soul all in. I hadnt blinked when I graduated with a degree in the Ancient Near East and was off to graduate school to discover unimaginable mysteries and doctoral-level esoterica.

My parents were proud but concerned. They feared I might never leave campus, and as it turns out I never did. These many years later I typically prefer a carrel in some airless library and there settle in to work, although it never quite feels like work. How can I describe it? It feels like school. Every time I crack open a musty book, I am returned in time to the feet of its master.

Take a seat, the master seems to say.

And stop chewing gum.

So there I sit and learn for a while. By some miracle, life has allowed me to pursue my own esoteric hunt through human civilization to follow my questions. Im a geek, Ive loved every minute of it. Ive had a fun career among like-minded geeks. Thats what my education conferred.

But even the strangest compulsions tend to have an understandable rationale, an interior logic that drives a behavior to absurdity. So I do ask myself why a reasonable person would travel so far on such an ethereal quest. For a couple of years in college, maybe as an undergraduate minor, sure, why not: learn a dead language or two; draw some nudes in art studio; ingest some psychedelics; take time to figure things out. Just make sure you outgrow it. But what if you dont outgrow it? What if you never end the adolescent experiment to figure things out? For me, its still just as compelling to imagine, as I did when I first opened Genesis as a freshman, that on some utterly forgotten path, in the remnants of some eclipsed civilization, perhaps along some long dry riverbed that once sustained human life, there lying dormant I might discover a set of washed-out footprints. Whose are they? Has anyone else discovered this path? Once found, if I can only follow these steps, perhaps theyll lead the way to

To where?

To a better place?

To a better way of doing things?

To knowledge?

To some answers?

Do the ages really contain secrets? Do they offer answers?

If they do, my education didnt confer any to me.

This is the sentimental part of my story, because none of that learning seemed to matter a whit when my dominoes fell. I thought Id built for myself some firm surroundings. I thought Id put together a solid family and a directed career. I hadnt. Once pushed, everything tumbled. First my job foundered. I ended up on airplanes trying to keep my career together (a hundred thousand miles earned me corporate chairman status and many much needed drink vouchers). That schedule of course kept me away from my family and, predictably, my marriage turned to excrement. We didnt fight, but we never talked either. Cathy cried while I froze. Or I cried while she panicked. We never cried together. Then the crying stopped, and no better mode of communicating came to replace it. We just werent facing lifes tumult as partners anymore. I looked back to consider what had really changed. What had we seen during these wedded years? Nothing extraordinary. Many wrenching miscarriages; finally two fighting and screaming kids; four states scattered across four American time zones; cycles of sexlessness and wanderlust; bouts of unemployment; and seven jobs between us. And a lot of poorly made decisions to boot. Was this the reality of marriage? Or was I simply in a bad one? Would a divorce even solve my problems?