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We cannot lock out the rest of the world
By Carl Heintze
Every night I make a circuit of our house. I check the windows to be sure they're shut. I look at the sliding glass doors, and, finally, I lock the front door and turn the dead bolt.
It's a nightly ritual. I'm safe. We're safe. We've locked ourselves in and the world out. When we go away for a few days, I do the same thing both inside and out, checking all the windows and doors, and then double locking the front and back doors.
Every night when I'm through, I go to bed, confident that I have managed to protect us from that larger world out there, so great, so powerful, so filled with danger.
My principal aim has been to keep burglars away from the cherished things we have accumulated during almost half a century of marriage. And yet, somehow, I know it is more than that. It's also a symbolic gesture. In a sense I'm also trying to place a barrier between myself and a world, that seems these days to be filled with evil, death and disease.
I know, of course, that my symbolic circuit of the house won't do that, that it is really futile, that I can't lock myself away from what is going on in the world, outside, nor will I ever be able to do so. Most of the time, though, I can keep the world at bay. It's only now and then that the world rushes in, in spite of my locks and deadbolts, and confronts me with how terrible it can be.
It did that on Sept. 11.
The world didn't intrude directly--but once again I found that I couldn't escape what was happening on the other side of the nation. What's more, I know it need not have been in New York and Washington. It could have been San Francisco--the Golden Gate Bridge, for example. But the bridge seems a symbol not as powerful or representative as the World Trade Center or the Pentagon.
We truly are a single and very small world. In the words of John Donne, which Ernest Hemingway made so famous, "No man is an island, entire of himself."
This leads me to think of another man, much younger than I, whom I know and who lives far away from me in the woods, eight miles from the nearest town and at least a quarter of a mile from the nearest neighbor.
He's a guy who has always thought of himself as apart from others, different somehow, marching to a different drum beat. He's the kind of person who does not fit in well and who doesn't care, who likes to be alone and who regards the rest of the world as foreign.
He used to tell me that he did not have much, but that he did not need much. He could exist with his brain, his hands, his arms, his legs. They were strong and so was he.
But that was before he discovered that even though he was far removed from others, he was not immune from human disease. One day he discovered his body had been invaded by cancer cells and that he would probably not survive long without all the help he could get from modern cancer treatment.
Now he is in a battle for his life with the outcome very much in doubt.
"The good die young," he says.
Well, maybe. Of course, we all die sometime, young or old, and we are all part of the same planet. We are all men and women who should not ask for whom, again as John Donne said, "...the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."
It did my friend no good to lock his door or to stay in the woods away from the world. The world came to him. It found him, and now he finds that he needs it. I think that's true for all of us.
We would like to believe that somehow we as a nation are somehow immune from what afflicts the rest of the world. "They may suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," as William Shakespeare said, but we won't.
That's not only not true, it is simply arrogance.
We have been exceptionally fortunate. We've tended to believe that the two oceans and two friendly borders that surround us have provided us with doors and windows we can close and lock.
Only now are we beginning to see that no locks can keep the world away. Man and womankind, we are all one, living on and in a shared world forever.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Campbell Reporter. A collection of his earlier essays can be found at http://www.doitright.com/Carl/essays. His email address is feodorh@juno.com.
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Campbell, California
