The Sun Sunnyvale's Newspaper Living in a moment clarifies By Carl Heintze It's always seemed to me that life has "moments." I suppose this is not what you'd call an earthshaking discovery. Of course, life has its moments, you're saying. It has them all the time. But that's not exactly what I'm talking about. I'm talking about those special moments, the times that in retrospect seem to have determined a whole phase of your life, when everything is suddenly, momentarily and blindingly clear, when the past suddenly illuminates the present and gives some guide to the future. I'm not sure I can give an example of a real such moment, but let's take as an example the word "Rosebud," the last word the hero of that wonderful movie Citizen Kane utters before he dies. It's the end of the picture as well as the end of Kane's life, and at the same time someone throws into the fire the sled that Kane coveted when he was a boy. Suddenly you're aware, as he apparently was, that all his life was an effort to gain what he once had taken away from him. His long search for power--which he thought was going to bring him happiness--doesn't, and in the end, in that moment, he realizes too late that his whole life has been an empty gesture. I don't mean that all such moments are so bleak; certainly they haven't been in my life. But there have been moments that in reflection seem to me to have defined what happened to me, what was happening to me and what might happen to me in the future. At the same time, there have been moments which for a second or two contained such magic that they remain forever in your memory. I can think of a couple examples: the day before we sighted New York Harbor on the way home from Europe after World War II had ended is one such "moment." I guess we can all come up with moments like these, moments that balance the many times of trivial, banal, silly or just plain dull days or the days filled with pain, sorrow or longing. It sometimes seems these last longer than the moments. It sometimes seems we wonder why there can't be more such epiphanies. I think the answer has to be that we would have no such wonderful times if they came very often. Then they, too, would become trivial. We were not meant to live on an exalted plane, but on one that allows us to yearn and search for the extraordinary. Those who do rise to the moment and live in it all the time are as fragile as Icarus was in his doomed quest to reach the sun on his artificial wings. Think of Beethoven, deaf and unable to hear any music, writing the mysteries of his last quartets, music unlike any anyone had heard before. It was music he heard in his mind's eye, if not in his ears. Or how about Vincent Van Gogh? Years ago I saw a retrospective exhibition of his works, one that started with the dark gray paintings he struggled with when he was living among Belgian coal miners. The exhibit ended with his famous final picture of the crows over the fields. The pictures grow progressively brighter and more filled with light and motion. The stars roil in the heavens, the sunflowers seem ready to leap from the canvas and into the viewer's hands. And it became clear as one walked along the line of pictures that Van Gogh was finding it harder and harder to keep within him what he felt. The last picture of the birds over the wheat fields is absolutely terrifying. It seems almost to shatter the sky, to fly apart, but it was his genius to hold it together for that brief single moment--that moment that was for him still expressible. And then it was gone. And so was he. He could no longer keep the moment in which he was living. To have done so would have left him mad. Even madder than he was. Nor, I think can, any of us, nor should we want to do so. For most of us must be satisfied with those few wonderful moments of our lives, the moments on which our destinies turn in a flash and savor them, even if they be bittersweet. They offer us some perspective on how the human spirit transcends its boundaries--a glimpse, I think, of what Heaven's like. [ Back to Contents Page | Sunnyvale Sun Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, October 14, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.