helped with everything.
There was something else I had thought about, too, ever since Minty and I went to Paris. It was the way that music broke you up and held you, how it tripped up fear’s great authority over life, how it put you back in the world you were sometimes so desperate to leave. From those days on I traveled with tapes of Hubert Laws, Chick Corea, Jaco Pastorius, and the others. I listened in my room on West Eighty-ninth Street when I was in the seminary and on the ships and on night shift at the hospital. And then I took what was for me a bold step. I had some limitations to contend with at my age, but I learned to play the tenor sax. Sonny Rollins. Roland Kirk. Charles Lloyd. I thought if I could get three or four compositions down from their repertoires, and learn to improvise, if I could play out in a field at night so the tones would just carry to distant rooms with their windows open, it would be like that night in Montmartre had been for me, when a friend cracked open the shell in which I had been content to see but never actually meet the world.
Jefferson deShay, physician, social
historian, editor,
The Correspondence
of Corazon Aquino,
three volumes, on
leaving Cagayan de Oro, Mindanao,
the Philippines
Nítch′i
Like many young men on the run from the threat of leading a common existence, I spent the early years of my adult life in very remote regions of the earth—the Tanami Desert, the Chukchi Sea, the Kalahari scrub. I tried to move on foot through those geographies with a level of awareness so sharp I would leave no trace of my passing. I strove to be invisible. The tolerance of those I traveled with—it was their country, always—was great, and of course I was a source of amusement to them. I was naive, but so were they; and I was trying to solve a problem they had not yet heard of.
My schooling was exceptional, if you think of it in terms of the quality of the teaching and my exposure to the wellsprings of Western ideas— Hotchkiss, Yale, graduate work in anthropology at Stanford. However, I wasn’t able to extract from this instruction what I needed to live. I could
make
a good living, but something essential always appeared to me to be missing. Think of a mountain lake somewhere, caught in a flattering light—a stunning scene, but then you learn the lake holds no fish. Think of a marriage with no moments of abandon. If I’d gone into religious studies instead of anthropology, perhaps life would have unfolded very differently for me; but unless I had actively broken with my traditions, I would have been trained to follow the theologies of redemption—Judaism, Christianity, Islam. The presumption there is that though humanity has started off badly and is burdened with sin, it can achieve a state of perfection through diligence and self-improvement.
I was more taken with theologies of creation. The world is beautiful and we are a part of it. That’s all. Our work is not to improve, it is to participate. I was a long while coming to an understanding of these thoughts, and in my late teens and early twenties I thrashed about in the confines of my own ignorance and fears.
I was too young, during those times of disaffection, to have taken up one of the Eastern religions, for example, as anything more than trappings, a costume. Overall, I would have to say I simply didn’t trust organized religion, most especially what American and English missionaries pushed so aggressively on the people of other countries. When I watched my mother prepare for church on Sunday mornings, I would detect someone shaping the many disappointments of her life into a stance, an attitude toward God that was dutiful, if reproving. God, on occasion, was a disappointment to her. Our High Episcopalian position was not an expression of faith, it was a hedge against theological eventualities. We approached the realm of religion as a patrician accountant might suffer the questions of some agent of the
There was something else I had thought about, too, ever since Minty and I went to Paris. It was the way that music broke you up and held you, how it tripped up fear’s great authority over life, how it put you back in the world you were sometimes so desperate to leave. From those days on I traveled with tapes of Hubert Laws, Chick Corea, Jaco Pastorius, and the others. I listened in my room on West Eighty-ninth Street when I was in the seminary and on the ships and on night shift at the hospital. And then I took what was for me a bold step. I had some limitations to contend with at my age, but I learned to play the tenor sax. Sonny Rollins. Roland Kirk. Charles Lloyd. I thought if I could get three or four compositions down from their repertoires, and learn to improvise, if I could play out in a field at night so the tones would just carry to distant rooms with their windows open, it would be like that night in Montmartre had been for me, when a friend cracked open the shell in which I had been content to see but never actually meet the world.
Jefferson deShay, physician, social
historian, editor,
The Correspondence
of Corazon Aquino,
three volumes, on
leaving Cagayan de Oro, Mindanao,
the Philippines
Nítch′i
Like many young men on the run from the threat of leading a common existence, I spent the early years of my adult life in very remote regions of the earth—the Tanami Desert, the Chukchi Sea, the Kalahari scrub. I tried to move on foot through those geographies with a level of awareness so sharp I would leave no trace of my passing. I strove to be invisible. The tolerance of those I traveled with—it was their country, always—was great, and of course I was a source of amusement to them. I was naive, but so were they; and I was trying to solve a problem they had not yet heard of.
My schooling was exceptional, if you think of it in terms of the quality of the teaching and my exposure to the wellsprings of Western ideas— Hotchkiss, Yale, graduate work in anthropology at Stanford. However, I wasn’t able to extract from this instruction what I needed to live. I could
make
a good living, but something essential always appeared to me to be missing. Think of a mountain lake somewhere, caught in a flattering light—a stunning scene, but then you learn the lake holds no fish. Think of a marriage with no moments of abandon. If I’d gone into religious studies instead of anthropology, perhaps life would have unfolded very differently for me; but unless I had actively broken with my traditions, I would have been trained to follow the theologies of redemption—Judaism, Christianity, Islam. The presumption there is that though humanity has started off badly and is burdened with sin, it can achieve a state of perfection through diligence and self-improvement.
I was more taken with theologies of creation. The world is beautiful and we are a part of it. That’s all. Our work is not to improve, it is to participate. I was a long while coming to an understanding of these thoughts, and in my late teens and early twenties I thrashed about in the confines of my own ignorance and fears.
I was too young, during those times of disaffection, to have taken up one of the Eastern religions, for example, as anything more than trappings, a costume. Overall, I would have to say I simply didn’t trust organized religion, most especially what American and English missionaries pushed so aggressively on the people of other countries. When I watched my mother prepare for church on Sunday mornings, I would detect someone shaping the many disappointments of her life into a stance, an attitude toward God that was dutiful, if reproving. God, on occasion, was a disappointment to her. Our High Episcopalian position was not an expression of faith, it was a hedge against theological eventualities. We approached the realm of religion as a patrician accountant might suffer the questions of some agent of the
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