THE HOUSE WE LIVE IN: a literary exploration

Literature asks us to imagine; it works its magic (and its misery) through imagination.

So let’s imagine that you wake up one morning and find yourself in a large, rambling house.  You don’t know how big it is at once, but in time, as you begin to explore it, you realize that it’s so enormous, you will never know it all.  In the house are people, some of whom you know: family members, friends, neighbors, colleagues; but most of them are strangers.  They tantalize and terrify you both at once.

At some point the truth dawns on you that there is no way out; it is in this house that you will have to live your life.  The house is not what you’d have chosen exactly. It’s in fairly bad condition: the ceilings are cracking, the paint is chipping, the smell is musty; many corridors are crowded with bullies.  Some parts are haunted where in the night blood-curdling screams are heard, places where others and common sense tell you not to go.  But the house will have to do—it’s all you’ve got.

One day your exploring nature takes you inside an unimportant-looking little room.  The room is empty, but there is a voice in it, a voice that seems to be whispering just to you.  It makes you want to stay and listen.  But you want to know if there are other rooms like this one. 
And there are.  Each one with a different voice.  The voices are talking about the house, about everyone in it, about everything that has happened, that is happening, that might happen, that should happen.  Some voices are vulgar and profane; some whine; some are angry and hateful; some are shocking.  And some voices are many of these things at once.  |
You’re spell-bound.  You begin to visit these rooms often now.  Gradually you realize that many people in the house do the same.  You talk together about your visits to these rooms.  You discover that some go there to escape the confines of their life in the house; some to be informed; some to be inspired; some to be provoked to critical thought and gain understanding; some to be delighted and to enjoy; some to glory in the sordid and sensational; some to glory in the right, the true, the just. 

And you—you listen to the voices that compel you to experience other lives and thereby exercise your humanity.
Like the voice of an old woman, 90, suffering from inoperable cancer, facing the end of her life.  But she’s terrified of death.  Nothing in her life has made her ready to accept its end.  She thinks back on the story of that long life: the story of a young girl who had to grow up without a mother; whose father was cold and dictatorial and proud; her defiance of this father by marrying the town’s reject; the unhappy years with a man whose body she desired but whose mind and manners she despised; the decision to leave her husband with her youngest son, whom she loved deeply in her heart but never expressed with her mouth; later, the son’s return to his father, to tend him as he lay dying; then the accidental death of that son for which she felt personal guilt, but for which she was unable to shed tears and which she was unable to accept. 
A sad story of broken relationships, of alienation, of unrepentant pride.  A story without warmth or tenderness for there had always been that overpowering fear of weakness.  Now darkness is closing in, and with it the terror from never having lived in the light.
She tries to run away from it all and finds shelter in an abandoned house.  There, exhausted in body and spirit, she faces her self-inflicted blindness and makes her confession to another wandering soul: “I had a son, and he died.  The night he died, I was transformed to stone and never wept at all.  I’d had so many things to say to him, so many things to put to rights.”  She begins to cry, her first tears.  Still she insists: “I don’t accept it.  It angers me, and will until I die.” 
But then her prideful spirit breaks down completely, and she is able to admit that she treated her son wrongly.  Suddenly the sense of his forgiveness floods her soul with peace.  She’s changed when she’s found and hospitalized.  When the minister stops for a visit, she asks him to sing, “All people that on earth do dwell, Sing to the Lord with joyful voice.  Him serve with mirth, His praise forth tell; Come ye before him and rejoice.”  When he finishes, a veil lifts from her eyes, blinded too long.  She’s choked with the incommunicable years, everything that happened and was spoken or not spoken.  The knowledge comes upon her so forcefully, so shatteringly—the knowledge that she must always, always have wanted simply to rejoice. 
Her voice, profoundly penitent, speaks to you:  “How is it I never could?  Every good joy I might have held, in my man or any child of mine of even the plain light of morning, of walking the earth, all were forced to a standstill by some brake of proper appearance—oh, proper to whom?  When did I ever speak the heart’s truth?  Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear.”
At the end of her wilderness now, the old woman is thirsty.  She takes the glass offered her, and drinks the water, and dies. *
And you—you return to your own life, sobered, and you pray God to save you from walking in darkness, eyes blinded to the truths within you and around you.

When you go again, you hear the voice of a man who learned long ago that life for many is a battle for survival.  As a youth he has to steal for food on the table at night.  Often he gets caught and jailed.  He watches his mother fall ill, grow weak, and fade away, for there is no money for medicine.  When he marries, it is to a woman who has no capacity for affection.  They manage to raise a sickly son on proper nutrition, which they are able to provide with money from stolen goods.  Work Is scarce and pays but little.  Often there is no work at all.  Eventually the little family of three lands in a cabin by a lake, and the man learns how to catch fish for a living.  It takes years before he is able to make it into a livelihood.  But his hopes for his son keep him going.  He wants his son to have a better life than he has had.  His son grows up into a sturdy, independent young man.  Then war breaks out.  The fisherman tries to ignore it as much as he can.  He wants nothing to do with any man or people or ideology that would curtail the freedom of others.  And he gives shelter to anyone whose life and freedom is endangered by another.  Thus his cabin on the lake becomes a hiding place. 
One night the Germans raid his place.  They find no one, but they take the fisherman in for interrogation.  They tell him they have his son too, and that his son will die unless the Germans get the names of those who are involved in the underground.  Nothing is more important to the fisherman than the life of his son.  Yet he refuses to tell what he knows.  When he discovers that his son is already dead, the will within him to live dies too.  They try to beat the wanted information out of him, but he is silent.  They torture him repeatedly to break this man who had not been broken by an absent mother and a cruel father, by poverty, exploitation, discrimination, humiliation, and a loveless marriage.  But they cannot break him.  Though life has trapped him again and again, his dignity and pride and self-respect as a human being have survived. 
He gives the Nazis nothing.  So they take his life.  The voice of the fisherman is stilled. **

You leave the listening room, and you walk the corridors of your dwelling place, and you think of blighted lives around you, made in the image of God, diminished by the inhumanity of others.  And you weep. You weep for all the Humpty Dumpty’s in the world who were created to sit on a wall, but who had a great and terrible fall.  Whose beautiful but delicate shell was cracked beyond repair; whose brokenness arouses compassion in some, and glee in others as they stomp on the pieces, crushing them to powder.

The voice you listen to on another day is not the voice of a child but of a grown man who, like yourself, has discovered that this sprawling house of yours has parts that are overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love; an impoverished place, darkened by the absence of God.  It’s the voice of a priest, pursued by the hounds of repression, a fallen priest, a corrupted priest but clinging fast to his vocation, administering the sacraments, giving sermons in jungle clearings, looking for wine that he may say Mass.  At the end he faces execution, the last surviving priest in the land; he’s ashamed that he has squandered his gifts and betrayed his calling, that he must come to his God with nothing in his hands to bring.  He dies, but another priest appears out of nowhere, and the ministry will go on—the power and the glory will not be denied. ***

The next voice you hear is that of a teenage boy.  It’s not a pleasant voice to listen to.  It whines, it curses, it’s full of teenage slang.  You want to leave, to shut it out, but you don’t.  For behind the profanity and the irritating repetition and the incoherency, there’s something you can’t quite dismiss.  You think you begin to hear another voice—the voice of a bewildered adolescent searching for the true in a world choking on false values and hypocrisy.  So you stay and you listen, because it’s your world in which the boy tries to find his way.  Tries, but fails again and again.  For his older brother, who was his hero, is dead.  His parents play only a passive part on the periphery of his life.  His friends think only of the pleasures of self-indulgence, and the adults whom he needs for help talk at him but not to him. 
You stay and you listen because you hear more now than the offense of his language.  You hear him being friendly to the friendless; being critical of messy people who have bad manners, who profane love by reducing it to sex, who humiliate the underdog, who slobber over sentimental movies while neglecting their kids right beside them, who are devoid of conscience or human decency.  In this creature who is no longer a child and not yet an adult, you hear the voice of a moral critic.  And you begin to look beyond his posturing and see his kindness and generosity in action, his respect for the humble, his love of good books, his need for clean, white things, his pursuit of purity. 
You’re shamed by his capacity to care about others; here’s an adolescent who is supposed to be self-centered and egotistic, and what does he think of? About what will happen to the lowly ducks in Central Park when winter comes; about what will happen to the innocent girls when not-so innocent boys take them out; about what will happen to young children when they see the f-word scrawled on school walls.  You hear an anxious frustration in the voice: “I thought how the little kids would see it….”
He rubs it out; then finds another.  “I tried to rub it off with my hand again, but this one was scratched on.  It wouldn’t come off.  It’s hopeless anyway.  If you had a million years to do it, you couldn’t rub out even half of them.” 
You’re shamed again.  You’d been ready to write this kid off as a foul-mouthed jerk, emerging now as a would-be saint.  You listen to his voice again, wistful and urgent at the same time: “I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. … And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff.  What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff. … That’s all I’d do all day.  I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.  … that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.  I know it’s crazy.” ****

Yes, it’s crazy—a 16-year old who would save the children from falling over the edge of innocence into the corruption of the adult world, while he himself is falling into the pit of despair because there’s no one to catch him. 
When you return to your part of the house, you realize that this lonely, lost voice has given you more to be Christian with than you had before.  Again, you remember the story of Humpty Dumpty, and the words of another voice you’ve listened to: “When God had made the Man, he made him out of stuff that sung all the time and glittered all over.  Then after that some angels got jealous and chopped him down to nothing but sparks, but each little spark had a shine and a song.  So they covered each one over with mud.  And the lonesomeness in the sparks made them hunt for one another, but the mud is deaf and dumb.” *****

The voices you listen to next are children’s voices, two children who are left without a mother.  They’re brought up by their father, and he is a good man.  And by a black housekeeper, and she is wonderful.    The children wonder about many things.  Their father listens and always tries hard to explain what they don’t understand.  But then something happens in the town where they live that is even beyond the father’s ability to explain.  A white man accuses a black man of something he hasn’t done.  The jury believes the white man’s word and not the black’s, though there is no evidence against him.  You hear the father’s voice: “… there’s something in our world that makes men lose their head—they couldn’t be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always wins.  They’re ugly but those are the facts of life.  The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentment right into a jury box.  As you grow older you’ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.”  The father wants his children to recognize that there is evil in a world where often the innocent are hanged and the guilt go free because of the color of their skin.  He wants his children to recognize evil for what it is.  “We must choose what kind of people we are going to be,” he says, “those who are overcome with evil or those who overcome evil with good.” ******

The voice goes in your ears and in your heart, the voice of a father who inspires the will to follow his example—to meet ignorance and hatred and prejudice with understanding, courage, goodness, and love.  It’s a voice that lingers inside you when you leave that room and makes you want to be a father like that to your children. 

The story you listen to another day is told by a young girl, Lena, and it fills your heart with tears.  Lena too is blessed by having a good father.  He has led his family out of the deep South and segregation and a history of “men hanging from trees and children being taught every day that God meant them to be inferior.”  “We gathered up our courage,” he tells Lena, “and moved on, out West here…the promised land, where people would look at us and see us, not our color.”  But there are poisonous snakes in the promised land, like the town’s white-trash Haney family: the Haneys are shiftless and poor and mean.  And when Lena’s dad replaces Haney as hired man, Haney’s hate-filled son Tater strikes back.  Lena finds both of them, in a far-off field: her father dying from Tater’s bullet; Tater badly mashed from being dragged by the spooked horse he was riding.
You know that the bond between daughter and daddy has always been close and strong and special.  You hear their voices now, and the listening room in this ramshackle house of yours is hallowed by them. Listen:
 “ 'Lena, I had so much I wanted to tell you.  All the things I thought we’d have time for later.’  He bit down on the pain with animal teeth, then his face drained back to calmness.  ‘Couldn’t remember to live every day like it was the last one…. I want you to get Tater back to his folks.’  He held her as her body stiffened and broke into helpless tremors.  No. Impossible.  Her head slashed back and forth against him.  ‘I won’t do it.’  ‘For my sake,’ he said patiently.  ‘Don’t grieve now, Lena.  This is wonderful, that we’re getting to say last things to each other.  Most people don’t get to, or can’t.  It’s what I held out for.  So I could tell you how much I love you.  And Claudie.  And the babies.  And thank you.  For all you’ve given me.’ ” 

The power of Godly grace through her dying daddy enables Lena to do the impossible: to load her enemy, Tater Haney, who killed the most precious person on earth, and whom she hates with all her heart, to load him onto the wagon and ride him back to town and help; to stop the wagon when Tater thrashes and screams in his pain, and to hold his thin hand until he calms.  She does what her father taught her: to overcome evil with good. *******

When the story is finished, it is not finished; for good stories never are.  You take them with you, inside of you where good stories multiply their blessings and change your life.
For what are stories for if it is isn’t also to make you try to catch the Humpty Dumpty’s falling from the wall, if it isn’t also to touch the tumbling mud-balls and help them to show their shine a little and make them sing again?

·        *             Margaret Laurence The Stone Angel

·        **           Rink van der Velde  The Trap

·        ***        Graham Greene       The Power and the Glory

·        ****      J.D. Salinger               The Catcher in the Rye

·        *****    Zora Neal Hurston   Their Eyes Were Watching God

·        ******  Harper Lee                 To Kill a Mockingbird

·        *******Ouida Sebestyen     Words by Heart