How far there is to fall

We are rarely ready to face the full form of pain. Isn't this so? Here in the humming, squashy sitting-rooms of our lives, how often will we be roused to real terror, real anguish? These are things so far from our daily humdrum of activity that we cannot feel them, and only think how they might be. Those of us who live in safe neighborhoods, who have never seen a gun, who have never watched someone die, will try to span the gap of experience with feats of imagination, to insert ourselves into the news or movies or friends' accounts. We needn't worry. If it has not yet, the real moment will come to all of us, and more than once in our long lives; they will be the dull, flat rocks that gape baldly in the flow of a stream.

Most people most of the time do not know or have forgotten what pain is, and this is not our fault. The scope of possible tragedy is as vast and inconceivable as the surface of the Earth. We know it is there, but for the sake of convenience focus on our small allotted plot, and only briefly are ever pulled up and given a suggestion of where the edges might be. In John Banville's The Untouchable, there is a scene in which the young, hedonistic English men sent to defend France during World War II barely register the danger as Germans descend upon them; the English army is retreating to the channel, but as they flee the narrator stops to remark that

[t]he harbour had a wonderfully festive look, with crowds of men milling about the quayside and craft of all kinds bobbing and jostling on the sea. The water was a stylized shade of cobalt blue and the sky was stuck all over with scraps of cottony cloud.

A moment later, as German bullets whiz past their heads, the narrator spots a soldier he went to school with and calls him over to introduce him to his friends. The disconnect between the present danger and the guileless insouciance of the soldiers renders the scene both hysterical and strangely terrifying; these men, you realize, so caught up with the little dramas and vanities of their lives, cannot see or accept what is around them.

This, to me, is also an illustration of the disconnect we experience when we read a news story about a girl being abused, or watch movies about real-life tragedies. (Even the word "tragedy" is somehow supposed to carry and impart the feeling of its definition; being only a word, it always falls short of the purpose for which people use it.) We do feel emotion when we hear of pain, even strong emotion, but this, I must say, is not even a portion of the whole thing, not even a lessened version of what those directly involved experience. It is something else entirely. It is the careful manipulation of image and sound, or of sentences that cascade and wrench and cause their own misery. When I read about the worst possible atrocities in the paper, I will recognize intellectually that they are horrible, but - if I am being honest - feel nothing emotionally but what I dredge up out of a sense of moral expectation. Unless I identify in some way with the story, in which case the pain I feel is for myself, I acquire no part of the pain of those who actually suffer. Pain is not a reaction to a thing, but a thing that happens itself.

What brings me to record these thoughts is a small, dense tragedy that occurred in my home yesterday night, a non-event that is hardly worth repeating but for the panic and dread it drew, however briefly, into our house; a microcosm of disaster. My brother was playing floor hockey in our backyard, his white sneakers trailing on the newly wet cement. It was dark, and my dad and I were in attendance (clutching sticks of our own) as he chased the dog-wet ball in circles, eyes set on the impish green blur. I remember only the afterimage: my brother's stick on the ground, and he on the ground too, behind it, his hands splayed as if in obeisance. He lifted himself from the ground, and there is a moment when all in attendance know, almost divinely, exactly what has happened, but cannot repeat it to one another until the final evidence is presented. My brother said, "I think I chipped a tooth." And then I saw it: a perfect quarter-circle in his right front tooth, as if only waiting for the puzzle piece that, with a flourish, would declare it whole.

Writing about it now, the whole event feels like nothing of consequence (at least for me, anyway; it is not my tooth that chipped), but I can assure you that it felt, at the time, like some permanent, irretrievable loss. My dad threw his hockey stick against the pavement, one of his few, always understated displays of anger. I felt clammy and flushed. My brother turned to one of us, then the other; I tried to reassure him but was myself doubtful, having forgotten in the moment if technology was sufficient to repair him. My dad constricted himself into a chair and opened a newspaper, his eyes tracking too rapidly.

It is a commonplace of moments like these that one wonders, with dread, whether anything will ever be the same again. It is, perhaps, an overstatement that compensates for our daily understatements, our inability to comprehend the dark shapes behind words like "murder" and "rape" unless they drop into our near proximity. And I thought, as I always do in these moments, of all of us on a thin ledge against the face of an impossibly high and steep mountain, tracing our way imperceptibly, in single file. Below us there are many more such ledges, all equally narrow, and once in a while someone might lose their footing and fall to the next one down, or two, or three. It is a precarious walk, but while we have our eyes rigid on our feet it is possible to forget the gaping chasm that lies only a footstep away. We climb slowly and gradually toward the top, but a gust of wind or the particular jut of a stone is enough to nudge us over, and who knows where the bottom lies. How high we all are, and how far there is to fall.