My father died last week. No great disaster, that, because his one-hundredth birthday was not far away. He was practically blind, quite deaf, confined to a wheelchair, and suffered from a painful infection in his leg that no treatment would cure. As he told me a few days before he passed away, he was no longer Leo (his first name). The fact that not only his wife of seventy years but almost all his friends and acquaintances were long dead did not help either. His last words were, “let me go.” In a way he was lucky. He died in his own home where he had been living for close to thirty years. Surrounded by the most tender care possible, and without any kind of tubes or needles stuck into his body.
The death of old people like him is always long anticipated. Yet somehow it always comes as a surprise, too. One day you take him out in his wheelchair just as you so often did before. You walk with him through the nearby park, which by the way is very nice indeed; thank you for laying it out, you people at the municipality of Kfar Saba, north of Tel Aviv. Not forgetting to put a hat on his head and the brakes on his chair, you sit down on a bench in the sunshine, and watch the fish in a pond. Or listen to a turtle cooing (the Song of Songs). Ornithologists will tell you it is calling for a mate. To me it seems to be saying, zo is het goed (Dutch: now everything is in order). Next you get the phone call. And he is gone, forever.
His death made me think, not for the first time, about the good things in life. And the bad ones, of course, but I will spare you those. Initially I thought there would not be enough of the former to fill a post. Once I started, though, there seemed to be a whole host of them, all shouting and jostling each other in a desperate attempt to get into the list. So, to avoid boring you too much, let me just put down a few of those I feel are the most important ones. It was he who taught me several of them—which is why I am writing this post to honor him.
1. A good meal with family and friends. I am no gourmet, dislike the kind of people who can distinguish between fifty kinds of wine, and I do not particularly like restaurants. After a few days, even the best ones get on my nerves. Especially Israeli ones, which tend to play loud music, making it impossible to hear oneself and others think. Fortunately Dvora is as good a cook as they come. She also keeps experimenting, meaning that the food is never boring. Imagine a sunny winter morning or a cool evening here near Jerusalem, some 2,200 feet above sea level. Imagine a balcony looking out over a small but carefully kept and beautiful garden. A small group of family and friends, perhaps accompanied by some children, gathers. A bottle of wine is passed around, making everyone feel slightly—but only slightly—dizzy. As Herman Melville is supposed to have said, anyone who has that can feel like an emperor.
2. Music. When I was six or seven years old my mother tried to teach me to play the piano. I did not want to learn and she desisted, but not before telling me I would be sorry. In this she was right. Following my father, my tastes in music are mostly Western and classical, running from Church music (both Gregorian and Eastern Orthodox) through the Renaissance (Monteverdi and Palestrina; as sweet as honey, both of them) through the Baroque (Bach, Handel, Vivaldi) and the nineteenth century (Beethoven, Schubert. Wagner) to the years around 1900 (Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov). But occasionally I also enjoy listening to Chinese music, Arabic music, and popular Israeli music. Two favorites that do not really fit into any of these categories are the Carmina Buranna and the Misa Criolla.My son, Eldad, gave me a set of good speakers for my computer: they are one of the best presents I ever got. Let me take this opportunity to say, once again, thank you, Eldad.
3. Art. Though I did take up making mosaics a few years ago, I got less artistic talent than he did. As I grew older I felt this lack more keenly than I did before. Such being the case, all that is left is to enjoy the art of others; particularly painting, sculpture, architecture, and design. My tastes run form the ancient Greeks to the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century (de Hooch, Cuyp, Vermeer, Rembrandt) all the way through Biedermeier—a recent discovery—the German Romantics and the Impressionists to Picasso and Fernando Botero. Nor will I miss a good show of Chinse, or, Indian, or Islamic, art. Flea markets are a joy to attend. Old posters, based on the history of the period in which they were created, are often wonderful. However, over the years I have come to dislike abstract art. Judging by the number of visitors I meet in the galleries, I am not the only one.
Normally I visit museums with Dvora who herself is an accomplished painter. For those of you who do not know, looking at pictures in the company of a painter is a unique experience. Most people, including myself, tend to focus on what they see; the sea, say, as Painted by Turner. Dvora, on the other hand, asks how the artists achieved the effect he did. To do so she comes so close to the painting that her nose is practically in it. How many times did she not alert the guard who came running!
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5. Scholarship. For as long as I can remember myself I have always been a bookworm. If I had a great aim in life, it was Rerum causas cognoscere, to understand the causes of things. Probably not with success; looking back, I often think that I know and understand fewer things now than I did at the time I first gained consciousness of myself. I do not think I have made any great discoveries.
How these things work in natural science I do not claim to know at first hand. In the humanities and the social sciences, though, practically everything has been said before by someone at some time at some place; with the result that making such discoveries is, in one sense, next to impossible. But the subjective feeling of having understood, or feeling one has understood, something one had never thought about before—that is an experience the quest for which is worth spending a lifetime at.
6. Nature. The expanse of a field, reaching far away into the horizon. A forest, dark and mysterious. A lofty mountain, enveloped in the kind of silence you only get where there are no people around. A lake, shimmering in the sun. The sea. The eternally changing, the all-powerful, sea. It is enough to make you want to cry.
7. Love. It has been defined countless times by countless different people. My own favorite definition is as follows: love is when one’s beloved shortcomings make one laugh. As, for instance happens whenever Dvora sees me with my shirt buttoned the wrong way, smiles, and starts making fun of me. Another definition is that love is trust so great that one never has to say sorry. Not because one never hurts one’s beloved; only angels can do that, and they tend to be rather boring. But because he or she knows that it is not done on purpose.
Anyhow. Love, accompanied where appropriate by the kind of sex that makes the body and mind of both partners radiate with happiness, is the most wonderful thing life has to offer. Pity those, and the older I grow the more of them I think I see, who have not found it.
8. Last not least, a heartfelt email thanking me for my posts, such as I sometimes get.