Some years ago I read a book (name escapes me) about a place where a pretty but isolated little house stood in a broad, open expanse surrounded by beautiful gardens full of roses. The occupants had everything that their hearts could desire. But in the distance a huge mass of people spreading from the one side of the horizon to the other, were approaching slowly. They looked like starving refugees from another world, dressed in torn grey rags, thin faces filled with misery and pain, pulling rickety carts bearing children and brick-a-brack, pathetic remnants of their earthtly possessions moving aimlessly across this mighty plain. It was a terrifying sight.
The occupants of that pretty little house knew that the roses in their gardens were not real: they were exquisitely beautiful Phoenician glass replicas, very expensive, and they sparkled magically in the sunlight. But they discovered that whenever they pulled up one of those beautiful roses it broke, and that starving horde would magically be pushed back to the horizon. They understood that this would not work forever because they only had a limited number of roses so their hope was that the threat would eventually go away - or that they would eventually find a solution to make it go away. But the solution did not come.
In fact, the starving horde grew, and every time it came back bigger and more menacing than the last time. And it got closer. The happiness in the lives of the family in the cottage diminished and grew into anxiety. Eventually they grew nervous about letting the children go out into the garden to play - at first they insisted that an adult must supervise and later they forbade it altogether. By now the miserable trudging hoard was visible all the time, from horizon to horizon, and faint sounds of their shuffling feet in their broken shoes and their ancient creaking carts could be heard through the cold, thin air.
Soon the groaning, the sighs and the voices of the crying children became a constant background to the increasingly tense occupants of the cottage.
And then one morning the beautiful daughter of the family in the cottage came inside and announced that there were no more roses, and they realised that they could not stay any longer.
So they hastily packed some bags, cannibalized the family motor-car and converted it into a heavy, hand-drawn cart, wrapped the rest of their worldly possessions into blankets, harnessed up all the able family members, assembled the family in the back yard, and got ready to go.
By now the sea of starving souls were at the front gate. They stretched as far as the eye could see. The groaning and wailing, the murmuring, the shuffling of feet, the coughing of rotten lungs, the crying of babies and hungry children filled the air. Suddenly the little front gate burst open with a loud crack, the little white picket fence was went down, and this slow-moving but inexorable mob swept into, round and over the cottage, it's bricks and staves and tiles tumbling down among them, window glass cracking under their cut and bruised feet.
There was no jubilation, no rejoicing, no malicious or spiteful behaviour from the mob at all. It was done unemotionally, indifferently, possibly without them even noticing what they were doing - they were that possessed by their own grief, their own need, their own desperation. You would have been wrong to call this a revolution or to try to categorise this event in any of those old ways, which were now utterly irrelevant. This was just dire need. They would have apologised if it would have made any difference. These were not angry, vengeful, politically driven fanatics. They were just penniless, starving, pitiful remnants of the human race, clinging to life - any life - as best they could.
And now, our once-privileged, pretty little family are walking amongst the mob. They are no longer special. They will have to find a new way of living. They are heading into a dark and scary valley in human history. There will be much suffering and deprivation and sooner or later we are all going to join them. Our ranks will be depleted, our losses will be great, we will be engulfed by misfortune - but we will live.
The will to live is the strongest driver of human behaviour in the world, and the closer you get to death, the clearer that becomes. Bereft of absolutely everything, no matter how bewhildered you may be, that singular truth will eventually come to you.
It came to me as I lay in a hospital bed, confused by morphine, organs failing and racked with pain, convinced that God (if he had ever existed) had walked away and forgotten me. And yet, this thought came to me:
You must live. You must live at all and any cost. You must sacrifice whatever you have to sacrifice, abandon whatever you have to abandon, fight, lie, cheat, steal, kill, tear, break, take mad and badly calculated chances - just live, and then you can try to make good on any damage that you did afterwards. And in my mad and morphine-induced state I was eventually saved by the Angel of Death. Expressionless, without any sign of warm compassion, he sewed up my wounds with a seamstress' sewing needle and a scrap of rough cotton and he stopped my bleeding and when it was clear that I was going to live he turned and walked away without a greeting and without looking back. The terrible moment was over, and I knew that I was going to live. And I never saw him again, to this day. He does not visit me in dreams. I do not see him standing on street corners or at the bedside of dying relatives. He chooses not to be seen.
But if you should ever see him - do not be afraid! Remember - everything is negotiable. And send him my regards - I think he'll remember me. And I will, of course, see him one more time - but this time, I'll recognise him.
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© Harry Friedland, June 2022
My blog: https://hjfriedland.blogspot.com/
