ONE NIGHT I had a strange dream. I saw myself sitting at a table talking with an angel and his two assistants. I’d never seen a creature lovelier than that angel, who was the incarnation of joy, full of the wisdom of life. Around the angel shimmered the whiteness of the silence of the Milky Way. That pure white, so unattainable and absolute, cast a special spell upon me. It whispered to me that the gleaming colors of the world of the senses that the Hindus call the Veil of Maya are no more than a subtle deception.
But then the angel’s young assistant, a man with a heavy Russian accent, explained that the absence of color around the angel symbolized the pitiless void of the universe.
“Mankind alone can find the antidote to meaningless nothing,” he said. “Human beings do this with their consciousness, with words and memories. Mankind’s greatest gift is the ability to endow life with meaning.”
I wanted to know if my own life had any particular meaning. But I never managed to ask the question, because the other assistant, an old man with a sharp profile, temperamental and full of passion, declared in bold, ringing Italian, “Il esplorazione!”—the voyage of discovery!
“The true voyage of discovery, the great adventure,” he explained further, “is that of life and death. The traveler plunges into the soul of humanity. There he is carried in circles and tells all, he builds bridges of words to that inner silence he discovers within his fellow humans, anchored within his own family.”
The scene in my dream shifted. Everything became dark. I sat alone at a table. I dipped my pen in the inkwell and began writing effortlessly. I filled up the white sheets of paper quietly, methodically, with a jumble of words, but soon a structure gradually began to emerge. I finished writing, and my words whirled away in the wind; humanity held its breath and the birds fell silent.
That dream was balsam to my heart. I awoke the next morning full of joy, with a new attitude toward life. New inner worlds had opened themselves to me. My understanding had been guided by a peculiar light and greater peace. I’d found the undiscovered land: stories. The purpose of my remaining months and days was to write down those stories.
WELL AWARE of the urgency, I devoted all my energies to deciphering the past so I could understand my own origins. Over the course of several weeks I devoured everything I could find: the documents about my family that I’d discovered in my grandfather’s suitcase, of course, and the thousand and one utterly fascinating pages of Benjamin Spinoza’s book, The Elixir of Immortality. Reference works and novels, as well; I read an enormous amount. My hunger for the written word and my ability to absorb it surprised me. My expeditions into the realm of fiction gave me great sustenance and the feeling that I was touched by genius; I had the impression that the momentous thoughts in those pages were my own, not those of others. In the refuge of good writing I felt shielded from my perishing existence. I believed in immortality.
OBSESSED BY THE THOUGHT that every human being is unique and that every event occurs only one time, I began for the first time in my life to write down the stories that I’d carried within me since childhood. Slowly at first and hesitantly, almost reluctantly, since I thought what little knowledge I possessed was all too insufficient and fragmentary to capture reality. Moreover, I didn’t really know where the twisting path I’d begun would take me. I quickly discovered that language falls short when one tries to describe one’s inner life; only the outer appearance of things could be adequately captured. I could clearly understand a subject and yet become terribly exasperated when I tried to put it into words.
WRITING THE PROLOGUE about my mother’s death was agonizingly difficult. That passage took me far more time to write than anything else I wrote—a whole month.
Why on earth did I need so much time to craft that passage of less than eighty lines?
What can I tell you? I’ve always found writing extremely difficult. I’ve never had any real gift for it. I’ve always hesitated, doubting every word as I put it down. In the middle of a sentence I’m always in danger of losing the thread; I write, cross out words, rewrite, cross out words again—it never ends.
AND THEN CAME what they called peripeteia in Greek drama, the sudden change of fortune. A routine medical examination revealed it. The physician discovered a metastasis of the cancer. My traitorous blood had transported rebellious cells to the remotest regions of my body. I came face-to-face with the knowledge that my time was running out and soon I would be defeated by the rebellion of my own insides. On the one hand, I’d just reconciled myself with my upcoming death. One family after another dies out, I thought, suns are lit and extinguished, and soon it will be my turn to go the way of all flesh. On the other hand, I was tormented by the thought that once I shut my eyes forever, all those stories in me would be gone without a trace and all those who had preceded me would disappear forever.
I couldn’t stand by and just let my ancestors disappear into the chaos of time. I faced one last decisive struggle.
THEN, WHEN I least expected it, I began writing quickly, relieved to find myself liberated from the torture of my wordlessness. From then on, I began to appreciate every day—in my head, in my spirit, and also in my body, not least in my body—how much that writing meant to me. The words literally poured out of me. My brain was feverishly occupied with my family lineage, everything I’d tried to suppress for years and forget completely. My dying ancestors danced around my head and jealously followed my writing; they were all, every single one, demanding their places in the text.
I could feel them close to me, and I could sense their warm breath as they leaned over my shoulder and read how I was giving shape to their lives. I could hear their whispered comments and their surprise when I put words in their mouths that they didn’t want to acknowledge and when I gave away their secrets.
All of them were there except for my mother and father. All along, those two considered me to be a failure as a son, someone they could never depend on or be proud of. Much of our relationship remains unexplained, and for that reason I can’t put down the details of their lives in a factual, accurate narrative. They knew that. That, I believe, is why they held themselves at such a distance. Undoubtedly my mother and father have been hoping that I would enclose them in the only thing they value: silence.
OFTEN I WOULD collapse into bed after two o’clock in the morning, only to be awakened by my inner clock four hours later so I could return to my task. I rarely bothered to get dressed in the morning; it took too much valuable time. It was more or less by accident that I had anything to eat or drink. No one and nothing else existed outside my narrative. The words made me forget everything else. The act of writing charged me with the energy of language, so that like Scheherazade I kept away the Angel of Death for a while longer.
WHAT I’VE WRITTEN here is not a confession. It’s a narrative. This is what happened; things like these happen here in this world. Narratives like this one about the Spinoza family and millions of other family chronologies are the basis of history. They constitute the great story of mankind.
TIME IS FLEETING. Our past is gone forever. The future has no need of me. Tomorrow will be built by other people. I can shut my eyes in peace. My task on earth is complete. I’ve replaced the elixir of my ancestor Baruch with the only thing that can possibly give human beings immortality on this earth: our ability to remember.
I LEAVE NOTHING but my own words after me. Benjamin’s book, the treasure of our family, I take with me to the grave. Ever a heavy smoker resistant to cure—I have an addiction that not even cancer could free me from—each time I finished writing a passage about our family history, I tore a page out of Benjamin’s magnificent book, filled it with tobacco, and enjoyed a hand-rolled cigarette.
At this very moment the last page of The Elixir of Immortality is going up in smoke.
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The Elixir of Immortality Page 64