A Sailboat in the Moonlight and Who (Foto--Piers)

Foto: Moonlight--The Pillars of Herakles

Dear Piers,
° The other day my brother innocently erred in saying, “If I get to Heaven, I hope I’ll meet up with D------, and we’ll fish and hunt rabbits all day everyday.”
° “Erred,” for he said it in front of me.
° “Won’t be much of a Heaven for the fishes and the rabbits,” wiseacred I.
° He thought, he amended, “Maybe up there we wouldn’t kill them.”
° Good save.

§

° My mind flashed back to my grandfather’s famous lecture on the Immortality of the Soul. He used to deliver it to captive audiences of public school children, this was back in the days when such audiences were homogeneously WASP, the only sectarian division being between English Relaxed Episcopalians and Scottish Haemorrhoidal Calvinists.

The Indian has his Heaven. When he dies, . . . he expects to go to a land of swift flowing, beautiful and mighty rivers, teeming with fish, where throughout all eternity he can indulge in one of his favorite sports.

° But I am a vegetarian, so that’s no good.

The Mohammedan when he dies looks for a Heaven where he can enjoy every sensual delight. In this world he has many wives, but in the next world he is to have many more.

° Not to mention the nonstupefying wine, the baklava, and the prettyboys. But there’s no promise of cats, so that’s no good.

The truly Christian man or woman has an altogether different idea of Heaven. He believes in a higher and better life--a life of service free from sin and the triumph of his soul and spirit over his lower and animal nature that he has here.

° So Heaven is to be an eternity of emptying bedpans with a cheerful disposition. I pray it be not so.

§§§§§

° I’m in the living room, I’m lolled on the sofa. The day is sunny and warm, and the breeze through the open dormers is caressing. From the South I can smell the Gulf. To the North I can see the converted storehouse in which Nathan is kilning bowls glazed jewelly in jade and turquoise. Coz is down in the cabin, he’s dandling his firstborn, He Born with the Caul, He Born with the Gift Entire. From the Terrace comes the hectic thwuck! of Leggero’s backhand, as he prepares for the Games. Downstairs, at the keyboard, you’re entwining themes from Palestrina’s Canticum Canticorum with Dupré’s, nero e bello davvero.
° A pot of steeping strong tea releases the scent of orangeblossom and passionflower and jasmine while Yucatan buttons melt in my mouth (though there’s a platter of costillas in the hall, and the lingering scent of the morning coffee grinding). On the page before me Fanny Assingham has just said ‘”This”--?‘ and Maggie is just fixing to reply ‘That!’
° She’s done it. I pause. Silence. Footsteps.
° One of you is coming up the steps.

§

° And that, my beloved Piers, ever forgotten so as to be ever newly experienced throughout the splitsecond that Eternity lasts, is Heaven.
° Contentment Surprised by Joy.

° All aboard as the Moon rises, Giac.