Wolves In The Attic: Chapter 11: The Coral Fan

​On the top shelf of the bookcase sits a pink coral fan. Possibly the fan is Gorgonian rather than coral; I am too ignorant of sea fauna to distinguish the two. From the four main arteries of this fan grew hundreds of capillaries, all intersecting one with the other. At the base of the fan is a white knob made of shells.
           
​This fan belonged to my wife Kris. Since her death, I have wondered how and why she acquired it. Did someone who loved her before me present the fan to her as a gift? Did she purchase it on a whim in one of those generic beach shops selling towels, floats, and sharks’ teeth? Is the fan real or manufactured? Did it bring memories to her? Does the fan have a secret history of which I am unaware?

​I have no idea.
           
If, as stated in the introduction, my purpose here is to examine objects and their place in my life, some of you might rightly ask: Why do you include this mysterious coral fan in our visit to the attic?
           
My response: “Beauty.”
           
The intricacy of this fan, its delicate junctions and intersections, its coloration, and especially the mystery of its place among my belongings: all these qualities attract me.
           
In Mark Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War, a novel I urge young men to read, a young Italian worker and an aged professor of aesthetics, a veteran of World War I, discuss subjects ranging from art to love to death. Here the young man, Nicolo, asks Alessandro about God.
           
“You believe in God, don’t you?”
           
“Yes.”
           
“How can you? What did He ever do for you?”
           
“That’s not the point, what He did or didn’t do for me. In fact, He did a great deal, but for some He’s done a lot less than nothing. Besides, one doesn’t believe in God or disbelieve in Him.
           
“Though I used to argue it,” the old man said, “even with myself, when I was younger. His existence is not a question of argument, but of apprehension. Either you apprehend God, or you do not.”
           
Apprehension.
           
To apprehend means “to grasp the meaning of; to recognize with understanding.”
           
It took me years to understand the connection between beauty and apprehension. Like so many of you, my readers, the world and its affairs swept me along like a woodchip in a rushing stream. Each day brought enormous challenges—raising children, earning a living, writing. The banks of the rushing stream passed in a blur.
           
When my last son left for college four years ago, solitude became my closest companion. Brother Solitude, as Saint Francis might have called him, may not always be the most affable of comrades, and certainly such solitary life would not appeal to many people—a few well-meaning friends keep encouraging me to marry—but seclusion is as necessary for my work as my MacBook Pro or my books.
           
At any rate, and even before Jeremy went away, my ability to apprehend beauty began increasing. At first this facility to seize on beauty came in flashes, as if by accident, moments where the laughter of a woman, the face of a child, or the sight of a reader in a bookshop made me stop in my tracks and marvel at the miracle of life.

Soon I discovered that I could will these moments into being, that all I had to do was stop, look, and listen. This first command of a parent to a child crossing a street became my portal to a world of beauty: Stop. Look. Listen.
           
In those moments when I remember to obey this imperative, when I remember to apprehend, I become a child again. I am six years old, and the world is filled with wonders and adventures.
           
Today I can summon up that ability to apprehend beauty as easily as I can walk from one end of the room to the next, but I am embarrassed by how long I took to learn this trick. Perhaps I am a slow learner. Perhaps most of you already know this trick. But if you don’t know the trick, or if you need a refresher course, or if you are simply so swamped by life that you have forgotten to look for beauty, then let me step to the white board and become a teacher for a few moments.
           
Here’s how it works.
           
First, you must pause. You must stop and focus your attention. You must stop, look, and if applicable, listen.

Let’s say you have gone into a 7-Eleven to buy a bottled water. You stand in line waiting to pay for your water. Now, look at the clerk. No, don’t look at her—study her. Become a detective, a Sherlock Holmes searching for details and clues. In this case, the clerk is an older woman, heavy-set, pale-skinned, with graying hair tucked up in a bun. She was clearly in a hurry applying her makeup that morning. On her blouse is a yellow stain, probably mustard from eating one of the store’s gruesome hot dogs. There’s no wedding band on her finger. She is unsmiling. She looks as if she hasn’t smiled all day. To the customer ahead of you she monotonically says “Have a nice day.” And then you step to the register and you look her straight in the eye and you smile at her and that’s when you see it, just for a second: a human soul. For one second only you look into those eyes—we’ll make them dark as plums—and you imagine her when she was eighteen and trouble was as far away as the moon.
           
You apprehend the beauty of a human soul.
           
Try it with those you love. In the middle of cooking supper for your family of six, your eight-year-old son runs into the kitchen covered with mud and leaves from building his fort in the back yard. You naturally want to prevent him tracking debris and dirt through the house, but as you caution him to brush off outside, take one second—just one second—and look him in the eyes and smile. Do the same with your lover or your husband or your best friend. Apprehend them. LOOK at them. Look into their eyes and apprehend them as walking, breathing miracles in your life, souls joined mystically to you through a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand moments.
           
The same technique works for nature. Stop every once in a while. Stop and let the voices in your head die away—the boss telling you how you blew an order, your baby’s irritable crying, that list of things you have to do today, all those scores of interior voices that overrun our besieged brains like hordes of screeching Huns. Stop and for one minute listen to the wind.  Listen to that mockingbird singing his heart out. Stop to feel the sun on your arms and legs when you are gardening. Stop and enjoy the fragrance of a newly-mown lawn in the twilight.

We forget to look. We forget to hear and to feel. We forget to apprehend. We get so caught up in daily life that we forget we are living on this marvelous planet of seas and mountains, plains and cities, all the while whirling around the sun and spinning around the universe in an incredible dance called existence.
           
In Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town”, Emily at the end of the play asks a question of the Stage Manager: “Does anyone realize life while they live it…every, every minute?”
           
“No,” the Stage Manager replies. “Saints and poets maybe…they do some.”
           
To realize life is to apprehend its majesty and mystery. In short, it is to apprehend its beauty. And while most of us are neither saints nor poets, we too can snatch beauty from our busy lives. To do so is vital. It is of the utmost importance.

​Because that beauty is what makes our lives worth living.