Houdini and the Vastness

All I want to think about right now is Krakatoa, a volcano that erupted in the Sunda Strait in 1883.

There are so many things I wish I could stop thinking about. I wake up in the morning and I check the news, feeling heavy with dread. I put on my usual current affairs podcasts and start to spin with anxiety. I try to distract myself with lighter content, and everything washes over me, irrelevant and meaningless.

“Just to be clear,” says my husband as I stand sobbing in the kitchen, “Is this about the war?”

He takes another crusty mug from the pile of dishes on the counter and attacks it with a soapy scouring pad. I decide to keep him company. I wedge myself into the passage between the stovetop and the cluttered family bulletin board.

“It’s the whole thing.” I wave my hands around the space between us. “The dominion of evil on earth,” I specify, aiming for melodrama and humor. I want to convince both of us that my despair is geopolitical, not biochemical. I’m not always sure there’s a firm boundary between the two.

I’m forever alert to signs of incipient metaphysical kookiness. I live in Jerusalem, which is notorious for intensifying those tendencies during even the best of times.

These are not the best of times.

My phone lights up with a call from my father, who lives with his wife on a remote island off the coast of Washington State. He asks how I am.

“Great,” I say, because it’s true. All is well in my little corner. My younger children have gone back to school after an endless August, leaving me with a quiet house. I have time and energy for writing, for activism, for learning Torah, for the ever-present pile of dishes. I’m guiding my oldest daughters through the first steps of their adult lives. The pomegranate tree in my backyard is heavy with ripening fruit, signaling the imminent arrival of Rosh Hashanah, of a sweet and abundant New Year.

“You don’t sound great,” my father says.

“Yeah, well, you know,” I say, “The world.”

He sighs with understanding, and we launch into a cathartic shared lament of every stupid infuriating thing happening everywhere. Our conversation is interrupted abruptly when Houdini—not the magician, but my father’s cat of the same name—drags a live bat into the house.

A colony of bats has lately taken shelter in the eaves of my father’s roof, much to the cat’s delight. My father and stepmother are less pleased with this turn of events.

I stay on the phone and listen to my dad trying to convince Houdini to give up her prize. Finally successful, he returns to our conversation. The bat is safely outside where it belongs, and the horrors around us seem a bit more abstract and remote.

I realize I haven’t left the house all day. I call a friend as I head out on a walk around the neighborhood.

I tell her all about Krakatoa: Tectonic collisions, portentous and unseen. A furious peak erupting spectacularly and disappearing below the ocean’s surface. Death and devastation wrought by ensuing tsunamis.

I stop short of telling her about the new land formations that emerged in the volcano’s wake, rapidly teeming with plants and animals whose origins are still debated. I spare her the litany of ways the world was changed by a single cataclysmic blast. I don’t tell her the eruption was the culmination of millennia of accumulating pressures.

Instead, I summarize. I tell her how Simon Winchester’s book about Krakatoa is the only thing bringing me peace at this terrible moment.

“I understand,” my friend says. “You’re talking about vastness.”

Once she names it, I see it all at once. Vastness. I remember that everything happening in the world is part of something enormous, intricate, interconnected. Sometimes the connections are apparent, and sometimes they remain obscure. But the vastness is always there, and I am part of it.

All of which leaves me standing in the present, with what is right in front of me. Not the confounding swirl of global peril and disaster, but my own small life and my own two hands. The bat in my father’s living room, the cool evening walk with a friend’s comforting words in my ear. Sitting in workshops at a political conference, slicing apples for my daughter’s lunch, typing words, whispering Psalms. Harvesting the pomegranates, tithing them with an ancient formula. Praying for a better year and a rebuilt world.