My friend Lynda told me I performed a mitzvah last week. Her father’s home was empty after her stepmother had passed after a long life. I came to help with all the things.
The many many things in the one big thing—the house.
After a few days with this house of possessions relics and memories, I am haunted by Leo Tolstoy. The Death of Ivan Illych, his short story of a long life touches this subject in his human way. This phrase:
In the dining-room where the clock stood that Ivan Ilych had liked so much and had bought at an antique shop
The stepmother had that clock.
I have that clock.
Lynda has that clock.
Who is this Ivan in the story? Why should Tolstoy write about his deah?
Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.
Oh my. I and my normalno life of ordinary simplicity just like Ivan’s terrible clock and terrible life and death.
So many precious things big and little we tossed. So many precious things we carefully saved. Who was this woman I never met?
Coming home at night to sleep, I look at all my surrounding possessions with new eyes.
Who was Ivan Illyich?
At school he had done things which had formerly seemed to him very horrid and made him feel disgusted with himself when he did them; but when later on he saw that such actions were done by people of good position and that they did not regard them as wrong, he was able not exactly to regard them as right, but to forget about them entirely or not be at all troubled at remembering them.
Oh, Vanya. Yes. Have I settled and made compromises? Am I troubled by the memory that I once was troubled. Trading my ethereal dreams for shiny and dusty things I could dream of improving.
What is this house I am living in? What is this life I have rescued from the dustbin of history with the hope of making something beautiful?
or at least comfortable?
Or maybe I hope for something I am not ashamed of
At least I fell into a same unremarkable sameness as those next to me
Do you see me Tolstoy?
Or maybe I see myself
Would I choose myself at an antique shop? Would fastidious Ivan thought me worth keeping?
He would enter and see that something had scratched the polished table. He would look for the cause of this and find that it was the bronze ornamentation of an album, that had got bent. He would take up the expensive album which he had lovingly arranged, and feel vexed with his daughter and her friends for their untidiness — for the album was torn here and there and some of the photographs turned upside down. He would put it carefully in order and bend the ornamentation back into position. Then it would occur to him to place all those things in another corner of the room, near the plants. He would call the footman, but his daughter or wife would come to help him. They would not agree, and his wife would contradict him, and he would dispute and grow angry. But that was all right, for then he did not think about It. It was invisible.
Tolstoy knows from the start that these little objects are not the thing. After days which the house of the deceased I know—from story and evidence—she clung to the things.
Falling asleep in my carefully selected bed and linens, I am certain I am the same far more than I like—more than is healthy. If I arrange a shelf with a collection of preciosas, does that mean I can found that against the moments of malice I have to the people I should love most?
Am I hoping to fool others so much I that believe the good impressions I have crafted?
Will the flourishes of the golden frame lift the value of the portait it surrounds?
Tolstoy gave Ivan in his last days of life a revelation:
And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him was all dropping away at once from two sides, from ten sides, and from all sides. He was sorry for them, he must act so as not to hurt them: release them and free himself from these sufferings. “How good and how simple!” he thought. “And the pain?” he asked himself. “What has become of it? Where are you, pain?”
The exotic teacups and the ceramic elephants a mask to the suffering and the decayed spirit. It’s not new. I hope to release the piles of things I don’t need I reach for the simple.
