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Even on family vacation, I tend towards philosophical inquiries and metaphysical speculations. On our second day on the island of Providencialis, I sat alone under the evening stars reading Borges' essays on the history of eternity and circular time, imbued with an ardent sense of peace that stale beer and cheap vodka used to impishly provide. (Though I often forget that a good game of ping-pong or volleyball is no less or more significant than my mental meanderings, and certainly as wonderfully useless.)
On the third day of vacation, under a particularly clear dusk sky, I finished "Death and the Compass," a tale packed with the characteristic Borgesian features of dreams, labyrinths, and double identities, when my six-and-a-half year-old son, Christopher, suddenly appeared before me, looking like me, absorbed in his own reveries, his finger pointing to the sky. With unusually sophisticated language, he expounded a marvelous notion about the source and nature of starlight-- that we can somehow capture it in our bodies, and that its traveling within us is somehow responsible for our own transmission and aging through time-- as we come and go-- despite light itself seeming ubiquitous and eternal. Well, perhaps he didn't state it quite that way; but, obviously proud and confident, he asked for a congratulatory kiss when I retorted with my own amateur theories extrapolated from my memory of college physics and high school astronomy. That's when he frowned and walked away, as I resumed my reading, forgetting to give him the requested kiss.
Later that night, after reading Borges' commentary on Canto XXXl of Dante's Paradiso, I dreamt I was Dante, the pilgrim, approaching the great Primum Mobile, when, there, in the center of the petals of the rose, I saw, not the face of Beatrice, but that of my son's! Like hers, it just smiled and looked away, the significance of the gesture unclear. I tried to reach him, and was given the ridiculous purgatorial task of incrementally halving my steps on a straight line along the ground, which naturally brought me closer and closer to him, though effectively farther and farther, since, mathematically, I was always left with another untraversed space, however infinitesimal each became; I was starting an impossible journey through an unbridgeable chasm when I looked up to see his face taking on the resemblances of others-- mostly of men, and some of whom I've yet to know-- all muddled in the knotted disc of the sun.
That was the point from which I woke, finding my son still at my side, sound asleep under the early dawn. And I began to think how he seemed just like me-- and maybe my dad too-- though not yet as taciturn and reticent. I thought how he'd one day build bridges with honest speech and gregarious love, untainted from stale cigars and boozed-up breath, the universal man on the anonymous trip, fortified with potentially so much more. I thought about Time and of the coming day, and of the futility of changing theories and fickle ideas whirling around like ghosts over the bedrocks of human substance and joined souls. Looking down, I could see that face, so timeless and ancient--that smile he would make, when I would traverse that space between his face and mine, offering him the simple kiss I had rudely withheld the night before.
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