June 2025
One year along the path
Well, beloveds, now you see why I can’t write anything less than the truth anymore. Here’s a mile marker in what I hope is a long journey.
A year ago this month, Randy, my most-beautiful-beloved-flawed human, gave me two sheets of typed paper containing an unnumbered list: one long, single-spaced column that filled both sides of the first sheet and the front of the second sheet. I think he said something like, “I made a list to help you understand me.”
I felt honored. Maybe a little awed. No one had given me a list before. I thanked him — at least I hope I thanked him. I took the list home and read it.
I had imagined it would be a list of book titles. You know, individual books.
And yes, some entries were novels or songs or scriptures from the world’s religions. Other line items, however, were shorthand for entire bodies of work — authors or musical genres or film styles or academic disciplines. Some entries would need to be read in German.
I read the list again.
The next time we met, I brought the list with me. When I saw him, I held it out.
“This is the equivalent of several advanced degrees,” I said. “And I’ll have to learn German.”
I think he agreed; at any rate, he didn’t disagree. He might have modestly said that his German wasn’t so good anymore.
I repeated: “This is a lifetime of study. Are you sure you’re worth it?”
He took a few moments to ponder before answering.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think I am.”
And just like that, I gave him my life.
We spent a happy evening at McKay’s looking for one of the books on the list, though as I remember, we came up empty-handed and he later ordered it for me online. It might have been the first night he hugged me, though that might have come later. I am sure about the book, though. It was Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung.
Some books, some authors, come to you at just the right time. I was ripe for Plotinus in 2023 when I read The Enneads during the spring of my 50th year. Earlier, I wouldn’t have understood. Later would have been too late.
Others come late but when you get them at last you see what you’ve been missing all the while. Memories, Dreams, Reflections was that. I needed it when I was in my 20s. Other books in the list were the same — William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience was another foundation-stone I’d missed. Same for the Bhagavad-Gita (which I’d read years back in a crappy prose translation and forgotten about).
While I supplied young-Jenn of 30 years ago with her missing library, I was learning young-Randy. Just as the books I read become part of me, so this stranger, this new mind’s companion, had made his books part of his inwardness. Among many other themes, they represented a search for a perennial philosophy via mysticism and direct spiritual experience. There was art, too, and music — beautiful music for dancing.
Once the list led to a fight. Randy misspoke, or more likely I misunderstood, but anyhow he seemed to say he had compiled his list to find out whether I was worthy of him.
In a flash I realized — or mistakenly thought, who knows — that I should have already read everything on it when I met him. I was behind, a lifetime behind, half a century wasted. I had a collapse that went on for days.
“I never should have written this!” Randy said in distress. He tried to take the two sheets of folded, now penciled-over paper.
“No!” I cried, grabbing the pages back. “It’s my most precious possession.”
So he left it with me, and we went forward again.
About six months later, Randy asked me for a list of books that had influenced me, and I wrote him one. He marveled at it and inquired whether he could tell his friends about it.
“I probably won’t read anything on this that I haven’t already read,” he added, “but it means a lot that you made it for me.” He was sitting cross-legged in his big chair in the lamplight. He looked at it again. “You listed fairies and a mountain, too. This is wonderful.”
Together, we kept working on Randy’s list — not that he was doing a lot of rereading, either. Instead, the list was growing.
The human mind may not be infinite, but it’s big enough. We can never come to the end of it. Therefore, I suppose, a longer-than-life list is a true pathway into the mind. A list you could finish would be too short to get you anywhere. This list, this lifetime of study winding like a ferny path through a forest of mingled light and shadow, teaches me about Randy.
We keep adding to it, Randy’s list.
“Let me have Huxley when you finish him?”
“I’d like to look at your Plotinus — I don’t think I’ll read everything, but I’ll study your marginalia.”
Now I’m a year into the forest. When I look over my shoulder, I can no longer see the bright, empty country I left behind. I’m like the dwarves and Bilbo, well into Mirkwood, but barely a fraction of the way across. And even if I traverse it all the way, every day of my life, it’ll just be one firefly-lit path through a very great darkness — the darkness that’s anyone’s mind.
“How far does the forest go?” Ursula Le Guin wrote, answering: “As far as the mind goes.”
And yet something else is happening. All woods come to an end. I knew it before I stepped foot on the path. I didn’t want to believe, and I don’t want to believe, but either Randy will outlive me, or I will outlive him.
It’s a staggering thought. This mind that is endless nevertheless will end.
The list itself bears witness. So many of the texts grapple with the meaning of life in the context of death. I come to the realization that Randy has been preparing himself for death since boyhood. And to do that — to live cheek to cheek with eternity — he’s had to study hard on life, too. What does life mean in the shadow of death? What’s in the liminal space? How might one cross it? Think about Krishna and Arjuna hobnobbing about eschatology on the battlefield!
There’s the list, and then there’s the matter of the list — the material, the substance, the content. Randy couldn’t have intended it. He already read those books years ago. But reading this paragraph now he’ll have understood what I mean before he finishes this sentence. He’ll understand because it arises out of his nature and preoccupations. The end was always already there, contained in the beginning: The list helps me understand Randy. The matter of the list helps me understand how one day to live without him.
I really was half a lifetime behind, you see, but not in the way I thought, and anyhow, it’s all right because Randy was always there waiting for me.
I can’t bring this essay to a good end, because it’s only been twelve months and anyhow, the list keeps evolving. We’re already off on a side path. I suppose I’m writing this as a traveler might leave a stone to mark the way for people who come after: Randy’s list, one year.
I climb a small, steep hill and scramble up a windblown pine leaning out from the brow of that hill and find myself, for once, with a little perspective. Behind is a shadowy valley. Ahead, I can see afternoon sun on the leaves of the highest oaks. But where is Randy? He’s off ahead, as usual, but he doesn’t travel fast. He’ll be following the creek and getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. There, I think, that winding furrow, under the willows. I clamber down again, find the path, and plunge into the forest.