catapult magazine

Telling time

by Jeff DeVries

“Time is but the stream I go fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.” (Henry David Thoreau)

3:46 PM. The fading sunlight of early December fell in hard gray slants between the buildings on Western Avenue. A young man hurried down the sidewalk, a black attach case with a missing handle tucked up under his right arm that squeezed it tightly against his body while his left hand held his cell phone to his ear. He was arguing with his wife about who was responsible for picking up her mother from the airport that afternoon.

At 95th Street, as he waited for the light to change, a woman in a hot pink skirt, a long grey wool coat and a grubby Chicago Bulls ski cap stood near him, mumbling random prophecies at the cars that sped past. Twice she approached the young man beside her, her finger wagging in admonition, her face enraged. He turned his back to her and talked on. The light turned. As he stepped off the curb, the briefcase slipped from beneath his arm, landing in the gutter.  “Shit,” he muttered into the phone as the woman with the shopping cart pushed past him. “I’ve got to go.” He stooped to pick up the satchel from the oil-slicked puddle where it lay on its side like a broken promise. Halfway across the street, the woman with the shopping cart made a hard left, stepping into oncoming traffic. Brakes squealed. A rusted Ford Ranger pickup truck veered left, clipped the woman’s cart but miraculously missed her. The driver never even saw the man bent over at the curb, the young man whose brain matter spattered the windshield of a Chrysler Lebaron that sat at the intersection of 95th and Western, waiting for the light to change.

 

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“In dramatic structure climax designates the turning point in the action, the crisis at which the rising action reverses and becomes the falling action.” (William Harmon & C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 5th Ed.

In the school where I teach English, an integral part of the freshman curriculum is getting students to recognize elements of plot and structure, including climax. For the sake of simplicity, students shorten any longer definition of climax to the notion of a turning point: the climax of a story occurs when the protagonist either performs or is victim to some decisive act or word that ultimately determines how the story will end.

What’s the climax in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire?” Is it when the man journeying boldly and, might I add, stupidly to his Klondike gold claim falls through the ice and wets his feet? Is it when a fresh mantle of snow breaks loose from high atop a spruce and blots out the fire whereat he intended to thaw his feet? Or is it when his frozen fingers drop the flaming matchbook with which he attempted a second fire? Or when he failed to tackle the dog and gut it, thereby hoping to warm his hands? My students struggle with this question, but the answer is easy. When the falling snow obliterates the protagonist’s fire, London writes: “The man was shocked. It was as if he had just heard his own sentence of death.” In literary terms, Jack London hung on this incident a big old neon sign flashing “CLIMAX! CLIMAX!” into the misty night.

The concept of the turning point is fundamental to human storytelling. Christians push it so far as to have their own special genre — the conversion story. The archetype of the story is the Damascus Road experience of St. Paul, a turning point so violent and jarring it left the man blind, befuddled, and finally baptized; Saul the Christian-killer died; Paul the saint was born. Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Many of my evangelical friends have their own Damascus Road stories, not always so dramatic, but they are sticklers for being able to point to the time and place of their regeneration. I knew one Baptist woman who celebrated her birthday and her rebirth day. Presbyterians and other Reformed folk, as well as Roman Catholics, often grow uncomfortable in the presence of this sort of talk. They grew up in the church; they’ve never known a different way of life. Still, they like to talk about turning points. The roads of their lives also bear signs that changed their directions; their signs just aren’t as gaudy as those utilized by Jack London or lived by St. Paul.

 

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3:46 PM. The fading sunlight of early December fell in hard gray slants between the buildings on Western Avenue. A young man hurried down the sidewalk, a black attach case in his right hand, its new handle still tacky in his clenched fist. His left hand held his cell phone to his ear. He was arguing with his wife about who was responsible for picking up her mother from the airport that afternoon.

At 95th Street, as he waited for the light to change, a woman in a hot pink skirt, a long grey wool coat and a grubby Chicago Bulls ski cap stood near him, mumbling random prophecies at the cars that sped past. Twice she approached the young man beside her, her finger wagging in admonition, her face enraged. He turned his back to her and talked on. The light turned. He stepped off the curb, the briefcase swinging at his side. He had nearly crossed over when behind him the woman with the shopping cart made a hard left, stepping into oncoming traffic. Brakes squealed. A rusted Ford Ranger pickup truck veered left, clipped the woman’s cart but miraculously missed her. The truck crashed over the curb where a moment ago the man had stood. The young man shuddered at the glimpse of nearly missed death, then shrugged his shoulders at the driver behind the windshield of a Chrysler Lebaron that sat at the intersection of 95th and Western, waiting for the light to change.

 

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A turning point is a moment in time. And with time, the Chinese proverb says, the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown. But what is the turning point, or even turning points, at which leaf becomes gown?

From tiny eggs hatch furry black worms less than one centimeter long. They begin eating immediately and they do so voraciously, stopping only during molting periods, during which they shed their outgrown skin. They molt at two, three, and four weeks of age. After the final molt, when they grow to about three inches in length and a half inch in diameter, the silk worms devour enormous amounts of Mulberry leaves. After this, each worm spins its cocoon with a single continuous thread. Silkworm farmers make commercial silk by boiling the cocoons and unwinding the single silk strand onto reels. Unfortunately for the caterpillars, this process means death rather than the beauteous freedom of butterfly-dom. Bet your life doesn’t sound so bad now.

Which event in the life span of a silk worm is the turning point? What is the climax of the poor silkworm’s tragic story? What is the key moment that transforms mulberry leaf to gown? The question is absurd. Take away any moment from the silkworm’s story, and you will harvest no silk. From emergence from its egg right through all four moltings, each step is necessary, a link in the chain of causality. Break any link, and the chain is broken: The mulberry leaf never becomes the gown.

 

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3:46 PM. The fading sunlight of early December fell in hard gray slants between the buildings on Western Avenue. A young man hurried down the sidewalk, a black attach case with a missing handle tucked up under his right arm that squeezed it tightly against his body while his left hand held his cell phone to his ear. He was arguing with his wife about who was responsible for picking up her mother from the airport that afternoon.

At 95th Street, as he waited for the light to change, a woman in a hot pink skirt, a long grey wool coat and a grubby Chicago Bulls ski cap stood near him, mumbling random prophecies at the cars that sped past. Twice she approached the young man beside her, her finger wagging in admonition, her face enraged.  “Shit,” he muttered into the phone as the woman with the shopping cart pushed past him.  “I’ve got to go.” He grabbed at her shopping cart to stop her, and as he did so, the briefcase slipped from beneath his arm, landing in the gutter. “Let me help you, ma’am.” He stooped to pick up the satchel from the oil-slicked puddle where it lay on its side like a broken promise. The woman eyed him warily then barked a laugh as she took the elbow he chivalrously offered her. They crossed in front of a Chrysler Lebaron that sat at the intersection of 95th and Western, waiting for the light to change.

 

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The world was supposed to come crashing to a halt at midnight, January 1, 2000. The power grid would fail, planes would veer off course and crash as their instrument panels malfunctioned, water filtration plants would fail, banks and businesses would lose their records, computerized prison doors would open wide, graves would spew forth their occupants, the four horsemen of the apocalypse would gallop across the continents, and Barry Manilow would once again top the charts. In the months preceding that fateful moment, millions stocked up on canned goods, bottled water, gasoline for generators, and weapons to fend off needy neighbors with less foresight. Here was a turning point of cataclysmic proportion, a moment in time that would shape the destiny of humankind forever.

What a bust! In the immortal words of the Barry Manilow song, December 31, 1999, was “just another New Year’s Eve, another night like all the rest.” The lights stayed on, my tap flowed clean, cool water, my neighbors behaved. I didn’t get to shoot a single one. The non-event passed, time marched on, and we looked elsewhere for a turning point.

And September 11, 2001, we found one. Or perhaps it found us. Either way, news anchors on television and political pundits and foreign correspondents wagged their heads and sagely advised us that now we were living in a new world; nothing would be the same. And certainly they were right. Our world is different. One need only pass through airport security to see that. Ask any American, Afghan, or Iraqi mother who lost a son to war in the intervening years if the world is different. Ask my local librarian who has posted a warning that by law the federal government is now keeping tabs on what books I check out from the public library. Damn right the world has changed.

But is September 11 really what changed the world? Or is it only the last link in a chain of events that started decades ago, perhaps centuries ago? Certainly September 11 was a turning point, but was it the turning point?

Every story, every life, is made up of innumerable moments in time, each of them decisive in its own way. Yet to the rare few we ascribe magic, labeling them as pivotal, crucial, life-changing. So London’s protagonist sees his fire snuffed by snow, hears “his own sentence of death,” and we label it the turning point. But how is it anymore of a turning point than when he fell through the ice and wet his feet? Or what about his laughing off the advice of the old-timer at Sulfur Creek who warned him never to travel alone when the weather reached negative fifty degrees or colder? The moment that man set out on his trek is as key to his demise as the moment his fire goes out. No wonder my poor students get confused. They’re too wise for their own good.

Mark Twain, toward the end of his life, wrote an essay in response to an invitation to share the turning point in his career. In his typical curmudgeonly fashion, he responded to the invitation by deriding the prompt:

[The turning point] is only the last link in a very long chain?; it is not any more important than the humblest of its ten thousand predecessors. Each of the ten thousand did its appointed share, on its appointed date, in forwarding the scheme, and they were all necessary; to have left out any one of them would have defeated the scheme and brought about some other result. I know we have a fashion of saying “such and such an event was the turning-point in my life,” but we shouldn’t say it. We should merely grant that its place as last link in the chain makes it the most conspicuous link; in real importance it has no advantage over any one of its predecessors.

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3:46 PM. The fading sunlight of early December fell in hard gray slants between the buildings on Western Avenue. A young man hurried down the sidewalk, a black attach case with a missing handle tucked up under his right arm that squeezed it tightly against his body while his left hand held his cell phone to his ear. He was sick of arguing with his wife about who was responsible for picking up her mother from the airport that afternoon.

At 95th Street, as he waited for the light to change, a woman in a hot pink skirt, a long grey wool coat and a grubby Chicago Bulls ski cap stood near him, mumbling random prophecies at the cars that sped past. Twice she approached the young man beside her, her finger wagging in admonition, her face enraged. He turned his back to her and talked on. The light turned. He stayed.  “I’m sorry,” he muttered into the phone as the woman with the shopping cart pushed past him. “I don’t want to fight. I’ll go.” He turned and started back toward where he’d parked his car. Halfway across the street, the woman with the shopping cart made a hard left, stepping into oncoming traffic. Brakes squealed. A rusted Ford Ranger pickup truck veered left, clipped the woman’s cart but miraculously missed her. The truck crashed over the curb where a moment ago the man had stood, coming to rest beside a Chrysler Lebaron that sat at the intersection of 95th and Western, waiting for the light to change.

 

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“Time has no division to mark its passage…. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.” (Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain)

To mark turning points in a story is to mark divisions in the passage of time, something that, as Thomas Mann points out, time itself does not do. Henry Thoreau makes a similar observation in Walden. During his seasons at the pond, he says

“I grew like corn in the night. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward for yesterday, forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing day.”

I’ve always liked that quote from Walden, so much in fact that I sometimes wonder if this Dutch, Irish, and Polish boy from the south side of Chicago doesn’t have a little Puri Indian in the mix as well. Time is a funny thing. We can plan for the future, or we can dwell on the past, but all we truly possess is the present. Life is an open stretch of highway we drive at night. We are traveling somewhere, but where we are is in the small swath of landscape carved out by our headlights, an ever-changing landscape that we no sooner own than it hurtles past us, glowing for a moment in our taillights before disappearing forever from our rearview mirror. Each of those landscapes has its own contours and undulations, its own flora and fauna, its own character. And each of them affects our future path, sometimes with a startled deer that leaps before us and makes us veer sharply one way or another, but also sometimes with a gentle sweep that nudges us in a new direction so softly we hardly notice. Either way, that momentary landscape helps shape us even as we help shape it; all contribute equally toward our destination. And each landscape is all we really own. For yesterday, today, and tomorrow, there is really only one word; that word is now.

 

There are turning points, but we should not mistake them for what Twain calls the conspicuous moment. Too many people live, waiting for the BIG MOMENT, the conspicuous moment, the moment so obviously fraught with meaning that it will change their whole lives. And while they wait, they miss the only turning point that matters, the one they are living right now. St. Paul of the Damascus Road recognizes as much. He urges the church in Corinth not to receive God’s grace in vain. For [the Lord] says, “In the time of my favor I heard you, and in the day of salvation I helped you.” I tell you, now is the time of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation." Now, as I write this sentence and now as you read it, now is the time of God’s favor. Now is the turning point that shapes the rest of your life. Now pulses with energy and promise and purpose. Embrace it. And whether it flares like a Fourth of July skyrocket bursting light on God’s kingdom to a wowed crowd or it breathes in the gentleness and solitude of papery birch leaves in the North woods, the moment is holy. Not because it is conspicuous; often it’s not. It is holy because it comes as a gift from the hand of the great I AM, the Eternal Presence who is eternally present with us and who offers each day as a turning point to shape us and bring us home.