A Lost Horizon: Perils and Possibilities of the Obvious

Abstract

A Lost Horizon:Perils and Possibilities of the Obvious John J. McDermott I. Gleanings: Personal and Philosophical What I say here has been said before on many days and nights by reflective persons, for centuries long and planetary wide. Why, then, say it again, Sam? Is it because Heraclitus was onto something when he told us the Logos speaks but few hear? Or is the situation that of the Hassidic tale as recounted by Martin Buber? A man took it upon himself to convey the message of the high and holy one. He found no response and so went directly, petulantly, to the author of the message. "Why are you here?" asked the high and holy one. "I have offered your message and no one hears me." "But," comes the response, "there is no hearing here for you. I have sunk my hearing in the deafness of mortals." More directly we can recall the biblical refrain, they have eyes but do not see and ears but do not hear. Of course, I include myself among the spiritually deaf and hope that however my remarks are heard or not heard, at least, I may hear them myself.1 I add that rarely is it that a profound message of any stripe, or from any source, is heard when first encountered. Certainly, that is so of my experience. The Cigar Man story, crucial to my fourth and fifth decade of life, took place when I was sixteen years of age, performing as a helper in a hopeless triage ward at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. I did not catch its message until some twenty years later when teaching an adult education course late at night on a dreary evening in a dreary building in the pressure cooker known as the City University of New York, Queens College. I was waxing eloquent about Camus and Heidegger with regard to the murky question of authenticity, when in a flash as in a flashback, I realized that the Cigar Man, a quadruple amputee with a tumescent gut, had taught me the meaning of authenticity and I missed it. For twenty years I missed the message, holding [End Page 1] it in my memory as but another vignette. When this vignette erupted and powered its way through my person, it became a story. The difference between a vignette and a story is as that between a sketch, a tease, a leitmotif, a surfing, on the one hand, and a spiritual teaching grenade on the other hand. Here now, I tell you a story even more illustrative of the time span often at work between event and message, between encounter and upshot. For this story, never having been even penumbric to my consciousness, the period of fallowness was some fifty years. The setting for this story occurs in 1989 and even retrospectively is too grim to recount in detail. Suffice to say that I went to the very bottom in every area, aspect, and sustenance of my person, ravaged by the perilous grip of clinical, acute alcoholism. Suicidal and only a few days from death by virtue of multiple organ failure, I was arrested by the county sheriff, courtesy of my adult children, and locked up. Entering under duress, a program of recovery, I was urged to consider the maxim of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, namely to survey the wreckage of my past. My addiction counselor told me that my personal, domestic, and professional abode had burned to the ground, leaving only charred wood and scarred bricks. He told me that I had to rebuild from scratch, by myself, for only a few would help, as I had the scarlet letter, due to a socially unacceptable illness—addiction. As I set out in my journey of recovering from the insane grip of clinical alcoholism, I came upon a foe heretofore not characteristic of my person. Surely, I was alert to the dangers of resentment, widely held to be the primary cause of relapse, which occurrence would have spelled my doom, my death. I went to work diluting, nay denuding my resentments, which became a difficult but doable undertaking. At first unknown to me, but soon...