The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 69: November 25

Today we are in Rome because our children, ostensibly in school in Berlin, have nothing but vacations. The weather has turned dour in Germany, and we cannot stay for so many days inside our little house without people going mad. One can play only so many card games and eat so many wet crackers before the collective familial humor flags. This was our thinking when we bought cheap plane tickets and headed to Rome. Better to be in sunny Rome than to be in wet, cold Berlin. Unfortunately Rome was equally wet and cold. Our sightseeing consisted of running from shelter to shelter.

Now it is night. Our shoes are balanced upside down atop the electric heater. Our socks are dry and hard. The kids are asleep and my husband and I are in bed watching YouTube videos of gurus. We watched Werner Erhard, founder of est, interviewed on The Tonight Show by John Denver. We marveled at how we were able to do this. Here we are in Rome in 2013, and we’re watching a video of Werner Erhard and John Denver from 1973! Meanwhile, the TV in our room doesn’t get more than two channels. All the news is from today. This seemed so limited, suddenly, such a narrow notion of news.

After John Denver we watched a video of a woman from the Landmark Forum (what I understand to be the corporate offspring of Erhard’s est) pitch her wares on a national morning talk show.

She said, “It all comes down to these three questions.”

Then we watched a video of my best friend’s guru, the one who was enlightened by the sight of a mouse.

The guru said, “It all comes down to these four questions.”

My friend’s guru was soft-spoken and spacey; maybe she was stoned. She stared at her interviewer as though dopily in love or trying to hypnotize him. She wore what might have been robes. The interviewer asked her many more than four questions; she feigned deep thoughtfulness at each and then replied, as though the answer had never before occurred to her, yes.

I was shocked. As I’ve said, this guru had really improved my friend’s life. I’d been hoping, when I got around to it and had the time, that I’d let her improve my life, too. But this guru, she had no game. She was like a zombie on pain pills. When I someday follow a person, I want to be impressed by their effortless bullshit passing and dribbling and slam-dunking; I want them to be a Harlem Globetrotter of rhetoric and presentation and spin. I want them, like that world-famous pickpocket (whose YouTube videos we watched in order to learn how to avoid being robbed at the Colosseum), to so deeply understand me, and how I perceive the world, that I can be uniquely distracted, fooled, and fleeced. I would happily pay with my wallet (and my watch and my wedding ring) to be understood as deeply as this pickpocket understands his marks.

I’d hoped this guru would understand me like that pickpocket. But to do this she would have to touch me, fondle me, reach into my front pocket, press her leg against my thigh. Maybe in person she does this. I was not, to be fair, experiencing her in person. But in person I could not imagine she would be much different than the human I experienced on my computer screen. We were at an impasse, this guru and I. Maybe I was at an impasse with all gurus. Maybe I was looking to the wrong people for answers and clarity. I turned instead to a guidebook for guidance. A real guidebook. Someone had left it in the common bookshelf of our hotel’s dining room. It was called Getting Along in Italian. According to Getting Along in Italian, one can ably survive a vacation and probably a whole life knowing how to ask and answer a few pages’ worth of questions. I narrowed the options down to these essentials:

Are you alone?

Where is my key?

This is a violation.

I have pain in my chest.

There is a mistake in the bill.

Where are the lifeboats?

Did anyone call me?

Did anyone come for me?

I want a felt hat.

I want a novel.

I want a priest.