The Brothers K

David James Duncan

Only the unwritten can truly live life.
So who I was, what I was, had to be unwritten.

In what you might call the missionary position, Joon prayed for days and days. He damaged his knees. He wept with longing. Lord! Show me the way! he cried until his voice left him. And do you know what finally happened? Nothing! Joon grew exhausted, fell asleep, and the Lord showed him nothing!

But this was only life in the streets. It was when he'd return "home" to his featureless motel room that his new featurelessness grew truly aggressive, for it was here that he was forced to keep company with the disgustingly innocent looking, bald-faced, boyish stranger who, according to the mirror anyway, was none other than himself. Could he really be this twitchy little shit who couldn't sit still in a chair, couldn't read anything longer than a magazine article without half falling to sleep, couldn't fully fall to sleep without getting drunk, couldn't do anything without talking to himself, justifying himself, narrating his life to himself, trying to cast himself in a thousand increasingly empty, soap-operatic, politically or sexually heroic roles? Had revolution revolutionized him so little?

Huh, our hero replied, long after she'd blammed down the receiver.

Men from small dark worlds like Stove Land almost always offend women, because there is no gender or domesticity down there. Women and children are welcome in Stove Land, but for the same reason that men are welcome: to work on the stoves.

Industry had gone. It had lasted 1/267th as long as the Indian village.

Muskrat burgers are the greatest joy of my life.

O thing that consoles.
How clumsily I thank you.

Allow me to preface this grim revelation by describing a syndrome unknown to most women, but nightmarishly familiar to a great many men: struggle though we do to "grow up," millions of us American males spend our entire adult lives involuntarily blundering into slightly revamped but clearly recognizable replays of the same tedious inabilities and fears, the same pedestrian self-conceptions and the same uncorrectable limitations we first experienced during our boyhood baseball careers. To fully understand the nightmarishness of these karmic recrudescences it's important to bear in mind that, unless we happen to be major leaguers at the moment, our baseball careers invariably went up in some form of flames. It's also crucial to note that there is no simple escape: those who had no boyhood baseball career often spend their manhood reliving, repressing or rationalizing this lack.

This whole outing, Everett said, when he found his voice, my whole purpose in life today, Dom, is to go home alone, and to make this lasagna myself.

Telephones are, without question, useful devices. But are also, it seems to me, the verbal equivalent of houses without toilets. Telephones allow minds to communicate with minds (or tongues with ears, at least) in clarity or turmoil, in semisomnolence or drunkenness, in lust, joy, hysteria, stupefaction or any other state that fails to render a human physically incapable of holding up a quarter pound chunk of perforated plastic--which is most every state there is. That telephones can connect us in seconds to any creature on earth foolhardy enough to lift its own chunk of plastic is wonderful. But it's also terrible, given what a lot of people think and feel about each other. That's why, until they're equipped with some sort of flush or waste-disposal system for the billions of words that ought not to be spoken, I'll not trust the things.

Even God is afraid of the naked

But this place makes me vulnerable to you, and crazy for you, in ways I can't describe or control. I mean, I'm trying to resist you this very moment, I'm trying to sound guarded and dispassionate here! but your letter tore me so far open so fast that I can hardly keep from scrawling I love you I love you I love you till I run out of ink. And it's terrifying, being this open in a place like this. That's what I'm saying. Because if I anchor my heart on you again, and fall madly in love with Myshkin too, and if you then vanish, I just couldn't bear it. Not here. If it didn't just kill me, I know it would turn me into a scalded, twisted something we wouldn't want to know. So consult your heart, Tasha. That's what I'm asking. Read all the tea leaves before you write back to me. Remember my temper, my big mouth, all our differences, "touchy, touchy" Remember I'll be an ex-con once I'm out of here, making ex-con money for life. Remember the beautiful parts too, if your hearts seems to want to. But don't "feel sorry for me" or try to make up for last winter. Don't "be nice" I beg you. Say "I can" if you can wait for me--and know that I'm overjoyed to be Myshkin's father. But say "I can't" if you can't. If it's ever going to come, let the end come now. And then, for both our sakes and Myshkin's, never write to me again.

Ma. Prem se bhiksha dijiye.

Christianity rarely gets such deep probing. When I was reading The Brothers K, I couldn't help but think that Duncan was the most Christian thinker I had read in quite some time. But at the same time he doesn't sound like many of the Christian thinkers you hear about today. I don't know what to do with him.
The Brothers K will tear your heart to shreds. Bad, I mean really horrible things, happen to people, especially people worth loving. Did you bat your eye? Please say you did. Alyosha reincarnate is Irwin and a Vietnam veteran who beat the living shit out of a man with a toothpaste tube. For this the world comes crashing down upon his head, well, perhaps it's more accurate to say two rifle butts do.
Duncan centers his story around a prayer. A dangerous and terrible prayer. A son prays that he may take a heavy burden from his father's shoulders. Duncan doesn't claim to have the prayer answered, but judge for yourself by the story: God answers even those most terrible prayers. Jesus took our burdens, hugged them tight and fell from the cross with them so they could be buried and we could walk upright. But what happens when a simple man asks for this? What happens when God grants it?
After dipping into Duncan's mind, I am wondering if the meaning of life cannot actually be found by moving to some small island in the San Juans and waiting for a mystical appearance of a bear to wash you away in torrents of rain. Or maybe I just have to fall down in a field of fresh buttercups and wait for them to crane away towards some new sun (actually the old sun is perfectly fine, I wanted to sound more poetic than I am).
Can life really be like a book?
Mother. What you offer with love, I accept.