Thoughts on Life

Thoughts on Life

by Marco M. Pardi

“No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.” Thomas Carlyle

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“How do you do what you do? Do you have limits?”

With about twelve feet separating their library chairs, Tonio looked over at Maartje and said, “You don’t fully know what I do.”

“It’s pretty obvious, even if it doesn’t always make the papers. I seriously wonder if you have any ethics and, if so, what they are.” Maartje had been reading accounts of little children with hand grenades or bombs strapped to them and told to run up to groups of American soldiers and detonate themselves in Viet Nam. She wondered if Tonio would shoot a child or would he try to find cover. She asked him about this.

“I don’t get into those situations, though I have been places where children by the side of the road suddenly raised an arm and you had to look quickly to see if it was a wave, or the toss of a rock, or the toss of a grenade. It was always a wave,” he said.

“But if it were a grenade, would you shoot or find cover,” she asked.

Tonio thought about that. Of course, with the pin pulled the grenade is active and about to explode. Shooting the person standing close by and throwing it wouldn’t make much difference and would lose time in finding cover. Still, he had always had an unofficial rule: If a child appeared to be thirteen years old or older he regarded them as an adult and acted accordingly. At any age below that he would assume the child was only following directions and he would shoot to wound if he could. “I act upon grown adults and not just any adults. You are well aware there are some truly evil people in this world.”

Tonio had privately been down this path many times before. His first rule in taking an assignment was: Never let it become personal. He knew of predecessors who succumbed to that temptation and then could not escape the endless pursuit of self justification or satisfaction. He did, however, allow himself to consider different levels of culpability. To him, perimeter sentries were just hired Ivans, or Tariqs, or Pedros maybe ex-military maybe not, trying to feed themselves and their families. Almost certainly they had little to no idea of the extent or the gravity of the crimes the person or persons they were guarding were guilty of. If he could avoid these sentries, fine. If he could not, they had to be terminated. Of course, that was not without risk; many were on a clocked check-in schedule. Tonio would observe them to hear if they communicated somehow and he would quickly check over a body for communications devices.

Inner guards and body guards were another matter. They certainly knew the business and likely had accounted for a few casualties themselves. The risk here was that these personnel were invariably recruited from the ultra elite of various military units. Putting them down was not at all a moral issue.

And, of course, there was the target. Tonio preferred to know as little as possible about the justification for the target’s removal. Again, he did not want to develop a personal agenda.

It has been said the Mafia had a ground rule: Never terminate someone in front of their family. Tonio saw several variables in that scenario, but if it was his only recourse then that would have to happen. He would be gone before shock turned to tears.

In a few short weeks much of the Western world will be visited again by an obese old man in a red suit, an old man who likes to visit Malls and entice small children into sitting on his lap while he lulls them with bourbon breath into telling him if they’ve been bad or good. The Malls will be playing insipid Christmas songs, inspiring visions of sugar plum SEMTEX dancing in our heads.

Many cultures, especially through their religions, have developed a concept of Final Judgment, a Hearing in which a supposedly superior being weighs the Rights and Wrongs of one’s life. Apparently this being has been keeping track, and knows if you’ve been bad or good – you know the rest. I don’t know of any reference to being strapped to an early form of polygraph but the Classical Egyptians seemed to have anticipated that with the scarab amulet, a fetish object reputed to calm the heart and conscience of the deceased as he faced his interlocutor. The Babylonians and later the Persians took it further with the invention of Shaitan – later embroidered by the Hebrews during 500 years of the Babylonian Captivity as Satan. Shaitan, that voice in your mind which said “You know that’s not quite true” as you professed your defense, was considered by many to be an advocate, keeping you on the straight and narrow. But as the need grew to deflect blame onto others Shaitan grew as an externalized entity dedicated to winning your soul away from what should have been your just reward. Enter Satan, with greatly expanded career portfolio; no longer just an amicus curiae in the Final Act, he (in a prescient nod to the Me Too movement he could appear as a female) was ever present to tempt you throughout your life, thereby acquiring characteristics such as eternal rivaling the aforementioned superior being.

Okay, but seriously examining the “sin” concept including that most egregious example, “Original Sin”, what exactly is our inner Shaitan up to? Is he (Attn: I’m going to use male sex and gender here) simply a social construct embedded in us, as the Catholic Church says, by age 7, the “Age of Reason”? “Give us a child until the age of 7 and we’ll have him for the rest of his life” Jesuit saying. Is everything we do throughout life judged by standards we accepted and internalized in our first seven years? The Egyptians tell us our heart is placed on a scale held by (Anubis according to some, Osiris according to others) to be weighed against the feather of Ma’at. If our heart tips the scales, loaded with the sins of our life, we are doomed. And we agreed to this by age 7?

Funerary texts, in whatever religion, are interesting. The Book of Coming Forth by Day (commonly called The Egyptian Book of the Dead) even gives us a list of the questions the deceased will face during interrogation. Supposedly, this list helps us guide our lives so we can provide the right answers when the time comes. But what about our daily lives as we live them? A psychological term for certain memories is, Intrusive memories or thoughts. How often throughout the day does something trigger the entry of such a thought? And what do we do with it when it flashes before us? As common wisdom would have it, do we rationalize it or do we bury it, dreading its reappearance which we know is sure to come? Rationalizing is fairly routine while we are awake, but how about during that third of our lives we call sleep. We settle in for what we hope will be a restful night, the dream curtains open, and Shaitan sets the channel to Remember This? Ever awaken in a cold sweat hoping no one else was watching? Just a dream, we tell ourselves, or our bed partner now cowering as we rub the fist we punched into the headboard. Or we awaken in the morning and quickly find something to occupy our minds. The Morning News…. someone else’s problems.

As I see it the most important and meaningful part of my life has been as a parent. And I think many parents would agree that there have been could have and should have memorymoments, especially when, now as a grandfather I see the absolutely marvelous way my child has raised the grandchildren. But I think it’s important to remember the distinction – and it can be a big one, between could have and should have.

Discussing this with my daughter, one of the most helpful things she said to me was, You did the best you could with what you knew at the time. Yes, there certainly are times when that feels like putting a BandAid on a bullet hole. But it gives me the opportunity to honestly examine the context of could and to wonder just how much of my life, all our lives, was described by Shakespeare when, in As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII, Line 139 he has Jacques express:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Live well, Dear Readers.