We were drunk somewhere in the Bahamas staring into our fishless wake from the tower of my dad\u2019s boat when he announced that he had something to share with me. A theory of sorts. An idea he\u2019d been contemplating for a long time. He took a moment to set the auto-pilot, then, with a gravitas that bordered on sobriety, he pronounced three words: \u201cKeep moving east.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIs that where the fish are?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d he replied. \u201cWell, maybe.\u201d But that wasn\u2019t important. His point, he explained, had to do with longitude and latitude.<\/p>\n
Lines of longitude (the vertical ones) intersect each other at the earth\u2019s Poles, the effect being that if you travel far enough north you\u2019ll end up headed south. And vice versa. But lines of latitude work differently altogether. They\u2019re basically an infinite series of concentric circles, the largest of which is the Equator. And since they\u2019re parallel, you can travel east or west along any one of them forever.<\/p>\n
That nuance hadn\u2019t occurred to me before. I admitted as much. \u201cBut what’s your point?\u201d<\/p>\n
And this is where my dad\u2019s otherwise simple cartographical observation turned philosophical. See, in his model the North and South Poles represent life’s extremes. All the classic dualisms: asceticism versus excess, godlessness versus zeal, appeasement versus belligerence. The kinds of extremes which, all religions agree, mankind ought to avoid. In other words, steer clear of the Poles. Hug the Equator, and just keep heading east or west.<\/p>\n
Well, east, actually. Because it turns out there are metaphysical problems with west. To travel west is, after all, to run against the rotation of the earth \u2013 against the flow of time itself. Not a good policy when you\u2019re trying to achieve endlessness.<\/p>\n
Trouble is, you can only travel east forever if you bear\u00a0perfectly<\/i>\u00a0east. A fraction of a degree north or the slightest tack south will, compounded over eternity, set your course so wildly aslant that you\u2019ll spin out of control like a lopsided dreidel and end up in flux between those two dreadful Poles.<\/p>\n
Still, no one\u2019s perfect; everyone veers off course from time to time. And that\u2019s okay. What\u2019s important is that we\u2019re always correcting our headings, always counterpoising our deviations. If we\u2019re going to adhere to an exclusively eastern course \u2013 if we\u2019re going to go on traveling forever \u2013 we must stamp out the waywardness in our lives.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou see,\u201d concluded my dad, \u201cit\u2019s like samsara, the Golden Mean, the straight-and-narrow-path, one-with-the-Earth, all that stuff distilled into a single, simple concept. You just go east.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shortly thereafter something disrupted our conversation. A lure snagged in a weed line, maybe. Or I had to scramble down the ladder for fresh beers. Whatever it was, it wasn\u2019t a fish.<\/p>\n
We all possess certain memories that are more vivid than the rest. Memories of a higher order. They stand out in stark relief against a life\u2019s worth of lesser recollections; they flare up in our minds spontaneously, when we taste toothpaste in the morning or smell coffee brewing at work. They splice their way into our dreams and spray-paint graffiti on our psyches.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re often images: a rope swing you played on as a child, your wife\u2019s face the night you met her, the hospital room where your mother spent her last hours. Existential encounters.<\/p>\n
Less often they\u2019re words. Conversations you had. Secrets whispered too loudly. Answers from the catechism you memorized when you were young and pious and gullible.<\/p>\n
Sublime as they were, I have to make a conscious effort to recall my surroundings that day in the Bahamas. I can remember sipping diesel fumes and inhaling goombay punch, pitching and rolling across a limitless sapphire that everyone kept calling water. We were trolling for monsters. And I can remember dusk, when a giant skyborn ember plunged into the sapphire and exploded into a sky-full of broken teeth that everyone kept calling stars. They smiled while we slept.<\/p>\n
These things I\u00a0can<\/i>\u00a0remember. But it\u2019s three words that I\u00a0do<\/i>\u00a0remember.<\/p>\n
Keep moving east.<\/i>\u00a0It\u2019s not wisdom, exactly. It\u2019s an answer from a beatnik catechism. A kind of bastard horse-sense born of a seafarer\u2019s boredom and a hippie\u2019s delirium. By itself it doesn\u2019t mean a lot.<\/p>\n
But it means a lot to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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