A Time for Everything-Part Two

The love of my life

Allow me, if you will, to give you something extraordinary to wrap your mind around at the end of the day …

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks:

 To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.

In yourself you stretch, you are well.
You look at things
Through his eyes.
A cardinal is red.
A sky is blue.

Suddenly you know he knows too.
He is not there but
You know you are tasting together
The winter, or a light spring weather.

His hand to take your hand is overmuch.
Too much to bear.

You cannot look in his eyes
Because your pulse must not say
What must not be said.

When he
Shuts a door-
Is not there_
Your arms are water.

And you are free
With a ghastly freedom.

You are the beautiful half
Of a golden hurt.

You remember and covet his mouth
To touch, to whisper on.

Oh when to declare
Is certain Death!

Oh when to apprize
Is to mesmerize,
To see fall down, the Column of Gold,
Into the commonest ash.

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How far would you go to find your one true love … your soul mate … that “beautiful half of a golden hurt?”  Would you travel half-way around the globe to a strange place on another continent? Would you abandon those who love you, risk everything you have or put your life in mortal danger? Would you follow your true love into the depths of Hell? 

A reminder from Part One: About these two books Matheson has stated, “Somewhere in Time is the story of a love which transcends time, What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death…. I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form.”

In Richard Matheson’s  book, What Dreams May Come, Chris, the main character dies suddenly in a car accident and unable to live with the grief of losing her beloved, the wife, Anne, commits suicide.

Love that transcends death …

Chris at first cannot accept that he is dead, and when he finally does, he becomes obsessed with the notion of getting back to his wife. After her death, he learns of her fate and decides to journey through Hell to be with her.

In the book, Albert tells Chris he does not have to risk the danger of descending into the bowels of hell to follow Anne. If he is willing to wait twenty-four years, he might have the opportunity to find and join her in another life.

His love for her is so strong that after a perilous journey, he gives up his chance to live in tranquility in Heaven and stays with Anne, who must pay for taking her own life.

What Dreams May Come

The novel, What Dreams May Come, is significantly different from the film, in plot and the vision of the afterlife. The novel’s approach to the love story is less sentimental, its tone more scientific than fantastic.

There are far more references to Theosophical, New Age and paranormal beliefs. The author Richard Matheson claims in an introductory note that only the characters are fictional, and that most everything else is based on research (the book includes an extensive bibliography). Story elements that are not in the film include astral projection, telepathy, a séance, and the term “Summerland” a name for a simplified Heaven in Theosophy, and for Heaven in general in religions such as Wicca

The details of Chris’s life on Earth differ strongly in the novel. Only Chris and his wife (called Ann) die. Their children, who are grown rather than youngsters, remain alive, as minor characters. Chris and Ann are rural types rather than the urbanites portrayed in the film, and he is not a pediatrician, nor is she a painter. He’s a Hollywood screenwriter, and she has a variety of jobs.

The novel’s depiction of Hell is considerably more violent than in the film. Chris finds it difficult to move, breathe, or see, and he suffers physical torture at the hands of some inhabitants. He does not encounter ships, thunderstorms, fire, or the sea of human faces that he will walk upon in the film. Instead, he and Albert climb craggy cliffs and encounter such sights as a swarm of insects that attack people.

Ann is consigned to Hell for just 24 years, not eternity. At the end, which resembles an alternate version of the film but not the standard version, she escapes from Hell by being reincarnated, because she is not ready for Heaven.

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Are Somewhere in Time and What Dreams May Come love stories or science fiction? Are they about time travel or past life regression or simply two sad tales of enduring love. Some do not believe in the afterlife, refute time travel, and believe that this life, this time, this world is all there is. 

 

If all you believe is here and now …

how much of that reality would you surrender

To be in love for the first time …

the only time …

the last time?

fOIS In The City

A time for everything under heaven-Part One …

In the delicate matter of love, there is a passage way between out intellect and our souls. The journey between the two can be as long as a lifetime of futile searching for some or as short as returning a smile from a crowded room for others.

Our Soul Mate …

I reprint a small part of Aristophanes’s Speech from Plato’s Symposium.

You would do yourself well to read the entire passage and remember when you do that in all myths and legends, as in all philosophy and modern psychology, there is the kernel of truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth … even when we stubbornly refuse to accept its meaning.

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“The original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, of which the name survives but nothing else. Once it was a distinct kind, with a bodily shape and a name of its own, constituted by the union of the male and the female: but now only the word ‘androgynous’ is preserved, and that as a term of reproach.”

 “ … Zeus said: ‘Methinks I have a plan which will enfeeble their strength and so extinguish their turbulence; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us.

“ … After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they began to die from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them,–being the sections of entire men or women,–and clung to that.

“ … Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the tally-half of a man, and he is always looking for his other half.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~

And from this time forward we were daunted by the improbable task of finding our “soul” mate, that perfect other half that might complete us and make us whole once more.

My standard joke for years was that my soul mate was living with another woman and 2.5 children in a split level in Long Island.

I have known people who have been completed, who have found their other half. And even when their soul mates died before them, they did not lose the connection. They knew they would meet again.

Dare we believe if we cannot find our other half this time around, there is a way to come back and try again? Can you fathom the romantic possibility of being able to go back in your time, now, before and after you die again to be with your soul mate?

I’ve recently read two books by Richard Matheson back-to-back (as many of us love to do with certain authors) and wish to explore their two enduring plots; love in the here and hereafter.

The search of two men in their life and afterlife to reunite with the person they know to be their one true love, their soul mate.

About these two books Matheson has stated, “Somewhere in Time is the story of a love which transcends time, What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death…. I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form.”

Love that transcends time …

“Bid Time Return is a 1975 science fiction novel which tells the story of a man from the 1970s who travels back in time to court a 19th-century stage actress whose photograph has captivated him.

In 1980, it was made into the movie Somewhere in Time, the title of which was used for future editions of the book … and the plot slightly changed … although written by the author himself.

The movie was wonderful, the sound track haunting and the acting superb. I myself cried the first time I saw it in 1980 and cry again each time I see it.

Somewhere in Time, is the story of Richard Collier, a thirty-six year old screen writer who is told he has incurable cancer and decides to go off and die alone and spare is family the tragedy of watching him fade away. The book is a narrative written by Collier to his brother to explain his decision to leave.

While there are marked differences between the novel and the movie, the question remains the same. To what lengths would a man go to find his one true love?

In movie, young writer Richard Collier is met on the opening night of his play by an old lady who places a pocket watch in his hands and pleads, “Come back to me.” Richard does not know this woman, who returns to her own home and soon after dies.

Mystified, he tries to find out about her, and learns that she is a famous stage actress from the early 1900s, Elise McKenna. Becoming more and more obsessed with her, he manages, by self hypnosis, to travel back in time where he meets her. They fall in love, a matching that is not appreciated by her manager. Can their love outlast the immense problems caused by their “time” difference? And Can Richard remain in a time that is not his?

In the novel, Richard travels from 1971 to 1896 rather than from 1980 to 1912. The book setting is the Hotel del Coronado in California, rather than the Grand Hotel in Michigan. The novel is in journal form, Richard writing to his brother of his last days. Richard begins the book with the knowledge that he is dying of a brain tumor, which later raises the possibility that the whole time-traveling experience was merely a series of  hallucinations brought on by the tumor.

The scene where the old woman hands Richard a pocket watch (which he had given to her in the past) does not appear in the book. Thus, the ontological paradox generated by this event (that the watch was never built, but simply exists eternally) is absent. In the book, there are two psychics, not William Fawcett Robinson, who anticipate Richard’s appearance. In the end, Richard’s death is brought about by his tumor, not by heartbreak.

The tragedy is that in both and the movie, Richard and Elise, find each other, then lose each other and Richard goes back to his own time to die.

We want to believe that Richard and Elise do not lose each other and they will one day meet again … their love “transcends time” and they will one day meet again … somewhere in time.

Have you ever had the sensation that something in your life was missing?

How far in the known and unknown universe would

you travel to find the one soul who completes you?

fOIS In The City

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Next Week: A time for everything under heaven-Part Two. I’ll discuss Richard Matheson’s second book, What Dreams May Come, where he goes farther into our existence and explores a love that transcends death, a book that can literally change your life, vanquish your fear of death, and warns you … karma is a bitch.