IN OUR STARS

I just finished reading Philip Roth's I Married a Communist and find myself so moved. In the end, our lives are filled with errors and delusion and betrayals, even when we try to do the right thing - sooner or later, life makes us pay, the times we live in are rigged and always contain a price we must pay. And so much of the time, we can find our lives, the ones that feel as though they fit. And yet we're alive and we keep trying - the best of us keep trying to do the right thing...

     The book ends with a wonderful image - when Nathan, the narrator is a little boy, his grandfather dies. He wants to know where the old man went and Nathan's mother takes him outside at night, points up to the stars and says the grandfather has become one of those stars. Now, Nathan, in his sixties and alone, is lying out on his porch in the country, staring up at the stars, imagining that each of the characters in the story we've just read has become a star and is now beyond all the mistakes and betrayals that filled his or her life. As have all the people alive in that time, the famous and infamous and unknown.  You see "that universe into which error does not obtrude. You see the inconceivable: the colossal spectacle of no antagonism. You see with your own eyes the vast brain of time, the galaxy of fire set by no human hand. The stars are indespensable."

     So much the central mystery - that we should be born and have consciousness and that we should die...