We found the best Parrilla yet. It has two locations on the same street, on opposite sides and not a block apart. It is down in the disreputable section around 58th and the Avenida Caracas. Twice the price of your average parrilla, for the most part, but so far the best meat (and tender) we have found in the city, and copious (but usually meat is copious, just tough and not so copious), and actually a meal not predominant in carbohydrates. It was a great, settling meal, not far from an elaborate church that stands with the mountains in the background and the pigeons in the foreground, and deserving of great fame, like the yucca that we had with our meat.
* * *
It is a city full of curiosities, among which we were searching for an apartment. I want someone to help me who actually enjoys such searches. Of the three apartments we’ve had I found the first because I went to Minneapolis alone to find one, and I settled on the first one I could find. The other two were found by Katrina because she likes searching and I hate spending time in wordly affairs. But here Katrina can’t do it, since you have to call in Spanish. I just have to steel myself and do it without any emotions (surely the chiefest sign that an age of grace and humanity has passed is the existence of that most nefarious device so diabolically proliferate in these last days, the telephone).
* * *
Being on the cusp of a new job, being employed, makes me feel like my life is draining away. I am fighting off the feeling, but worldly affairs are dreadful. I have been among a sect of Protestants who with sincerity if not with subtleness of perception believe man was made for work. If the work of man can be distinguished from toil, if the work of man is directed toward the arts of leisure, then I can agree. But these people believe that business is blessed, that man was made to be in continual activity at least six days a week, and their ideal is not my Homo Ludens, but Homo Economicus. I am not Homo Economicus.
It is a consolation that I do not own property and that I no longer own a car, but I have a wife and cannot entirely withdraw from worldly affairs. And it is a small price to pay for a wife (notice how involved in worldly affairs the woman of Proverbs 31 is, however, and tell me there isn’t something unbiblical in the notion that the husband must support the wife). We must be in the world for what is, after all, only the time of a fleeting shadow before the sun dispels the present darkness and the day of eternity begins: when we shall rest.
* * *
So having been diligent in my studies, having been diligent in the loathsome business of looking for work, and having done some diligence in the unhappy business of looking for a place to live—which I am sure I shall not, in the end, regret—I was ready to look back on this life full of ephemeral accomplishments (other than lunch, which was a great success and filled me with much cheerfulness, among other things) and decide it was time to sit in the sunlight reading, thinking, reflecting.
* * *
I am worried that I have already spent two hundred pages of Lewis, a whole book of Eddison, a slender, negligible work on translation, and some two hundred pages of Yeats. I don’t think the Lewis is very renewable, except as a source for consultations. The Eddison is renewable and so, happily, is the Yeats which is very valuable—but then it makes me think I’ll never find things again the fortuitous way I found the Yeats. If I regret anything in coming to Colombia it is in being a person who has finds few greater pleasures (however meagerly) than those of English literature and that I am very prone to feeling on the verge of exhausting them: being here makes the fear somewhat acute.
* * *
It is like being in the world, this being in the world. And yet, as has been made obvious and perhaps some have understood, it is ridiculous to feel at all uneasy. I finished re-reading Cymbeline this afternoon in the sunlight, and I closed Shakespeare with a sense of having come around full circle. My youth no longer seemed remote and I living a posthumous life; I felt connected to it, or the memory of the places shone more real. I wonder if my sense of life in Minnesota will grow distant. Strange how the sun upon a page—as I wrote my reflections—gave me a sense of real proximity to the places of my childhood and to the afternoons reading books from the British Council later in Mexico. Why should it seem closer just because I am physically closer to the places? I’m still not there and it seems to me that one’s geographical location, short of the actual places, would not make memories seem suddenly less remote. Shakespeare preserves a sense of the vastness of the world and of the particularity of his own land: perhaps that suggested it to me, or perhaps it was the yucca.
