Darling by Richard Rodriguez Read Free Book Online Page A

about the years he lived in Riverside, California.) The monastery was built upon the mountain where Christ was tempted by Satan to consider the Kingdoms of the World. And here are we, tourists from the Kingdoms of the World, two thousand years later, regarding the mountain.
    A figure approaches from the distance, surrounded by a nimbus of moisture. The figure is a Bedouin on foot. A young man but not a boy, as I first thought. He is very handsome, very thin, very small, utterly humorless. He extends, with his two hands, a skein of perhaps twenty-five bead necklaces. He speaks English—a few words like beads. “Camel,” he says. “For your wife, your girlfriend.”
    â€œThis is camel,” he says again, fingering some elongated beads. I ask him who made the necklaces. His mother.
    There is no sentimentality to this encounter. Sentimentality is an expenditure of moisture. The Bedouin’s beseeching eyes are dry; they are the practice of centuries. He sits down a short distance away from us while we contemplate the monastery. He looks into the distance, and, as he does so, he becomes the desert.
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    Moses, Jesus, Muhammad—each ran afoul of cities: Moses of the court of Egypt, Jesus of Jerusalem, Muhammad of Mecca. The desert hid them, emptied them, came to represent a period of trialbefore they emerged as vessels of revelation. Did they, any of them, experience the desert as habitable—I mean, in the manner of Haim, in the manner of the Bedouin?
    After he fled Egypt, Moses took a wife; he took the nomadic life of his wife’s people as a disguise. Moses led his father-in-law’s flock across the desert to Mount Horeb, where God waited for him.
    As a boy, Muhammad crossed the desert in Meccan caravans with his uncle Abu Talib. Muhammad acquired the language of the Bedouin and Bedouin ways. As a middle-aged man, Muhammad was accustomed to retire with his family to a cave in the desert to meditate. During one such retreat Muhammad was addressed by God.
    The Jews became a people by the will of God, for He drove them through the desert for forty years. God fed the people Israel with manna. Ravens fed Elijah during his forty days in the desert. After his ordeal of forty days, Jesus accepted the ministrations of angels. Such supernatural nourishments of the body suggest a reliance on God rather than an embrace of the desert.
    In
The Desert Fathers,
Helen Waddell writes that the early Christian monks of the desert gave a single intellectual concept to Europe—eternity. The desert monks saw the life of the body as “most brief and poor.” But the life of the spirit lies beyond the light of day. The light of day conceals “a starlit darkness into which a man steps and becomes suddenly aware of a whole universe, except that part of it which is beneath his feet.”
    There are people in every age who come early or late to a sense of the futility of the world. Some people, such as the monks of the desert, flee the entanglements of the world to rush toward eternity. But even for those who remain in the world, the approach of eternity is implacable. “The glacier knocks in the cupboard, / The desert sighs in the bed,” was W. H. Auden’s mock-propheticforecast. He meant the desert is incipient in the human condition. Time melts away from us. Even in luxuriant weather, even in luxuriant wealth, even in luxuriant youth, we know our bodies will fail; our buildings will fall to ruin.
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    If the desert beckons the solitary, it also, inevitably, gives birth to the tribe. The ecology of the desert requires that humans form communities for mutual protection from extreme weathers, from bandits, from rival chieftains. Warfare among Arab tribes impinged often upon the life of the Prophet Muhammad. In response to the tyranny of kinship, Muhammad preached a spiritual brotherhood—discipleship under