S. by John Updike Read Free Book Online

clothes and pretty much stink of sweat and cement, but after a while you don’t mind it, in fact you rather like it, your own smell. Here they all come, high as kites.
    Next day. Just a few minutes before I go and face the hideous dinner brawl. I really shouldn’t say that; they do a wonderful job here organizing things, but the Arhat’s spiritual magnetism has just overwhelmed the facilities—a setup designed for four hundred is being asked to house and feed nearly a thousand, with a lot of day trippers and curiosity seekers on the weekends. It’s what Charles used to say of the hospital—no matter how many beds you put in, there’s always one sick person left over. I’ve found a place to be by myself a few minutes, though some of our group leaders tell us a wish for privacy is very pro-ego and anti-ashram. I don’t know—Buddha was always doing it, and the Arhat never tells us to go everywhere in a noisy smelly bunch like some of these sannyasins seem to want to. Obviously, you need to be by yourself just for spiritual sanitation now and then. When I think of all those days rattling around in my old house, going from room to room picking up, waiting for Pearl to get back from school or Charles from work or for somebody just to
call
or the mailman to come up the drive with his Laura Ashley catalogue—fourteen rooms and four baths and two and a half acres of lawn all for me—it seems obscene in a way and yet a kind of paradise. Isn’t it funny how paradise always lies in the past or the future, never exactly in the present? Just last night in hisdarshan, the Arhat said there can be no happiness in the present as long as there is ego. He pronounces it “iggo.”
As lonk as sere iss iggo, the happiness
—I really can’t do his accent, he has the strangest, longest “s”s, different from any sound we make—
suh happiness fliesss avay. Like suh pet birt and suh pet catt, zey cannot exists in ze same room. Ven suh Master doess nut preside, suh vun eatss se utter
. I make it sound ridiculous, but in fact I could listen for hours, it’s like a fist inside me relaxing, like a lens that keeps opening and opening to let in more and more light. Even when I don’t understand the words—literally, from the way they’re pronounced—something very beautiful is going on inside me, by orderly stages, the way something grows, a few more cells every day.
    For instance, Midge, I’m sitting out in the rocks about a half-mile from the Chakra—you know, where the Fountain of Karma plays—and there’s a kind of natural bench—out here where I am, I mean—under what they call an Arizona cypress, with these drooping gray-blue limbs and little brown berries seamed like tiny soccer balls, and I wish I had words to say how
charged
it all feels, how
pregnant
just the rockiness of the rocks seems—the little silvery veins of some mineral, the little loose heaps of rosy dust, the parallel ridges showing all the millions of years of sedimentation—and then too the breeze and the cypress with its resiny essence and the distant mountains like wrinkled tissue paper—how
sacred
, really, and the whole matter of whether God exists or not, which I always thought rather boring, is just plain tran
scend
ed, it seems so obvious that
some
thing exists, something incredibly and tirelessly good, an outpouring of which the rocks and I and the perfect blue sky with its little dry horsetails are a kind of
foam
, the foam on the crest of all these crashing waves, these outpourings all through the aeons of time, and yet terribly
still
, too—I know I’m not expressing it very well. There is something in
ev
erything, its
is
ness, that is unutterably grand and consoling. I just feel terribly
full
. I feel—how can I put this?—like I’m carved out of one big piece of crystal and exactly fitted into a mold of the same crystal. Tell Irving I feel
motionless
. Ask him if this is samarasa. My happiness is deeper than I’ve ever felt happiness