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Ever have any bizarre thoughts?

The small town girl Carrie, in Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie, was never ashamed of wanting things. Migrating at the age of 18 to Chicago, she first wanted money and then fine clothes. She wanted to live in a mansion on North Shore Drive. For her, life was synonymous with desire. And sure enough, she acquired everything she wanted. She may have been a bit shortsighted spiritually but materially she literally reached the top, living in a penthouse in New York - a famous actress. Yet even then, as she looked out of her penthouse windows, there remained something else (someone else?) she wanted - so that when the novel ends it's clear her whole existence must be spent in "the pursuit of that radiance . . . which tints the distant hilltops of the world."

Mr. Trexler in E. B. White's short story "The Second Tree from the Corner", unlike Carrie, no longer wanted anything. Like myself, who after a 24-hour ordeal on a flight from Italy to Cincinnati to Dallas to SFX didn't want to go anywhere ever again, Trexler was played out. Life had become that tomorrow and tomorrow and boring tomorrow of Macbeth that "creeps its way to dusty death." Which is probably why he was seeing a psychiatrist.

But even here the sessions went nowhere until one day the doctor broke the silence and asked, "Ever have any bizarre thoughts?" Bizarre? Trexler wondered what it meant. Its synonyms might be: odd, unconventional, farfetched, fantastic, exotic thoughts. And yes, Trexler often had such thoughts but deleted them immediately as mere illusions, impossible, farfetched! So he replied, "No, I never have bizarre thoughts." And so the sessions continued aimlessly until again one day the doctor suddenly challenged him: "What do you WANT?"

Trexler brooded over the question as he walked toward Madison Avenue. What did he want? What did those fellows want whom he saw through saloon windows staring into the bottom of their glasses trying to catch of glimpse of it? What did everybody want beyond necessities and security? It was evening. Central Park looked "green and desirable in the distance, the last daylight giving the street scene a luminous and intoxicating splendor." And suddenly Trexler fathomed what he really wanted. It was something " deep, formless, enduring . . . both great and microscopic and partook of the nature of large deeds and youthful love and old songs and early intimations"; bigger even than the words like Heaven or the Promised Land we use to describe it. He wanted to be in touch with the interminable Source of things and from that vantage point to feel at one with all the finite things around him that otherwise seemed so distant and impersonal. He wanted that fullness of life Christ talks about; to experience the universe as a Home loaded with warm, personal, trustworthy relationships.

And Trexler began to understand that to WANT things was not an illness but sign of health. A sign of privilege too, for unlike all other animate creatures which are content to be programmed by nature we human beings aspire to so much more. From our very cradles we reach out to clasp all things finite and infinity itself; we aspire to transcend even death. Our appetite for engagement even with the Creator of this universe is insatiable.

"A small tree, rising between him and the light, stood there saturated with the evening, each gilt-edged leaf perfectly drunk with excellence and delicacy," and Trexler (in response at last to his psychiatrist's question) thought - bizarrely: "I want that second tree from the corner, just as it stands." Which gets even old jaded me to thinking: " When is that next available flight to Italy?"

-- Geoff Wood