The Carroll Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 2

John Carroll University Carroll Collected The aC rroll Quarterly Student Winter 1966 The aC rroll Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 2 John Carroll University Follow this and additional works at: http://collected.jcu.edu/carrollquarterly Recommended Citation John Carroll University, "The aC rroll Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 2" (1966). The Carroll Quarterly. 56. http://collected.jcu.edu/carrollquarterly/56 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Student at Carroll Collected. It has been accepted for inclusion in The aC rroll Quarterly by an authorized administrator of Carroll Collected. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Carroll Quarterly, a literary magazine produced by an undergraduate staff and written by the students, alumni, and fac ulty of John Carroll University, Cleveland, Ohio. Volume 19 Winter, 1966 Number 2 Editor-in-Chief TONY KUHN Short Story Editor JERRY FAY Poetry Editor DICK TOMC Review Editor TIM BURNS Essay Editor TOM O'CONNOR Managing Editor RODERICK PORTER Editorial Assistant WILLIAM DeLONG Copy Editors LARRY RYAN JOHN SANTORO Faculty Advisor LOUIS G. PECEK Contents The Windows . 5 Thomas Edmund O celot . 10 Martin Croes Today . .. .................. ........................ .. .. 11 Pat Jo Walsh Film Review: The Loved One .......... ..................... 12 T ony Kuhn Titan's Coup #2 ........... .............................. 14 Richard T omc December Graduation ...................................... 16 Markiavelli Theft of God's Oblation . 18 William Roger V ath Joseph . .. .. .. ............................. .......... .. .. 19 Gregory Paul Szuter To Know Love . 20 JR Lovie .. ...................................... ......... 21 Edwin Flagg Worm Song ............ ................. .. ............. 22 Gregory Paul Szuter A Thinker . 23 Jeffery L. H awk and Stephen J. M etzger The Book Shelf . 24 R. Vistbek Dear Friendly Advisor . 25 Bob Sweeney Forty Minutes . 26 Mack M urphy Within the Fourth Dimension . 28 K evin R. M cDonough The Windows THOMAS EDMUND I have finally noticed how small my room is- I should guess about ten by fourtteen. It has been my room all my life but I only noticed now how very small it is. When I came to bed six weeks ago, I was very ill. All I remember is dream ing and the look on their faces, as if part of themselves were suffering. Then I got somewhat better, and they would talk and the doctor would talk. When I remained silent, they got Dr. Stillwell who is a psychiatrist. He began by talking quietly and giving me all the help he could to adjust to my new life in bed-my all new life, certain and short in my forever bed. Now he has told them that I must have time to accept the situation on my own terms; he himself has stopped coming three times a week and now comes only once. I respect him, and I realize that I must do this myself and that by his stay ing away he is trying to nudge me toward communication; but I would prefer him to come as he did before. Not that I would talk more now than previously, but he spoke well and was the only person who said anything that helped me at all. I suspect he knows this. But he has come only once a week for four weeks now, and I am still quiet, and I believe I will never talk to him very much. My family is sad. I am unhappy for them, but I wish they would leave me alone. They are watching me do something every person has the right to do privately. I cannot collect myself under their constant gaze. What they want is in reality everything, and this includes me. We all live our lives and see them slip away with each year and each good-bye and each change so that to blur the transiency of living, we try to make people, places, years, a living part of us so we can have them always. But the closer we draw people and things and time to ourselves, the sharper the pain when they in evitably leave us. Not to accept the impossibility of stopping a moment of happiness and living within it is the certain and terribly painful trait of immaturity. Living is constant gen eration. The end of one moment is the presence of a new, and we cannot live within remembered happiness. Actually only death means no limits. If all the happiness of life could be had in one eternal, present movement, here then death would be meaningless. As it is, only death can break us away from the past and future and make it all a present happiness- a moment in which there is nothing sadly faded and nothing yet left to love and lose. But to be a man is to cling to life, and even though I try to accept the inevitable, I still cling through two windows. 5 Each morning I wake up very early in a world which barely promises light. There is a breeze I feel on my body and hear in the leaves of the bushes and the reaching, quak ing rose vines beyond the window at my feet. The curtains on that window at the foot of my bed are always open. I can't close them, and my family thinks the fresh air very bene ficial. As I lie in my bed, I cannot escape the view afforded by that window at my feet, that is, unless I close my eyes which I do not do very often now. However, when I wake up, it is still dark; and though I can't see, I can feel the breeze on my hands and arms and chest and face, and I can hear the same breeze feel the leaves and the leaves touch each other. I cannot stop it, this breeze which sweeps clean the world and me. At dawn it brings the birds. They are not there one moment, and the next it is as if the whole world of leaves were filled with them. In the new light, I can see the shudder ing dark leaves of the bushes, and the reaching arms of the roses as they sway back and forth. The curtains which frame the window flutter in counterpoint to the closed curtains at my right. I was not conscious of the scent of the flowers be fore, but I now know that I must have been breathing it all night. Life swims in such rapid, complex waves that we can not fully perceive the intensity of the embrace. The sky becomes flushed as the arrival of the colors begins. The open curtains at my feet become two shaking veils pink and golden with the new sun. The white of the house next door is a backdrop for the green of the leaves, moist and waxy with summer; and the tossing white flowers among them fling their heads up at a golden sky. Later the wind will become quiet and breathe softly as a hot summer day prowls forth from the morning. And there are the misty, rainy mornings and cool mornings and cloudy ones and the days and nights which grow from them. It all looks in on me incessantly through the window at my feet, and inescapable stare eluded only when I lift the curtain of the hidden window at my right. But then I have a keyhole which I see gasps of life never caught in the frame of the other window. I don't even have to straighten my arm to lift the corner of the curtain and look out into the backyard and beyond to the cinder alley overgrown with the green and the backyards of the houses behind us. I keep the curtains closed, but I often look out, as I said before, by lifting the curtain. There are flowers wild with color; the green of the trees shot through with the craggy black bark of their trunks and grad ually delicate branches; a squirrel on the telephone wires ; a dog trotting down the alley between efficient sniffs. But what I want to see are people-the neighbors, somebody walk ing down the alley, somebody in a car the next street over. 6 Before it's possible to see them, I can always hear kids, walk ing or on their bikes, and the garbage men shouting and crash ing the cans; and I know enough to look out the window. Then, too, at the clink of a metal gate or the shutting of a car door or the slam of a back porch screen door, I know I can see one of the neighbors going some place or doing some thing. I enjoy seeing them alive. As I watch them, I always imagine how they'll be years from now-what will have hap pened to them, whether they'll be happy or sad. Probably I'm eighty per cent accurate (I tell myself, give or take de tails) about their basic situations years hence. Very few per sons are visibly brilliant non-conformists set apart from their fellow men by unusual and proven intellects and talents. Yet almost all my friends, and also myself, dread falling into lives used before. I reason that every life is important, but I am too young to have stopped hoping and assuring myself that mine would have been noteworthy to the world. But al though almost all those beyond the window at my right will never grasp life in any unique way, their sounds, the hour hand at eight, three, or a little after five, or a love for them will make me look out upon those who will live. The real rea son, though, that I look out that window is to see Darcy.

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