Moving Day

by Jonathan Stone

Who possessed the time, and patience, and talent—who knew the safety and serenity in life—to create such intricacy? To craft these subtle pleasures?

Stanley Peke has been shrewdly alert all his life. His shrewdness, his alertness, have indeed brought him his life. And for a moment, he was stupid. And one stupid moment, it seems, one lax moment, wipes out all the shrewdness of a lifetime.

A habit, a practice of forgetting. Purposeful and protective and useful. Forgetting as healing, as balm.

There is, on the other hand, a certain lightness to owning nothing, he is quickly discovering. To living without objects.

That, he has thought, is maybe the greatest freedom, the deepest genius, of automotive design. Intimacy, because you are not looking at each other. Perspective as you talk.

"Perspective as you talk." I love this play on words.

All man’s possessions are just this impulse, aren’t they, filtered through civilization—simply the impulse for a home.

This is a land he could have been happy in, he senses. Here is his chance to look in on other lives, lives not lived.

Shema yisrael Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. “That’s all you need to know,” the American rabbi said matter-of-factly. “That’s faith in a nutshell. A simple declaration of the authority of the spirit. An acceptance of meaning—above idols, above objects, above kings and emperors, above facts, above actuality, above all.”

For what is worse than death? Only one thing: death with foreknowledge.

Damn his history. Damn his past. It skews and burdens every judgment, makes it impossibly layered, textured.

The little black secret that had torn at him for more than sixty years, gnawed at him across a lifetime: It was fun.