Prime Time - Jane Fonda [138]
Full Tilt to the End
He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
—GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, Love in the Time of Cholera
THE PHILOSOPHER AND PSYCHOLOGIST DR. JEAN HOUSTON TELLS this story about a series of life-altering encounters she had as a young girl:
When I was fourteen years old my parents got divorced, and I was just grief-stricken about it. I took to running down Park Avenue, late for school—I would run from my grief. And one day I ran into an old man and knocked the wind out of him. I picked him up and he said to me in a French accent, “Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?”
I said, “Yes sir, looks that way.”
He said, “Well, bon voyage!”
I said, “Bon voyage.” And I ran to school. The following week I was walking my fox terrier, Champ, and I saw the old man coming out of a building. I lived at 86th, just off of Park Avenue, and the old man lived somewhere around 84th and Park.
He said to me, “Ah, my friend the runner, you have a fox terrier. Where are you going?”
“Well sir, I take Champ to Central Park after school. I just think about things.”
“I will go with you sometime, okay?”
I said, “Well, sure.”
“I will take my constitutional.”
Now he was something. He had no self-consciousness at all. He had leaky margins with the world. He had a long French name but he asked me to call him by the first part of it, which to my American ears sounded like “Mr. Tayer.” So I called him Mr. Tayer. We walked for about a year and a half, off and on, mostly Tuesdays and Thursdays. He would suddenly fall to the ground and look at a caterpillar: “Oh, Jean, look at the caterpillar! Ah, moving, changing, transforming, metamorphosing. Jean, feel yourself to be a caterpillar. Can you do that?”
“Very easily, Mr. Tayer.” I mean, here I was, a fourteen-year-old girl nearly six feet tall with red dots on my face—I felt like a caterpillar!
He said, “What are you when you finally become a papillon, a butterfly? What is the butterfly of Jean?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Tayer!”
“Yes, you know, you know. I know you know. Now, what are you transforming into?”
“Well, I think when I grow up I’ll fly all over the world, and maybe I’ll help people.”
“Ah! Bon, bon, bon.” And he’d say, “Oh, Jean, lean into the wind!” There are these strong winds off of Central Park. “Ah, Jean, smell the wind! Same wind once went through Jesus Christ.”
“Jesus Christ felt this?”
“Yes. Oh, Marie Antoinette, here she comes! Genghis Khan, not so good. Joan of Arc, Jeanne d’Arc! Be filled with Jeanne d’Arc! Be filled with the tides of history!” We had all these wonderful games about life: “Jean, look at the clouds, God’s calligraphy in the sky!”
He would suddenly stop and look at you, and he would giggle and you would giggle, and he’d giggle and you’d giggle, and then he would look at you laughing and laughing as if you were the cluttered house that hid the Holy One. I would go home and tell my mother, “Mother, I met my old man again and when I’m with him I leave my littleness behind.”
Toward the end of our walk together one day, he stopped suddenly and he turned to me and said, “Jean, what to you is the most fascinating question?”
And I said, “It’s about history, Mr. Tayer, and destiny, too. How can we take the right path in history so that we even have a destiny? My friends at school all talk about the H-bomb, and I wonder if I’ll ever get to be twenty-one years old. Mr. Tayer, you always talk about the future of man as if we had a future; I want to know what we have to do to keep that future coming.”
He said, “We need to have more specialists in spirit who will lead people into self-discovery.”
“What do you mean, Mr. Tayer?”
He said—and this is exactly what he said; I was taking notes because I knew I was in the presence of greatness—“We are being called into metamorphosis, into a far higher order, and yet we often act only from a tiny portion of ourselves.