Arthur, a regular Guardian reader, was deeply shocked at this.
"That's a pretty unpleasant way to behave, isn't it?"
"Is it?" asked the old man mildly. "I'm sorry, I'm a bit out of touch."
He pointed down into the crater.
"Is that robot yours?" he said.
"No," came a thin metallic voice from the crater. "I'm mine."
"If you'd call it a robot," muttered Arthur. "It's more a sort of electronic sulking machine."
"Bring it," said the old ma. Arthur was quite surprised to hear a note of decision suddenly present in the old man's voice. He called to Marvin, who crawled up the slope making a big show of being lame, which he wasn't.
"On second thought," said the old man, "leave it here. You must come with me. Great things are afoot." He turned toward his craft which, though no apparent signal had been given, now drifted quietly toward them through the dark.
Arthur looked down at Marvin, who now made an equally big show of turning round laboriously and trudging off down into the crater again, muttering sour nothings to himself.
"Come," called the old man, "come now or you will be late."
"Late/" said Arthur. "What for?"
"What is your name, human?"
"Dent. Arthur Dent," said Arthur.
"Late, is in the late Dentarthurdent," said the old man, sternly. "It's a sort of threat, you see." Another wistful look came into his tired old eyes. "I've never been very good at them myself, but I'm told they can be very effective."
Arthur blinked at him.
"What an extraordinary person," he muttered to himself.
"I beg your pardon?" said the old man.
"Oh, nothing, I'm sorry," said Arthur in embarrassment. "All right, where do we go?"
"In my aircar," said the old man, motioning Arthur to get into the craft which had settled silently next to them. "We are going deep into the bowels of the planet where even now our race is being revived from its five-million-year slumber. Magrathea awakes."
Arthur shivered involuntarily as he seated himself next to the old man. The strangeness of it, the silent bobbing movement of the craft as it soared into the night sky, quite unsettled him.
He looked at the old man, his face illuminated by the dull glow of tiny lights on the instrument panel.
"Excuse me," he said to him, "what is your name, by the way?"
"My name?" said the old man, and the same distant sadness came into his face again. He paused. "My name," he said, "is Slartibartfast."
Arthur practically choked.
"I beg your pardon?" he spluttered.
"Slartibartfast," repeated the old man quietly.
"Slartibartfast?"
The old man looked at him gravely.
"I said it wasn't important," he said.
The aircar sailed through the night.
The old man could be the last survivor of Magrathea or Atlantis. He could be Methuselah or Noah. A resident of Shangri-La or Brigadoon. He may be a man or a god or a demon or a robot. At this point, Arthur isn't sure who or what he is dealing with. It's all mystery and myth.
As I've said before in this blog, I'm fine living with negative capability, to borrow from John Keats. Living with uncertainty is part of the human condition. That pretty much describes my whole life. Especially these last couple months, I'm never sure when I wake up what the day will bring me. Ever.
Now, I would be happier living in certainty, but that's not a realistic goal. Benjamin Franklin said, "In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes." However, even that quote is draped in mystery, for it may have been Daniel Defoe or Christopher Bullock who first uttered it more than 60 years before Franklin, making one of the Founding Fathers of the United States a plagiarist.
We all live in negative capability. There are no guarantees when you wake up in the morning that you will come home at night. No guarantees that you will keep your job or your wife or your children. I think that everyone has to fool themselves every day in order to face life. For instance, when I got out of bed today, it was with the understanding that I would be going to church and then spending the afternoon mowing the lawn at my mother's house. Those were my plans.
Now, those plans kind of panned out. I did worship with my wife, and then I did spend a couple hours pushing the lawnmower at my mother's. However, it could have easily gone in another direction. My car could have been sideswiped in the parking lot at McDonald's as I was picking up breakfast. The lawnmower could have refused to start. It could have rained. None of those things happened.
Today, my wife is struggling with her bipolar disorder. She hasn't been sleeping well recently. That, in itself, is not cause for major concern. However, she's also been unable to be restful at home, suffers from racing thoughts. (She told me this afternoon, "I feel like I'm jumping out of my skin.") She also had a pretty bad episode of depression on Thursday evening.
All of these things point toward a problem that needs to be addressed with her doctor. My wife has already called her doctor's office once. She's going to call again tomorrow. In the mean time, she didn't go to work today. Instead, she stayed home and slept. (She only got three hours of sleep, if that, last night.)
Bipolar is a mysterious disorder. It can be completely controlled for years with a certain medication, and then, one day, that medication can stop working properly, with serious results. My wife and I have been through some difficult times with her mental illness. I remember nights where my wife would jump in our car and disappear to Walmart to go grocery shopping at 3 a.m. She would start home improvement projects that went unfinished. One weekend, we drove to Wisconsin and bought a brand new minivan. (Several months later, we had to trade in the minivan for a car we could actually afford.)
So, you see, I have some experience with myth, mystery, and negative capability. I know that a day can turn from mundane to insane very quickly. I also know that I can't do anything to control the negative capabilities of my life. This may sound very twelve-steppish, but I have come to accept very recently that I am powerless. I can't control the weather. I can't control my wife's mental illness. I can't control what happens in the Star Wars franchise. (If I could have, Han Solo would still be alive.)
What can I do in the face of mystery? I can confront it when it happens. Deal with it. Move on. I certainly can't live my life trying to avoid it. If I did that, I wouldn't ever get out of bed. I'd just live my life in fear of the unknown. And I would miss all the wonderful things God sends my way. A daughter graduating from high school A son winning a poetry contest. A dinner of lobster ravioli. A evening walk with my wife, holding her hand, talking about tomorrow and the next day and the next.
Yes, the future is full of myth and mystery and unknowns.
But it also contains hope, and that (along with a little bit of chocolate and a good book) makes Marty a happy saint.
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