Good Fortune

Michel de Montaigne

Here is a saying found in a Chinese fortune cookie: “Your heavy desire, only allow you to see what you are looking for.” Will the anonymous writer of this brilliant spiritual admonition please make his or her identity known? But what is the import? Is it what the recovery people are talking about when they ask “you know what you want, but do you know what you need?" Is it the concept of “limited objectives” that don’t let us see the possible munificence and magnanimity of the world? Is it the idea that lies behind another saying, “when one door closes, another opens?” You are full of urges and they compel you to fulfill immediate desires instead of taking a longer view. Sometimes you can hold the urge at bay, but once you have crossed the Maginot Line, all hell breaks loose and there's no turning back. It’s also the notion of Answered Prayers. “There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered ones,” said Saint Teresa of Avila. “Watch out what you want for you may get it,” is another homily that conveys a similar idea. Of   course all these could easily qualify to be fortunes too, although to be effective your normal cookie cutter fortune has to have a D.I.Y. feeling—something which in the case of the fortune above is conveyed by a grammatical error, “Your heavy desire, only allows” is how it should read and the writer should have lost that initial comma, but when you make it read like one of the aphorisms of Montaigne, who also addresses these issues, you lose the charm. The problem is that once you get a fortune like this one, you rush to crack open the cookie in the next restaurant, only to be disappointed. The message coming to you was like one of those bottles that floats up to shore on the beach, carrying greetings from the denizens of another time. It’s by definition impossible to recreate the feeling of serendipity. In your drive to satisfy the desire, you become as narrow casted as the person the fortune teller was addressing, in his or her initial missive.

O Quebec V: The 45th Parallel

 Photo by Hallie Cohen

The 45th parallel is marked on a grey slab that looks curiously like a headstone in the town of Richford, Vermont, about five miles south of the Canadian border, in the heart of an area of desolate beauty known as the Northeast Kingdom. It’s down the road from a boarded up takeout Chinese place. Most of the main streets in this locale, with their lines of two-story wood or red-brick buildings and deserted storefronts, are an inglorious celebration of the cynosure of geography that marks the midpoint between the Equator and the North Pole. The stone marker was put up by the local American Legion back in the ’80s, and it’s the kind of tourist attraction that’s easy to miss and unlikely to attract large crowds, the kind landmark that creates more of a whimper than a bang. But there is something wonderful about the fact that the marker sits in such an inconspicuous location. Both poles, even though they are currently degrading due to global warming, have been the sites of legendary expeditions, in which famous explorers like Robert Falcon Scott have lost their lives. In the meantime, mankind has been furnished with many mountains to climb, including Everest and the rock face of the Matterhorn. Huge skyscrapers continue to challenge the heavens, but this quiet spot on an obscure country road seems a fitting place for the ultimate Maginot line. You don’t feel anything as you cross it, and that seems to be the point. “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on,” Beckett’s narrator says in The Unnamable. When you take away man’s self-created dramas (the hostile separation between North and South Korea at the 38th parallel, for example), the life we live on earth is really best described as a simple road with signs leading North, South, East or West.