What Is the Future?

It’s the end of summer in the academic South, and I’m working on syllabi for my fall courses: Spiritual Autobiographies and Beginning Poetry Writing Workshop. I’m creating the schedule, weeks 1 through 16. I’m filling in the dates, 8/17, 8/19, 8/24…11/23. I’m sequencing the assigned texts: Darling to Dharma Punx; Incarnadine to Night of the Republic.

I’m imagining the writing exercises, the first one an object poem, where the objects are one, five, and ten dollar bills which I’ll hand out in class, and they’ll write, and then we’ll read Howard Nemerov’s ”Monday: An Introductory Lecture,” and I’ll let them keep the money. In Spiritual Autobiographies, the essay based on interviews of parents, grandparents, former teachers, or other adults with whom they interact, about their spiritual lives. In draft form, these essays will be used as another course text. What can we learn about spiritual experience from the lives of those with whom we speak?

It’s the last day of July. (It’s not the last day of July in your life, dear reader, as you read this). The last day of July—fire, melon, granite, or mud—is filed away now with all the other Julys you have lived, maybe one or two of which are memorable—July 1976!—while others—July 1998, July 1965—are indistinguishable, one from the other.)

It’s July 31, 2015, and alone in my study I imagine myself inside my cluttered office in late October, oblivious to the sugar maples just outside my building firing off their farewell message before winter. In the syllabus, it’s November, my favorite month, the month of birthdays—my late maternal grandmother’s, my brother’s, mine.

In the syllabus, it’s November and I am bearing a backpack stuffed with anthologies, computer, iPad, wallet, and refills for fountain pens. An aluminum bottle of ice water hooked to my bag pings with each heavy step I take from car to building to elevator and down the second-floor corridor that darkens as it turns toward my office.

It’s the end of July, and I’m wearing shorts and jeans, I’m wearing a t-shirt and an Oxford button-down collar shirt, and I’m wearing Chacos and loafers. It’s a summer Friday and my calendar is clear, and it’s a fall Friday and I am rushing from building to building, checking email in my palm as I go, no time to lose.

What is the future? It must be the past, the twenty-six UNC Asheville Julys that have preceded this one, for as I look through the computer screen to the future right now that’s all I can see: the challenge of squeezing a meeting into a September Tuesday.

What is the future? It must be the habit of dragging out the shutting down of the computer—refresh email inbox, refresh the New York Times, refresh, refresh, refresh, desperately seeking the messiah—at the black end of an early December Wednesday.

What is the future? Is it the promise of redemption? Then why do I feel constricted when I look at the calendar, the crowded grid, the busy days ahead? Is the future the messiah’s radiant face and heart as wide open as a full moon? Then why do I see only the lined face of a legal pad, filling with lists of things to do?

You have no future with us. How lucky I’ve been, never to have been told this. Though I have been denied, because of two cells of prostate cancer, long-term care insurance. Though, because of bilateral aorta-femoral arteries bypass when I turned 30, it took me several tries, many years ago, to purchase life insurance.

The future’s so bright… Is it, then, sunlight? But it takes eight minutes for sunlight to reach the earth, so what we see when, wearing our stylish shades, we look into the sun is old, the past. And if your experience, dear reader, is anything like mine, you, too, know how the past, the personal past keeps growing, its shadow, cast across the present, ever widening, deepening.

The past: It’s voracious and would like to eat everything in sight, including the future. But feeding it only intensifies its hunger.

The near-term future: I can see it, too, the portion of it I’m preparing for now, the academic year. I can see what shape some of it will likely take, from here where I’m assigning its hours. But I’ll keep my eyes open as I go. I’ll try not to let my heart harden, as someone I knew did when he envisioned the future. You knew him, too, you who walked away from Egypt. Walking away from Mitzrayim, the narrow place.

A classroom, an office, a hallway, a quad, a campus: open and wide spaces in which insights may and do arise, in which intelligence can be and is cultivated, in which, every now and then, wisdom speaks. How light the backpack becomes then, how liberating the structures in which hearts become wise.

Richard Chess is the author of three books of poetry, Tekiah, Chair in the Desert, and Third Temple. Poems of his have appeared in Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry, Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of IMAGE, and Best Spiritual Writing 2005. He is the Roy Carroll Professor of Honors Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He is also the director of UNC Asheville’s Center for Jewish Studies.