From “The Book of Lights” by Chaim Potok:
“From the age of fifteen until the age of twenty-one he lived in the apartment world of his aunt’s whispery talking and his uncle’s coughs and brooding silence, and he did not know which was more frightening. For a while after his cousin’s death he thought his family had somehow been singled out for a special curse. But he talked to friends and found that throughout the neighborhood ran a twisting river of random events: parents died in slow or sudden ways, children were killed, relatives slipped young from life. The world seemed a strangely terrifying place when you really thought about it. He tried not to think about it too often.
“Sometimes to get away from thinking about it he fled to the roof of the apartment house. There, on the cracked and reeking tar paper, he would sit with his back to the brick wall of the stairwell and gaze up across the adjoining roof-tops to the sky. Usually it was a smoky stench-filled sky, but on occasion it was clear. One night he saw the Last heaven of stars clear as he had never seen it before, stretching from one end of the city to the other. It was a cool summer night, and as he sat there he heard a soft whining sound and a stirring in the darkness. He was about sixteen at the time, a boy of the streets, and not given easily to fear. In a corner of the roof, near a cluster of pipes, vents, and bubblelike protrusions, he found a bitch whelping her pups. She was a black mongrel with a white spot over one eye, and she growled softly as he approached. He watched the pups come, listened to her soft whimpers, saw her tear and lick off the sacks, clean the pups, push them aside, lie back, and wait for the next. He had never seen life born before. He knew the street talk about pricks and cunts, had read the porno books passed around in school yards, seen the photographs of the various positions. But the birth of these pups stirred him in a strange way. He saw them emerge from the organ that he and his friends would ta k about with leers on the street. But here on this roof the bitch and her body seemed filled with a singular radiance. Life was being created before his eyes. He trembled, soared, wanted to shout and weep, and remained very still. He reached out to touch one of the newborn pups, and the bitch raised her head and bared her teeth. Overhead the art-filled sky seemed to drop down upon him. He felt all creation, in the pain and inexhaustible glory of this single moment. He wanted to hold the bitch to himself, caress her, caress something. Instead he reached up and brushed his hand across the sky and felt, actually felt, the achingly exquisitely cool dry velvet touch of starry heaven upon his fingers. He cried a little and shivered in the chill night air. Finally he thought it time to go back down, his aunt would become one concerned about his absence.
“He returned there the next morning. No bitch, no pups, no sign that life had been created on that sodden smelly roof. He wondered if he had dreamed it. He asked around the house. No one knew anything about dogs on the roof. He wandered through the neighborhood, casually questioning friends. No one was peddling puppies. A mystery.
“But that rooftop feeling of awe and that caress of sky and stars were unforgettable. What an encounter that had been! He never forgot that moment. He hoped it would return one day. He felt he would be changed in some extraordinary way if it ever returned. He began to wait for it.”
Tags: , Art, Books, Chaim Potok, religion, Writing