We can probably agree, Roger, that she was really, really unhappy

Robert Frost at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, January 1961. He was a fine poet, but really now, people have got to stop quoting that blather he wrote about home.

by Ken

I never read NYT columnist Roger Cohen. I know hardly anything about him, except that the occasions when I've tried to read him, it didn't seem remotely worth the effort. So I still don't know what caused me to read his column today. Probably it had something to do with our Professor Krugman doing one of his patented Monday no-shows. Maybe it was either find something else to read, or think about doing some actual work, and I decided I couldn't let it come to that.

Or maybe it was that the column title, "Modern Odysseys," indicated he was going someplace, and if so, at least I could be positioned to wave a hearty bye-bye. Sure enough:

Now about to circle back to London after 30 years, I've been thinking about my family's odyssey. We lose sight of the long arc of things in the rapid ricocheting of modern life.

Bon voyage, Roger! You might want to, um, try to stay out of the path of all that, you know, ricocheting.

Then he's writing feelingly about his mother. He recalls a recent visit to South Africa, where she was born in 1929. He visited a cemetery on the outskirts of Johannesburg, on "a perfect winter's morning on the high plateau, still and luminous," and viewed the memorial plaque for her that's there, although she died (in 1979) in London.

She was, it seems, the pampered daughter of a rich Johannesburg merchant, who fell in love with a doctor who "lifted her from that comfortable cocoon into the cold and the rationing of post-war London."

She made the best of it. Uprooting is hard. The surface current of her English life appeared smooth at times, but in the depths the tug of African sun and light never abated. She abhorred the damp.

Hers was the land of avocado trees and dry heat. In her latter years she spent more time in South Africa. It was her soul's home, another reason for putting the plaque there rather than in London.

This unfortunately leads Roger to ramble on about "home," and rambling, and to quote Robert Frost's maudlin and highly debatable musings. (Oh, you remember: "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, /They have to take you in." And it's "Something you somehow haven't to deserve.") Eventually his rambling segues into the writer Chrstopher de Bellaigue, whose mother moved to England from Canada and never, writes her son, "quite knew where she belonged."

[De Bellaigue] writes: "After her death by her own hand, when I was thirteen, as I memorialized, even martyred her, I resented her origins. I felt obscurely that they had contributed to her death."

Which prompts this:

That jolted me -- and sent me back to my mother's suicide note of July 25, 1978: "It's as though I've turned to stone. I can't relate, I can't communicate and I can no longer bear the pain and gloom I cause to those I love most. ... At present I am filled only with self-hate. I do love my family and dear friends but I can't go on and on like this."

My mother survived, just. But the bi-polar state that led her to try to take her life that day never entirely relaxed its grip. Her will to live was intermittent. Cigarette ends stained with lipstick accumulated in ashtrays around her, red-smudged little death piles.

And man, that got me. No, my mother didn't commit suicide, or anything like that. We've got a lot of stuff in my family, but not a lot of suicide. We're more stick-it-out-to-the-enders, and then see if you've given or received more unhappiness. Still, there's something about being told that this woman at age 69, feeling that helpless and hopeless (presumably not as a result of physical distress; at least we're not told about any), tried to take her own life, and essentially, albeit slowly, succeeded.

"I can no longer bear the pain and gloom I cause to those I love most."

Sheesh! That is one boatload of pain for one poor soul to bear.

The thing is, her son thinks this is a story about "the pain of displacement." His second paragraph was: "This is just one story among many, with its measure of joy and tragedy, and I recount these events not because I find anything exceptional in them but rather because I believe the pain of displacement amounts to a modern pathology."

He burbles on about his various family members' wanderings, going back to the grandfather who wandered from Lithuania to South Africa and became that rich merchant, and about having himself found a home in New York ("the place that will take me in"), only now, "I move on again to Europe to continue this column from there [rats! -- ed.]."

Well, it's his life and his family and his mother, and I don't doubt that she missed South Africa. But my goodness, in the portion of that suicide note he reproduces, that doesn't seem like anywhere near the most important part of that poor woman's burden of pain, which reaches out across this gap of time and space and grabs a total stranger by the throat.

Of course, the last thing I would wish on Roger would be to have to reimagine that pain, which I imagine hasn't left him for long over those 31 years. Here's what he thinks his story is about:

Reading James Salter's haunting novel "A Sport and a Pastime," full of the twinned formality and sensuality of France, I encountered this passage:

"Life is composed of certain basic elements," he says. "Of course, there are a lot of impurities, that's what's misleading. ... What I'm saying may sound mystical, but in everybody, Ame, in all of us, there's the desire to find those elements somehow ..."

Technology is wondrous but also multiplies the "impurities." In the end we must go back to the things -- birth, death, love and beauty -- that spoke to me on that South African plateau. And we must each discover and render the elemental in our own lives.

Huh? Well, OK. Anyways, have a nice trip, Roger! And, uh, don't forget to write, you hear? (Oops! That last part, that's just the sort of thing you, you know, say. Try not to take it too literally.)

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