And Eternity

by Piers Anthony

  The thing to remember is that, whatever your problem, you aren't the only one with it, by a long shot. There is help and comfort for you, if you can reach it. It seems worth a try. This series is ending, but the organizations remain, and it may be that you won't have to depend on God alone for help.

  I pondered for months whether to end these Notes with the conclusion of this series, and finally asked an editor, who I think also sweated the matter somewhat. We concluded that there will be Notes in a different series, though perhaps not as autobiographical as the present ones. So this may be the last of the intensely personal, militant essays, at least for a while. If you are a Notes freak, though, keep your eyes open, and sometime, somewhere, when you least expect it, there'll be another.

  Which brings me to the matter of the effect of my move on my writing. Well, the delays continued so long that I completed the novel and this Note in first draft before moving. Only the editing—that is, going over it to correct spelling and syntax, add in omitted bits, and set the format for printing out the copy for the publisher—took place after the move. My spot research for Ligeia helplines was the last thing I did; that was at the new house. Now you know.

  We have had a total of three hard-disk crashes since computerizing, and each has been a colossal headache, costing me everything I had saved for the prior year or so. Of course, I had my novels backed up on floppy disks, but still it was a pain. The last one wiped out three months of daily records I hadn't gotten around to printing out. I agonized, and decided to drop the records. I had kept them for 21 years, recording each day's production and events, and that should be enough for posterity to examine. Now I just type my ongoing thoughts in a separate file as I go along, and print and erase that file each day. So the computer has changed my life in a way, whether for good or ill I can't say. I worked out a little song about it. Do you remember the popular song "Winchester Cathedral"? Well, the hard disk is called a Winchester. So my variant goes: "Winchester Computer/you're breaking down,/ You stood and you watched as/ My data left town." That's from the heart.

  In each of these Incarnations novels, I have noted the manner that the subject seems to affect my life. Death, Time, Fate, War, Nature, Evil—did it continue for Good? It seemed it hadn't, for though many interesting things happened, including our move to the new house, none of it seemed supernatural. It is true that our move represents achievement of a residence that is larger and nicer and more private than what we have known before, and probably this is our final mortal home, so there is a certain symmetry in its occurrence at the time I wrap up this series, but that's about the extent of it. So it seemed that this time the magic did not operate, except perhaps in little ways. For example, two Jehovah's Witnesses appeared at our door in this period, seeking to alert me to the approaching termination of the world we know. I try to address all such visitors politely, though the chances of my being converted to such belief are minimal. They left their book, Life—How Did It Get Here? By Evolution or by Creation? and promised to return in two weeks to discuss the matter further. I looked at the book, but though it makes superficial sense, I feel that its points have been effectively answered by Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker. In short, for me, Evolution has carried the day. I looked forward to discussing this, but the Jehovah's Witnesses did not return, and then we moved. So I put the discussion in Chapter 9, using Nox's vision to clarify the base of the Incarnations series. Actually, I think the Bible speaks more realistically than many of its apologists think, and makes more real-world sense than they credit. But it speaks in language the common man of two millennia ago understood: "day" rather than "eon." Whereupon modern man misunderstood it.

  I completed the first draft of Novel and Note on my daughter Cheryl's eighteenth birthday in late Mayhem. (My daughter Penny's birthday is in OctOgre, of course. I believe I mentioned that the Ogre does things in such months, with maybe a bit of help from my wife, who is another Mayhem.) All that remained was the editing, which I did after we moved—on my wife's birthday. My birthday gift to Cheryl was enough of my time to get her through her driving license. Penny was pushing to drive at fifteen, but Cheryl wasn't as eager, so still wasn't licensed. She also had a problem with coordination of the clutch and gearshift. We pondered, and decided that it would be best to teach her with automatic shift. We also wanted four-wheel drive, because our tree farm has some back roads and sugar sand that can be treacherous. We had each feature, but not in the right cars. We wound up trading in both car and van, to get auto-shift in the first and 4W drive in the second. Two trade-ins and about $25,000 took care of it. Ouch! But at this writing, Cheryl is learning. Oh yes, my time is precious—but so is my daughter.

  It happened that the school year was wrapping up, and the Citrus High School Senior Awards Ceremony was held on Cheryl's birthday. Now Cheryl, despite her record SAT score, was not the top student in her class, or the second; in fact she wasn't in the top five. Grades can be a chancy thing, depending on a student's luck in the draw of classes and teachers, absence owing to illness, conformity to the system's expectations, and the vagaries of the grading curve. The most intelligent or motivated or honest students are not necessarily those with the highest grades. But what Cheryl lacked in height she made up in breadth. I counted the number of times she was called to the stage, and it became apparent to all present that this was indeed her day. She had a total of 18 awards, scholarships and recognitions, from the National Merit Scholarship on down, nicely matching her birthday age, far outstripping those of any other student. Among other things, she had assumed the editorship of the moribund school newspaper, the Whirlwind (a minor echo of the name of the school's football team, the Hurricanes) and brought it up to second in its class in the state. Not only had I not been doing any of this for her, or even helping her, I had hardly been aware of her school activities. It is not that I am a neglectful parent; I will help if asked. Rather, I am busy with my own work, and Cheryl is an independent cuss. I wonder where she inherits that from?

  About this time I began to get a glimmer of something. Just as the revelation of the identity of the new Incarnation of Good came only at the very end, and by surprise, so did the revelation of the good that was associated with this novel come to me. The final impetus was not for me, but for my daughter. Perhaps I should have seen it coming, as it seems obvious in retrospect, but I was somehow blind to it beforehand. Parents typically seek to vindicate themselves through their children. I wasn't even in the top half of my graduating high school class, 36 years ago; I was a complete nonentity. My wife did better, but married me instead of completing college. We had five babies, the first three of which died at birth, and the fourth was learning-disabled. Cheryl was the last. So the scholastic proof of our family lay in her success—and what a success it turned out to be! Often when I attend public functions, I am the center of attention; this time I was glad to be known as Cheryl's father.

  When we moved to the forest in 1977, not only did we try to preserve the trees there, we planted five hundred more. These were red cedars, which we bought from the state forestry department as seedlings and planted around our border. About three quarters of them died in the first year, but we still have a generous hundred surviving, some of them now fifteen feet tall, some still under a foot tall. I discovered one that was growing well, but it was being crowded out by a laurel oak sapling that intercepted most of its light. Now the laurel oak is a nice tree, and we like it, but this one was in the wrong place. If I left it, my cedar would in due course die. So I got my axe and chopped down the laurel oak.

  I felt horribly guilty doing that. Here was a nice tree, minding its own business, cut down in the prime of its youth. I had taken a life, for a reason that neither that tree nor the one I had saved would understand. I had played God, deciding which one was to be saved and which one was to perish. It was true that there were thousands of laurel oaks and only a few cedars. Still, was it right for me to condemn to death one in favor of the other?

  This both
ered me for several days—indeed, it bothers me now, a year and a half after the event. I take life seriously wherever I encounter it. Yet such decisions are necessary all the time. Every time I eat, something is perishing. I don't eat meat, because I prefer not to take a life unnecessarily—but what of the plants I eat? This has been a lifelong concern of mine, and the guilt never quite fades. In order to live, I must kill other living things. I don't like it, and I suspect I shall never truly come to terms with it. Now take the concept of God. Mine differs from that of most of my readers, but for the sake of this discussion, let's assume that there is a God, and His (Her) nature is somewhere in the ballpark of that described in this novel. Every day, every hour, every minute, He must make decisions, choosing between lives, because of an overall picture that we mortals can hardly understand. How much pain must there be in every one of those decisions! He must not have it all His own way, any more than I as a novelist have my fiction all my own way. I joy and suffer as I deal with fictional characters, trying to put together a significant whole. How much worse it would be if they truly lived and the fates I decreed for them were real! Yet God must handle real lives.

  I think I can understand how He, after centuries of such effort, reaping the praise of those whose only interest is to get ahead of their neighbors, and the condemnation of those whose selfish interest He declines to endorse—while the world slowly deteriorates because of their ignorance and rapacity—might finally just tune out. What is the average prayer, other than an appeal for some unwarranted advantage? The engines quit on an airplane, and the passengers pray for deliverance, not because they are benefiting the cosmos, but simply because they don't want to die. They seldom express much genuine interest in doing His will, just their own. They continually put their own words in His mouth: God wants you to contribute to this church, God considers you a sinner if you don't do what I say. He might not want to destroy the world He had labored so imperfectly to perfect, but neither would He want to continue with a futile effort. I can see how He could get disgusted and conclude that it was best to simply let the world wend its way to Hell in its own fashion. I really couldn't blame Him. Could you?

  But I see no salvation in tuning out the world. So, in the end, I do feel that reform is necessary, and this novel represents a suggestion of the kind of action required. I believe it bears consideration.

  JeJune 17, 1988