Composing a Further Life

parents’ so that our lives cannot be seen as their legacies, and our children will live their own very different lives. Instead of following in our footsteps, they may have learned our willingness to strike out on our own. If we try to tell them in words what we have learned from experience, they will learn something quite different through the passivity of listening. We will never be able to compute what was passed on simply by our presence.
    We cannot pass on the Eriksonian strengths/virtues directly, but perhaps we can do so indirectly. We cannot instruct our children to trust, but we can try to be trustworthy and we can make a practice of showing trust in them; we can teach love by loving and will by consistency. We can even make them more beautiful by responding to their beauty. We can give them hope and courage for their lives by the way we respond to the diminishments of age and, at the last, by the manner of our dying.

Epilogue

    W E END WITH ANOTHER STORY . When the Twin Towers fell, in 2001, I was sixty, not sixteen. I did not see how I might contribute to better understanding between the Islamic world and the West, but I was sharply aware that much of what divides us is ignorance and misunderstanding. I had been doing research and writing on other topics, and my knowledge of the Islamic world had become threadbare and out-of-date.
    At the same time, thinking about the way people compose their lives had made me very much aware of the resources of memory and the way earlier learning can be recycled and informed by new understanding. As I followed the aftermath of 9/11, my years in Arabic linguistics and in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies were increasingly on my mind, with a nagging regret growing from the feeling that I have not sufficiently met the obligation to share the knowledge so expensively offered to me in my student years, knowledge badly needed in a society now preoccupied with fear and hostility toward the Middle East. That reflection made me aware that I had not maintained my knowledge but allowed it to grow obsolete.
    Among the languages I have studied, Arabic was the one I fell in love with and regret losing. I first heard Arabic when I was sixteen and I crossed over from Israel, where I was staying, to Jordan, for in those days Christians were allowed at Christmastime to cross the border as pilgrims (and also, in the case of Christian Arab families, to visit kinfolk from whom they had been separated by war). Instead of visiting the Church of the Nativity, I visited refugee camps and carried that memory with me to the study of Arabic in college and to a continuing concern for peace in the Middle East. Sometimes when I hear Arabic spoken in the street, I fall in behind the speakers simply to luxuriate in the sound.
    Above all, I loved Arabic poetry. In 2006 I spent an evening in Santa Fe at a home with a view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the distance. As I sat with friends, we could see two distinct electrical storms wheeling across the desert and colliding with the mountains, and I found myself describing one of my favorite passages of Arabic poetry, written before the rise of Islam by Imru’u l-Qays. 1 There is even a word in Arabic for following the movement of a storm by observing the flashes of lightning.
    As the poet tracked the storm from one familiar landmark to another, he piled on similes. The flicker of lightning reminded him of the flash of hands shuffling marked arrows in a traditional form of gambling, and then it reminded him of the distant oil lamp of a desert anchorite like those who still, at that time before Islam and the founding of the monastic orders, withdrew to solitary hermitages. The winds snapped the trunks of date palms on familiar oases and lifted the roofs of buildings. The twisted wrack of the storm wrapped around a rocky peak like raw wool around the whirl of a spindle. The storm dumped its baggage like a Yemenite merchant unpacking camel loads of colorful merchandise, and in the morning the larks sang as if they had drunk spiced wine.
    Storms in Arabia can lead to sudden floods moving through the wadis, riverbeds that are dry most of the year; because the wadis are attractive places to camp, drowning has been a fairly common cause of human death in the desert, but what the poet spoke of was the muddy bodies of drowned animals, like the plucked up bulbs of wild onions.
    I had translated the poem, and I had written about it as a linguist, but I had