THE SMILE

Irving A. Greenfield, Ph.D.
50 Battery Place, Apt. 5L
New York,
NY 10280
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1-212-786-4342









THE SMILE

by Irving A Greenfield


Dr. Martin Khol?s emotional meter registered a null; he knew it and was unsettled by it. He loved his wife, two sons and grandchildren and a few other people outside the family. He was capable of laughing at a good joke and jeering and a bad one. Sunrise and sunset gave him pleasure as did play of light and shadow on the cityscape. But notwithstanding all of that, something was wrong; he really didn't care if he lived or died. And rather than being filled with an overwhelming feeling of sadness, it registered nothing.
His wife, Anna, for fifty-seven years, said he was depressed; and he counted with he was ?deep in the throes of thinking through a philosophic problem,? and since that was the field of his expertise, she accepted the answer without comment and thankfully, as far as he was concerned, there were no follow-up questions.
It felt extremely odd for him to walk along a crowded city streets, or attend a concert, or sleep next to his wife and know there was a part of him missing, a lacuna where none had ever been. It was a nothingness that became something because it remained nothingness, a null.
If he could have described it, give it a shape and color; or better still if he could have quantified it, he might have been able to discover its origin, defining its structure, and possibly arrive at a conclusion that would enable him to deal with it. But none of those conditions were available to him.
Martin decided that somehow his age was a key factor in this situation, and that eighty it was time to examine the events of his life and weigh them, or to put it into words that Socrates was supposed to have spoken, "An unexamined life is not worth living." Being a philosopher himself, he never thought there was any wisdom in those words; they always seemed to be a shade away from being fatuous. Such an examination would require absolute objectivity; something he believed all men lacked; and the word "life" was troublesome too. A life for him may not be a life for someone else. Its lack of exclusivity made it impossible to define. But this didn't stop him from looking at his past; and though the memories were there, often abundantly clear, they did nothing to change his emotional null.
Then, on a crisp autumnal Saturday before Thanksgiving he was on the M 20 bus, somewhere around Fourteenth street, going up town to meet his wife, who was at the Broadway show, Chicago, when he looked out of the window and saw his own reflection amid the light of the early Christmas decorations; and it instantly occurred to him that his problem might lay in another dimension altogether: that the past had nothing to do with it and the future less, since the future was filled with uncertainty; therefore, according to the way he was thinking it was the present that mattered, the moment was the be all. We constantly move into the future and as soon as reach we reach the present it becomes our past.
Martin tried to catch a glimpse of his reflection again, but the lighting was never right. But at that moment when he saw himself where was he? This senses told him he was on the bus in the present moving immediately into the future. But at the instant he saw himself he was also somewhere outside the bus looking in. So the question was which one of him was real? And if they were both real would that account for the way he felt? Did his opposite feel the same way?
The questions did not excite or depress him; they were there in his mind as interesting speculations. But intuitively he knew they were more. He felt as if he had reached a profound insight; a reality, a kind of mystical reality sort by religious ascetics. But this was no glowing light or saintly vision. His was wrapped up in knowing -- knowing what? Knowing he knew that he -- the two of them existed in the same place at the same moment. It didn't matter whether he was him or his other was him. What mattered was the hint of a smile, a way of communicating across a boundary, a way of telling him that he too knew the nothingness that is something.
And then Martin was struck by what he considered a profound truth: he always had that void, that sense of nothingness; and if he had it, so did every human being. Perhaps every animal had it? But human beings, because of their evolutionary development, had it to a greater degree, the sense of inexorable time moving to an individual end, but also a cosmological end.
Somehow, Martin reasoned, there was a connection between the sense of nothingness and the absolute nothingness that all living things experience. But if that were so, what was the connection to his or anyone's emotional null. It could only be the beginning of the end: small at first, but as the years progressed it too progressed, growing larger until it could no longer be ignored. As it grew, so did his feeling of an emotional null grow. After all, passed a certain point in life, what could move that needle off of its null position?
He thought about the various emotions that might cause the needle to move: love, hate, anger, joy, contentment or discontentment. There were more but he didn't bother name them. But none of those emotions meant anything; they would not move the needle.
When the bus stopped for a red light, he saw that it was at Twenty Third Street. Still a distance to go before he'd get off at Forty Ninth Street, walk one block west and meet his wife in front of the Colony Music Store.
He went back into his world, a new world he told himself. ? All of the emotions he thought about he still experienced. But -- and it was one of those big BUTS -- they didn't matter. They happened and were gone, leaving no lasting effect. Everything became a mental shrug of his shoulders. Nothing mattered. Was that because of the void? When did he or anyone else, become conscious that nothing mattered? Probably when the void began to manifest itself?
Perhaps it begins as a mid-life crisis, which isn't confined to mid-life but happens every few years taking various forms of discontents or psychological and physical disabilities? But it's only when a person passes through his sixties, seventies and eighties does some sort of illumination take place. Different, he imagined, for each individual. But the feeling of nothingness is there, a preparation for the ultimate nothingness when the nothingness dissolves into the sublime purity of death.
Martin took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, and for the next few moments allowed his mind to go blank, before he was overtaken with the idea that there were only two ultimate experiences in life: birth which takes place in nine months; and death which takes a lifetime to get to. In between there were only happenings. Now he was close to the end and was privileged to have touched something unique.
Suddenly Martin thought about the face peering back at him; his without a doubt, except there was a hint of a smile on it and he wasn't smiling. Somehow he and his other self and is had broken through "the wall" and allowed each other to find that nothingness is really the secret of everything.
And when he met his wife, she commented that he somehow looked different."Radiant," she said.
He smiled, took hold of her hand and together they walked to their favorite