Philosophy Made Simple
Robert Hellenga
Praise for Robert Hellenga’s
PHILOSOPHY MADE SIMPLE
“Sweet and lovely. … A charmingly picaresque tale…. Rudy Harrington is a trusting, thoughtful man whose lovability is so artfully created that to get to know him is a treat…. Since this is a novel, it is not a surprise to learn where Hellenga stands on the ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature. He makes his case against Plato well, moving us with pathos and pleasure, startling us into wisdom.”
— Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, New York Times Book Review
“In Hellenga’s vibrant fourth novel, a retired widower embarks on a semi-philosophical quest that yields an avocado grove, an elephant, and a new love…. There’s nothing whimsical about this solidly grounded fiction, which enchantingly explores the space between philosophical concepts and our hapless floundering in life’s challenges.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Fans of Robert Hellenga’s The Sixteen Pleasures will be glad to learn that the heroine, Margot Harrington, is back in his new novel…. Hellenga makes philosophy concrete and lyrical.”
— Polly Shulman, Newsday
“Rudy is smack in the midst of the profound mysteries of existence…. Searching for the reality behind reality, the thing itself, he abandons his philosophers and ‘for a brief moment he sees things as they really are.’ This epiphany is exhilarating for both Rudy and for the reader.”
— Barbara Fischer, Boston Globe
“Wonderfully accomplished. … A frolic in the mode of the comedy-tinged seriousness of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row… . Robert Hel-lengas ability to ground his intelligence in the everyday and produce novels that are smart and intellectually engaging while at the same time emotionally compelling is a rare thing.”
— Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune
“He’s a capable and clever writer, able to mix widely different intellectual strands into a simple whole. We have philosophy, family relations, avocado farming, parallel universes, and abstract painting, all resting comfortably together…. Hellenga is masterful at capturing the poignancy of a rite of passage, whether it be our children moving out, the selling of the family house, the parting after weddings, the shift of life at retirement, or the memories of when our marriages worked and when they didn’t…. Hellenga reminds us, through story, that philosophy and life cannot be made simple.”
— Charles Oberndorf, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“In something that is a bit of a rarity in these days of ubiquitous chick lit, here is a novel about life and love told in the voice of a man of experience…. Rudy finds his answers — and more.”
— Library Journal
“In Philosophy Made Simple, Robert Hellenga offers an engagingly whim sical read, and a great deal of food for thought — a feast for the mind and for book group discussion.”
— Hilary Williamson, Bookloons.com
“In all of his novels Hellenga takes on large subjects, exploring them with insight and clarity. He tells great stories with humor, poignancy, and deep understanding, never leaving out the quirks and idiosyncrasies that make his people real.”
— Valerie Ryan, Seattle Times
“A wry and gentle look at one man’s search for the meaning of his life. Readers will be enchanted by Rudy’s story … Robert Hellenga’s fourth novel gracefully tells the story of a man seeking ultimate meaning amid the mundane events of daily life. Happily Philosophy Made Simple is anything but an introspective or pedantic work. In it, readers will meet an engaging cast of characters that includes a prickly Hindu holy man, a kindly Mexican flower shop owner who provides professional companionship to middle-aged men, and a gentle elephant named Norma Jean.”
— Harvey Freedenberg, BookPage
“The plot moves along energetically fueled by an assortment of characters.”
— Barbara Liss, Houston Chronicle
“Rudy’s touching search for answers maintains just the right amount of humor…. The characters, some deceptively simple but effective, offer up frequent surprises and insights as their lives intertwine with Rudy in his quest for enlightenment, which he gains in the end, at least for a moment.”
— Sandy Amazeen, MonstersandCritics.com
“Philosophy Made Simple is the saga of a modest man trying to make sense of the shadows on the wall of his life. Robert Hellenga’s good humor and generosity keep the most serious subjects delightfully buoyant without detracting from their gravity. But finally, what’s most satisfying — and profound — about his writing is that he has great respect for the complexity of ordinary people and events (though he spices his story with some pretty extraordinary ones as well!). I loved this book, every graceful insight, every unexpected turn.”
— Rosellen Brown, author of Tender Mercies
ALSO BY ROBERT HELLENGA
The Sixteen Pleasures
The Fall of a Sparrow
Blues Lessons
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 by Robert Hellenga
Reading group guide copyright © 2007 by Robert Hellenga and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this
publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored
in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher
Back Bay Books / little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
www.twitter.com/littlebrown
Parts of this novel originally appeared in somewhat different form in Black Warrior, Columbia, Crazyhorse, and Mississippi Valley Review.
The author is grateful for permission to reprint the following:
“Sonnet XI” by Edna St. Vincent Millay is from Collected Poems, HarperCollins.
Copyright © 1931, 1958 by Edna St. Vincent Millav and Norma Millay Ellis. All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, literary executor The excerpt from “Long-legged Fly”
by W. B. Yeats is reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult
Publishing Group, from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems,
Revised, edited by Richard]. Finneran. Copyright © 1940 by Georgie Yeats;
copyright renewed © 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats, and
Anne Yeats. “Vicksburg Is My Home” is by Hans Theessink.
From Hard Road Blues — Blue Grove (BG-6020). Copyright © 1994.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author
First eBook Edition: November 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-09038-4
Contents
Praise for Robert Hellenga’s
Copyright
Allegory of the Cave
For Sale
The Second Coming
Sunset in Jerusalem
The River
Irrigation
Last Will & Testament
A Cultural Friday
Meg
The Ding an Sich
The Übermensch
Molly
The Bath
Everything Means Something
The Veil of Maya
Nirvana
The Gift of a Virgin
Will the Circle Be Unbroken?
God Is Dead
Just Another Day
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Reading Group Guide
&nb
sp; FOR MY WIFE, VIRGINIA
Allegory of the Cave
Rudy took up philosophy late in life. He wanted some answers, an explanation, or at least a chance to ponder the great mysteries, before it was too late — love and death, the meaning and purpose of human existence, moments of vision, the voice of God, the manifest indifference of the material universe to injustice and suffering, the insanity of war, the mysterious tug of beauty on the human heart. What did he know about these things? Not a lot. But something. He’d never had a college education. He’d turned down a basketball scholarship at Michigan State University in order to go to work for Harry Becker up in Chicago. But he hadn’t peddled avocados for thirty years on the South Water Street Market without learning a thing or two about life, and Helen, his wife, had practiced all her lectures on him when she’d started teaching art history at Edgar Lee Masters, dropping her slides one at a time into the projector on the dining room table, the front end propped up on a couple of paperbacks so that it cast a slightly top-heavy image on the wall over the sideboard. So he knew a little bit about Beauty too. Beauty with a capital B: not just a pretty face or a picturesque landscape, not just a Greek Aphrodite or a Renaissance nude or a Turner sunset, but something that might shoot out of an old man’s face or out of a side of beef, sharp as his carbon steel kitchen knives, sad as bent notes on his guitar, but joyful at the same time.
Rudy’d met Helen after a basketball game in Gary, Indiana, back in 1925. He’d played for a semipro team sponsored by the commission merchants on the market, the South Water Bluestreaks. Helen’s uncle, who worked for the Leshinsky Potato Company, next to Becker’s on the market, was one of the refs and had introduced them after the last game of the season, in which Rudy’d made the winning basket. A week later, Saturday night, they’d taken the trolley up to Rogers Park to see Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera at the new Granada Theater, and afterward they’d walked down to the lake. By the time Rudy got home it was three o’clock in the morning, but he wasn’t tired.
Helen had been dead for seven years now; Meg, their oldest, had a law degree and two kids and was planning to go back to work full-time; Molly, their middle daughter, was teaching social dancing at the Arabesque Dance Studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan, while she studied to get her real-estate license; Margot, the youngest — a book conservator at the Newberry Library on the near North Side — had just gone to Italy on the spur of the moment, right after the big flood in Florence.
What had happened? Where had it gone? Life? His life? What would happen to him now? Looking back, he wondered about the scholarship. Of course, if he’d accepted it, everything would have been different, wouldn’t it? He’d never have met Helen; he and Helen would never have bought this old house, never have had three daughters; Helen would never have gone to Italy and met Bruno Bruni, and so on. On the other hand, maybe in a par- allel universe he had accepted it. And maybe in a parallel universe Helen was still alive, living in Italy with Bruni. That’s what his daughters Indian boyfriend, Tejinder Kaal, nephew of the philosopher Siva Singh, seemed to be getting at in an article that Molly’d sent him. Rudy hadn’t been able to make head nor tail of the article, which had been published in a journal called Physical Review Letters. Parallel universes. What a crock, he’d thought, but then Tejinders picture had appeared in the science pages of Time and Newsweek, along with sketches of ghostly people from parallel universes superimposed on photos of a playground (Newsweek) and a cemetery (Time). Both Time and Newsweek cited one of Helens favorite poems, “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost, because, according to Tejinder, there were no roads not taken.
Thanksgiving was the same as always — turkey, dressing (dry and moist), mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, avocados stuffed with chutney, cranberry relish, apple pie — except that Margot was still in Florence, and Molly had stayed in Ann Arbor in order to be with Tejinder. Dan, Meg’s husband, had taken the car to get gassed up for the trip back to Milwaukee. Meg had put the boys down for a nap and was helping him with the dishes. Rudy was washing and she was drying bowls and plastic containers and wooden spoons — all the stuff that didn’t go in the dishwasher — and spreading them out on towels on the kitchen table.
She and Dan had just bought a house up in Milwaukee, and when she said, “Pop, uh, we’ve, uh, been kind of wondering,” Rudy thought she was going to ask him for some money, which he didn’t have enough of. But she said, “We’ve, uh, kind of been wondering about having Christmas in Milwaukee this year.”
Rudy rinsed off his hands, dried them on a dish towel, and poured himself another cup of coffee from the pot on the stove. He wasn’t sure who was included in the “we.”
She started to talk a little faster. Now that Philip was in first grade and little Danny was starting nursery school, she said, she needed to get out of the house. She’d joined the newly formed National Organization for Women, she said, and she was going to start working for a firm of young lawyers in Shorewood — Berlin, Killion, and Wagner — and expected to be very busy getting her feet on the ground; she’d be lucky to get Christmas Day off. Molly was working hard too and would probably be staying in Ann Arbor anyway, Meg explained, so he knew they’d already talked it over. The train schedule was really impossible, and Molly had sold her car, and TJ had relatives in Detroit. But all he, Rudy, would have to do — and Margot, if she ever got back from Italy — was hop on a train in Union Station and he’d be in Milwaukee in about ninety minutes if he didn’t feel like driving, or if the weather was bad.
Rudy’s life — or maybe it was just Life — had always had a way of sneaking up on him, catching him by surprise. He’d think a chapter was about over, and then it would go on and on. Or he’d think he was in the middle of a chapter, and all of a sudden it would stop. It hadn’t been so bad when he was young, because most of the chapters had been ahead of him; but at Rudy’s age, six zero, there weren’t so many chapters left. He hated to see a good one come to an end, which was what was happening.
“Well,” he said, looking down into his empty coffee cup, “suit yourself, if that’s what you really want.” This was a phrase he’d used a lot when the girls were in their teens. One of them — usually Molly — would want to hitchhike out to California with her boyfriend, and he’d say: “Suit yourself, if that’s what you really want.”
And that’s the way they left it, because just as Meg was about to say something that might have settled Christmas one way or another, Dan came in the back door, kicking snow off his boots, saying that the weather was looking bad and they ought to get going before it got dark.
After they’d gone Rudy sat down in the kitchen and started to work seriously on a bottle of pretty good Chianti that was still sitting on the table, imagining what Christmas would be like in Milwaukee, or here in Chicago with just him and the dogs, and maybe Margot, and by the time he got to the bottom of the bottle he’d pretty well convinced himself that he ought to sell the house and go down to Texas and buy Creaky Wilson’s avocado grove. Creaky had died of a heart attack in September, just at the start of the season, and Maxine, Creaky’s widow, had called to see if he was interested or knew anyone who might be interested. Rudy’d never raised avocados, but he’d raised peaches and apples with his dad, and he’d been handling Becker’s avocado account for thirty years. Most avocados come from California — thick-skinned Fuertes and Hasses — but Rudy preferred the thin-skinned Texas Lula, pear-shaped with creamy sweet flesh. Well, he thought, swirling the last of the Chianti in the bottom of his glass, it would be a good way of making them — his three daughters — appreciate what it meant to come home for Christmas to the place you grew up in.
He went down to the basement and pulled out an old one-by-twelve board that had been lying on the floor behind the furnace ever since he’d taken down the bunk beds in Meg’s old room — the board had been used to keep Meg from falling out of the top bunk — and cut off a two-foot length with a new saw The saw — a present from the Texas Avocado Growers Association — was Japa
nese and cut on the upward pull rather than on the downward thrust, which confused him a little but didn’t stop him.
He didn’t bother to sand down the edges; he just opened a can of the paint he’d been meaning to use on the storm windows and painted:
FOR SALE
in big black letters. Underneath FOR SALE he painted:
by owner
When he was done he brought down an electric fan from the attic and turned it on and pointed it at the sign to make the paint dry quicker, and then he went upstairs and sat down in Helens study, as he sometimes did when he was upset or lonely It was a small room but it held a lot of books, on shelves he’d built himself. The curves at the top of each bay were modeled on the curves of a famous bridge in Italy. Helen had given him a photo and he’d made a jig to cut the curves. The door on the east opened into the hallway the one on the west into their bedroom. On the north wall three mullioned windows with leaded glass opened onto the roof of the porte cochere. Helen and the girls had liked to sunbathe on the roof in the summer.
Helen had been raised by an aunt and uncle. The old post-office desk, with a sloping surface and a shelf at the back, had been her uncle’s. It was big and solid. Rudy had had to take the jambs off the door to get it into the room. It was where she’d graded her papers and written her articles. She’d taught art history at Edgar Lee Masters, a small liberal arts college on the near North Side, not far from her aunt and uncles two-story brick bungalow. Her specialty had been medieval and Renaissance art, but she’d liked modern art too, and the bay on the right of the desk was filled with books about modern artists. From where he was sit- ting Rudy could see that the artists’ names on the spines were in alphabetical order: Bacon, Beckman, Braque, Chagall, Dali, de Kooning … Helen was always rearranging her books — alphabetical order, chronological order, by nationality, by period — just as she was always rearranging her life.
