On Will

Essay 5

On some days I think that all I have is my will. Everything else comes and goes, builds up and crumbles—the flow and the ebb—but my will is there and nothing can kill it. In moments in my life when I’ve felt really down, or lost, or flawed, I wondered what made my will exist, to resist, literally, every event. Whether it had always been there, whether it’s some gene, that sometime in the “deep well of the past” it is what made someone walk out of the Olduvai Gorge, up the Levant, across the steppe; made them work and love, save and move, crawl home from concentration camps, hide from tanks, eat nothing—and win and wait and snicker and grieve and pose proudly. To reluctantly end communism, to be terrified and cynical because all worlds end, and keep going and going and going on, high on the infinite will.

I sat in my bathrobe when all seemed gone and felt my will there like a bone. It is there, it is hard, it is for as long as I am. It carves my way in the earth—ahead, still—and there’s nothing I can do to stop it, and there’s nothing it can do to stop me.

It is my mystery, but it does not feel mine... I’m shaped like its temporary stop, on its way up the Nile, each cross-timezone mile, for the time being only on Earth. And it gets me up every day, and it’s two for the road, this way.