Providence Read Free

extraordinary. The universe shaped you to come here tonight to elicitthis story. The universe shaped me to be here tonight to tell it.
    This is the other half of
Ishmael.
This is the part that many readers sense was left untold.
    In responding to readers’ letters, I soon realized that the question “Where did this book come from?” doesn’t have just one answer. It has dozens, because
Ishmael
came from every part of my life. I saw that some of the answers could be found in 1975 and 1974. But then I saw that some of them could be found in 1967 and some of them could be found in 1963. And some of them could be found even before that, in 1953. Finally I realized that the real beginning of the book had to be traced back to 1941, to one of the earliest memories of my life, and that’s where I’ll start here tonight.
    They have the feeling that the origins of
Ishmael
must be somehow magical, and they’re right.
    Some patient biographer may discover that I’m setting this event in the wrong house or in the wrong year, but it’s the event that counts, not the house or the year. What I remember was that we were living in Mrs. Gilogly’s house on 32nd Street between Dodge and Farnum in Omaha, Nebraska. I don’t suppose any remnant of this lifestyle survives today, but it worked very well in the era of the Great Depression. Mrs. Gilogly’s was a huge old family residence that had been converted into a boarding house, which made for a very practical and economical way of life. We had the top floor, Mother, Father, Dennis(my older brother), and I, perhaps four or five rooms. I remember only a couple of the other residents, but I suppose there must have been half a dozen, all white-collar workers or university students. It worked out very well for my parents, who both worked, since Mrs. Gilogly provided a sort of ad hoc day care for me, who was the only really young person on the premises (my brother being seven years my elder).
    My parents were probably considered very modern, not only because they both worked but because they were very permissive with their children. Frankly, I doubt if this proceeded from any kind of principle, modern or otherwise. Mother liked the nightlife, such as it was in Omaha, Nebraska, at that time in history. They would come home from work, have dinner in the communal dining room downstairs, get dressed, and go out for the evening, coming home long after I was asleep. I think their attitude was that, since they liked to do as they pleased, it was only reasonable for their children to do as they pleased as well. I know that, at the very least, at the age of six, I would on Saturday afternoons, all by myself, take myself off to the movies, a mile or so away. I was a solitary child, even at this age, I don’t know why. I wasn’t conscious of being shy or special; I wasn’t conscious of being lonely. Until the event I’m leading up to, I wasn’t conscious of being anything, as far as I remember.
    One night in the spring of 1941 I had a dream. It was the middle of the night in Omaha, Nebraska, in this dream—truly the dead of night, every radio silent, every lamp dark, every car in its garage, every man, woman, and child in bed asleep. Only one human being was abroad inthat dead of night, and it was me. I was trudging home after a movie, head down, one foot in front of the other, down the long, silent blocks, past the dark, silent houses.
    Suddenly I found my path blocked. A tree had fallen across the sidewalk. This was strange, because the tree hadn’t been there two hours before, when I passed by on my way to the movie theater. I say it was a tree, and it was, but it was a kind of dream tree. It was the essence of a tree, which is to say it was a tree trunk. If it had been an actual tree, I would have come up against a huge tangle of leaves and branches, and the heart of the tree, the trunk, would have been hidden and inaccessible inside that tangle, which means that what happened next