Feeling Sad
We had good rivalries with the other teams. I still remember going to basketball games as a young boy and staring at the banners of the other schools that hung in our gym. One night, I noticed that one of the schools (named Pennfield) had been removed from the TVAC wall of banners. I was sad to see them gone, even though I didn’t know where Pennfield was or how well they had competed or why they had left. I wasn’t able to shake that somber feeling for quite awhile.
I was laying in bed one night last year, trying to get to sleep as the last football game of the season was being played. I could hear the cheers, the PA announcer, and an occasional cannon blast declaring that my alma mater had scored.
I was feeling sad. It would be the last TVAC football game ever. The Little League was disbanding at the end of the year, and many of its schools (including mine) were getting merged into a new “mega-conference” of sixteen teams.
I was just laying there thinking about the TVAC and what it meant to me.
Or, more accurately, what it didn’t mean to me.
Sand in an Hourglass
It was odd. I never thought much about the TVAC. I was passingly pleased when my school won a league championship and was mildly interested to know the standings, but that was about it. Yet I was melancholy over the thought of this being the last TVAC football game ever.
I wasn’t sure why I cared. The TVAC never had, and never would, affect my family, my job, my church, or anything else of importance. But, illogical as it may seem, I was undeniably disturbed by its looming oblivion.
Then something happened that told me why the TVAC’s disbandment was bothering me.
I had a wicked bout of what I call “evening terrors.”
Evening terrors happen to me occasionally. Some bouts are mild, like the Pennfield melancholy that I still remember hitting me as a maturing boy. But some are fairly intense, especially the ones that hit at bedtime. And about two or three times a year they come on so hard that they keep me awake for twenty minutes or more.
It’s hard to describe an evening terror, but it’s like your entire mental landscape shifts and you aren’t seeing things like you normally see them. My wife, my sons and daughters, my parents, my friends, my house, my job, my writing career — all those things that take center spot at different times during the day — become mere shrubbery in a mental landscape of ephemerality. My parents are getting older and will be dead tomorrow. My children are small; soon they’ll be moving out. The money I make today and occupies my attention for half of my waking hours will be irrelevant shortly. The high school and its football stadium will one day be bulldozed or converted into some sort of commercial use. In an evening terror, all the things that seem so important during the day become seen for what they ultimately are: transient and passing.
Especially one’s own life. I’m in my thirties. In a few hours, I’ll be forty and I’ll wake up tomorrow and be seventy-five. During an evening terror, your existence seems like sand in an hourglass. I know this is a worn-out metaphor, but it’s an apt metaphor because the sand in an hourglass drains constantly and quickly. In an evening terror, this reality becomes starkly evident.
This, I believe, is the crux of an evening terror: The references of your normal mental bearings — the cries and concerns of everyday life — aren’t there to distract you, and there is nothing between you and bare reality. You and It. Nothing else, all the mundane stuff shoved aside.
The Long Sleep
Now, I want to make clear that I don’t think the mundane stuff isn’t important. My wife and children, my job, my parish life: those are important things. Indeed, it is through such things that people come to know God. They are mediums. They stand between God and us, revealing God to us and allowing us to worship God through them.
But these mediums are transient things, and some day they will pass — or, more precisely, we will pass from them. And when we do, we will stand before stark, naked reality.
It is significant that evening terrors seem to assault me the strongest when the passing of an ephemeral thing (like the Twin Valley Athletic Conference) is on my mind but otherwise I am at rest (like when I lay down in bed to go to sleep). I suspect evening terrors are merely a foretaste of something to come. A foretaste of what will happen when another ephemeral thing prepares to pass as I lay my body down to sleep for the last time.
Eric Scheske is the Editor of Gilbert! The Magazine of G.K. Chesterton.
