Help

by Keizer, Garret

• ISBN13: 9780060560621
• ISBN10: 0060560622
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-08-25
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

The noted "Harper's" essayist explores the paradox that we are human only by helping others--and all too human when we try to help.

Author Biography

Garret Keizer is a frequent contributor to Harper's Magazine. He lives with his family in northeastern Vermont

Table of Contents

ONE: THE DARK WOOD	1	(18)
TWO: THE DUBIOUS SAMARITAN	19	(34)
THREE: THE DREAM WE NO LONGER ADMIT	53	(46)
FOUR: THOSE WHO HAVE HANDS	99	(50)
FIVE: THE DOMESTIC SAMARITAN	149	(42)
SIX: THE DESCENT INTO HELL	191	(42)
SEVEN: A BETTER PLAN THAN THIS	233	(16)
NOTES	249	(18)
BIBLIOGRAPHY	267	(8)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	275

Excerpts

Help
The Original Human Dilemma

Chapter One

The Dark Wood

The trooper was calling long-distance from Arizona to find outwhat I knew about Kathy B. besides her name, the Christian half ofwhich happened to be the same as my wife's. I registered the similarityas soon as he said the words: Kathy is dead. I hated the sound of that,though I had heard something like it once before. Years ago, whenKathy B. was living nearby and slowly draining the reservoirs of mygoodwill, she had called the office at the school where I taught andasked that I be paged because of "an emergency."

"Who is this?" the secretary had demanded.

"Kathy."

But it had not been my Kathy, and it had not been an emergency,though I might well have had an accident or a heart attack as I dashedout of my classroom and down the crowded hall to the phone.

I told the trooper I did not know much. There was a couple over inIsland Pond with whom Kathy had sometimes stayed during her sojournsin northeastern Vermont; the trooper said he had already foundtheir names after searching Kathy's campsite. It was they who had recommendedthat he call me. Yes, I was a minister, I verified, but onlypart-time, and I had never really been her minister. I had found hersitting on the church lawn one Sunday morning (gaunt and toothless,at first glance neither male nor female but with an ascetic's preternaturalstrength in her grip and in her stride) and had tried to help her fora few months thereafter. In fact, I was one of those who had helped herarrange the trip to Arizona. She had seldom attended my church.

"I just tried to help," I said.

If the trooper was thinking what I was thinking, that apparently myhelp had not been enough, his voice did not betray him. In fact, hesounded ready to credit me with more grief than I could feel when hetold me that Kathy B. had taken her own life.

Two lines from two songs keep playing in my head these days, thoughit has been a while since either was a regular on my stereo. The one isfrom the folksinger Joni Mitchell, and it goes: "If you can't find yourgoodness 'cause you've lost your heart." The other, from an Australiangroup called Paul Kelly and the Messengers, is much like it. "I lost mytenderness," Kelly says. Then he adds, "I took bad care of this."

It would make a neat transition to say "me too," but the truth is thatI have not lost my heart or my tenderness as nearly as I can tell and sofar as people tell me. Not yet. I also have not lost my hair or any of myteeth, which another singer, James Brown, claims are the main things aman needs to hang on to. (I assume that is especially true if the man isJames Brown.) But I have reached that age when things do start to falloff or out of a person: hair, teeth, muscle tone, and perhaps some ofthe altruistic energy of youth.

A quip often attributed to Winston Churchill asserts that a manwho isn't a socialist when he's young has no heart, and a man who isn'ta conservative when he's old has no brains. I would sooner lose my hairthan allow myself to become a conservative (or brainless) -- but I amextraordinarily fond of that quote, and I take it there must be a goodreason. It may be the same reason I keep imagining the Mitchell lineand the Kelly line playing over and over like a dire musical omen -- andthe same reason too that I heard the trooper's announcement with asense of mounting resistance. I am too old, I said to myself, to be surprisedby this news and too old to feel implicated by it. I am also tooold to feel guilty for not feeling sadder about it. I did what I could tohelp her. I saw this coming.

And yet I was apparently not too old to wish, and to say that Iwished -- in regard to the trooper's search for any next of kin -- "thatI could be of more help." And even though Kathy B. was dead now, Istill prayed that God would help her.

Help is what this book is about. You will notice that I am also at theage when one has little patience for a long prelude. Along with thatimpatience comes a sense, hitherto rare in my life, of limited possibilities.At twenty-five, we feel that we will always be able to get to certainthings at some later date; when we are fifty even a bookcase starts tolook like a graveyard. If I start right now, and read twenty-five pages everyday ... But of course we do not start right now, and even if we did, wewould be unlikely to keep the resolution. We know more vividly thanever before that we are going to have to make deliberate, fatal choicesabout which books we are going to read and, in a case like mine, whichwe will try to write.

For various reasons that will become clearer as we go on, I have decidedthat one of the things I want most to read and write about iswhat it means to help someone -- and what it means not to help someone.They go together, of course, because, as most people discoversooner or later, you can wind up not helping even when you wanted tohelp and vice versa. Let Kathy B. stand as my Exhibit A.

I should say at the outset that I am not writing primarily about altruism ...

Help
The Original Human Dilemma. Copyright © by Garret Keizer. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Help: The Original Human Dilemma by Garret Keizer
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