wing it to you.”
“You’ll what it to me?”
“Wing it,” she said. “Distance is nothing to living energy. I can send
the corrected energy to you from here.”
“How fast does energy travel?” I asked. “At the speed of sound, or is
it more like a jetliner? Does it fly direct, or will it have to lay over in
Minneapolis?”
Mother laughed and hung up.—I STUDIED MOST MORNINGS in the college library, near a small window. I
was there on a particular morning when Drew, a friend from BYU, sent
me a song via email. He said it was a classic but I had never heard of it,
nor of the singer. I played the song through my headphones. It gripped
me immediately. I listened to it over and over while staring out at the
north cloister.
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our mindsI scratched those lines into notebooks, into the margins of the essays
I was writing. I wondered about them when I should have been
reading. From the Internet I learned about the cancer that had been
discovered on Bob Marley’s foot. I also learned that Marley had been a
Rastafarian, and that Rastafari believe in a “whole body,” which is why
he had refused surgery to amputate the toe. Four years later, at age
thirty-six, he died.
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. Marley had written
that line a year before his death, while an operable melanoma was, at
that moment, metastasizing to his lungs, liver, stomach and brain. I
imagined a greedy surgeon with sharp teeth and long, skeletal fingers
urging Marley to have the amputation. I shrank from this frightening
image of the doctor and his corrupt medicine, and only then did I
understand, as I had not before, that although I had renounced my
father’s world, I had never quite found the courage to live in this one.
I flipped through my notebook to the lecture on negative and
positive liberty. In a blank corner I scratched the line, None but