Waiting for Snow in Havana and other cheekiness

Alas, this is not my title, but that of my favorite memoir, Carlos Eire‘s Waiting for Snow in Havana, which won the National Book Award in 2005.

A rollicking Latin story of growing up prior to Castro taking power in Cuba, this memoir made me laugh, despair, rejoice and savor my own freedom here in the good ole USA.
I’ve been waiting ever since for the sequel, to find out what happened to Eire after he and his brother arrived without relatives in Miami on the “Peter Pan Airlift” in 1962. Sent as a ten-year old with his 14 year-old brother, Eire carried a parting gift from his parents, Thomas à Kempis‘ The Imitation of Christ, which Carlos indicated made all the difference to his life.

In 2005, I wrote to Carlos Eire (who is a professor of history and religion at Yale) and expressed my appreciation for Waiting for Snow in Havana, but asked about The Imitation of Christ–since he never explained why it was so important. Just as cheeky in 2005 as he was in his youth, Eire suggested I read the book myself and form my own conclusions.

Once a professor, always a professor.

I read it, didn’t see anything that made sense to me, and so I let it go, hoping a sequel would enlighten me.

I’ve spent all weekend pouring through Learning to Die in Miami. It didn’t grab me as completely and with as much a salsa hush as Waiting for Snow in Havana, but it moved me on a deeper level as Thomas à Kempis’ influence (not mentioned until nearly the end, but obviously there in hindsight) worked its way through young Carlos Eire’s life. His description of “the Void,” alone, is worth the price of the book:

“Bonk. I leave my body and float over it. I’m looking at myself, and at the doctors and nurses . . . My body doesn’t look too good without me in it. I look dead, or hungover, or both at the same time . . .

“Bonk. I’m out of there, going down a spiral tunnel very, very fast, headfirst. It’s a long way down, down, down. It seems to take hours, maybe days, or some timeless measure, and as I plummet it gets darker and darker, and I can’t see anything, and my falling speeds up.

“Bonk. I’m out of the tunnel, and there’s nothing there. Nothing but me, without my body. Nothing but utter darkness and me, whatever I am: mind, soul, whatever, but certainly not a body. I left that behind on the operating table, looking poorly. No motion, no sound, no cold, no heart; nothing to see, nothing to touch, nothing to feel, nothing to taste. Not even wormwood, or my own salty tears. I have no eyes, anyway, no tongue. Nothing but pure thought and the awareness of my own existence and my own eternal loneliness.

“Never, ever, have I felt such pain and terror; such pure panic. I pray for annihilation, but there is no one or nothing to pray to. All I can do is to wish for my extinction, and to know that I’ll be eternally unable to annihilate my lonely rotten self.”

I gasped when I read those words–that to me is life apart from God–and Carlos put it into words that seared with a cold knife blade into my soul.

According to Eire, Thomas à Kempis’ book talks of dying to self, of giving away everything to gain it all, and other concepts well-known to a follower of Christ.

Maybe I’m old enough now to read The Imitation of Christ, and understand things just a little better. Writer Jim Watkins wrote an updated language edition in 2016. You can see the link here.

Tweetables

The Imitation of Christ and cheekiness. Click to Tweet

“The Void” and The Imitation of Christ. Click to Tweet