The MWL wrote a story. It was a short story, compact, sleek and decisive. It came into the world on the back of a envelope, fully formed and complete, and never grew warts, or pig tails or any bigger.
If you make up stories, you know that, like kittens from the same litter, some of them appeal to you more than others. When, for the first time, the MWL reread the story he had written he fell in love with it.
Everything about it pleased him. He liked its scrupulous imagery. He liked the way its well cut metaphors were set in phrases like jewels in a brooch, and the way the phrases, regular and glowing, clung to one another but were distinct, like an expensive string of pearls. He like the way its plot flowed and clung to the earth around hairpin turns. He liked the way it began, and the way it ended. He even liked the way it was punctuated, and the way it looked on the page. In short, he loved it all.
But he found, after he read and reread it many times, that he didn't understand it. The most he could manage were crystals of comprehension that collapsed instantaneously into powdery heaps of confusion, or glimmerings of sense that were quickly eclipsed by contradiction.
The MWL was one of those people who believed that love and understanding were synonyms rather than contraries, and he was bothered a great deal by this lack of understanding.
Since he loved the story he determined to understand it. He reasoned that even though he had made this story up, other people might grasp its meaning better than he did, and that he could discover what it meant by finding out what other people thought its meaning was.
Because he was a subtle and creative person, he found a way, whenever he talked to anyone, to slip this story into the conversation. Sometimes it would ostensibly be to illustrate a point he had made. Other times he would dust it off to emphasize a point that the other person had made. Sometimes he rolled it out just to fill a silence.
But after doing this for a while he realized that, although a great many people liked the story, no one understood it, and everybody he told the story to, waited for him to make its meaning clear to them. When he did not, because he could not, they backed over it, out of the conversation.
As time went on, he grew more and more discouraged, and although his affection for it endured, he despaired of ever finding out what the story he loved so much, meant.
He began to look at it as a betrayed lover looks at his used-to-be-beloved, towards whom his eyes and his heart pull him, while his common sense and experience drive him away. He began to leave it out of his conversations, seizing any excuse to avoid it.
One day he was in the park, dejectedly trying to germinate the seeds of a story he could not only love, but encompass and comprehend, when he met his friend, Reb Dunzel, a Hasid who wore a baseball cap and sneakers. Their first topic of conversation was the child playing in front of them who the MWL was babysitting while her mother was working. The conversation leaped gently to chants, a topic the MWL had no interest in at all, although the way the Rebbe talked about them, they seemed to be pregnant with meaning.
Reb Dunzel seemed to have at least a tenuous hold on a number of things that had no handles at all, and the MWL thought that he might be able to tell him what the story meant, or at least, shed some light on it, and he got ready to lead the conversation to where the story lay, cradled and blanketed in mystery, (and, he was beginning to feel) cunning and deceit.
Then a strange thing happened, at least it seemed a strange thing at the time. He heard Reb Dunzel say, "that reminds me of a story I heard recently," and then start to tell him his own beloved, mysterious story. Now the MWL's first impulse was to interrupt him and yell, "but that's my tale," but he stopped himself and listened to Reb Dunzel tell the story. And, although he couldn't tell why, its meaning became crystal clear to him.
After he finished telling the story, and the little silence that marks occasions like this was over, Reb Dunzel confessed that he had no idea what the story meant.
"I would like to meet the man who made it up," he said sadly. "He must be a genius to have shaped such a wonderful story. It's clear to me," he added, "it's absolutely clear to me, that such a story was crafted to convey its meaning precisely and directly." And he reigned in his talking to give the MWL a chance to respond and tell him the meaning he had found in the story.
But although the MWL could not quite explain why at the time, he could not tell Reb Dunzel what the story meant, even though its meaning had become absolutely clear to him, and he was infinitely grateful to the Rebbe for helping him see that meaning.
"I'm sure," Reb Dunzel continued after the silence was used up, "I'm sure that the only reason I do not understand the meaning of the story is that I am a little slow, and the only reason you can't see its meaning is that I have told the story badly." Although the MWL tried to disabuse him of the notion, Reb Dunzel refused to let go of it and carried this belief home with him as if it balanced the mystery of the story, and allowed him to love it.
Walking home later with his ladder on his back, the MWL thought about what had happened. He decided that it was not ingratitude or covetousness that kept him from telling Reb Dunzel what the story meant. It was that, while the story had a meaning, the meaning belonged to only part of it, and once you knew the meaning, all the other parts of the story became invisible, and you had a different story, or only the piece of it that the meaning made visible, which looked like a different story like another less lovable cat from the same litter.
As he walked, he glanced at the story, which was had stretched out and was relaxing in a corner of his mind, and saw it was a crafty thing to have set itself up to be made in that way, and he saw himself as a victim of the queerest sort of loving.
And somewhere between the park and home, he decided that loving and understanding were the same side of two different coins and that understanding someone or something did not tell you what you loved nor why you loved it, but told you something else entirely but he arrived home before he could tell exactly what.