ONLY DISCONNECT

By Roger Rosenblatt

On a weekend for which a light dusting was forecast, a good four inches fell on Quogue. They wouldn't call four inches snow in places like Butte and Fargo, but on the southern shore of eastern Long Island the amount is impressive. It makes a sudden New England of an area that, in fact, was settled before most of New England, in the mid-17th century. The steep roofs of the New England-like houses are lathered with snow, and the surprisingly tall pines are shagged with ice, the way they get in Vermont. The main difference is the beach; there is snow on the beach.

I walked to the beach on Sunday morning. The snow made a wide lateral strip at the top, and where it stopped, the sand, brown and wet, continued to the lip of the ocean. I suppose the tide washing ashore made that portion of the sand too warm and moist to sustain the covering of snow, so half the beach was snow and the other half sand.

Sights like that are jarring to the senses because our experience tells us that certain things, both in and out of nature, do not go together. Meret Oppenheim's fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon is always upsetting, no matter how often one looks at it, because we tend to keep certain textures and functions separate in our minds. Snow on a beach is not upsetting in the same way, but it startles the imagination. Where a child built a castle in the sand, he might make a snowman in winter. Or he could build a fort, two forts, two forts of perishable substances. Two beachheads.

My mind drifts in this direction because, no matter that I know there is no reason for bringing the snow and the sand together, still, one is always trying to connect disparate things. How should one drink tea out of an animal? What coherent whole can I make of snow on a beach?

Students of my generation were taught that E.M. Forster's Howards End is an important novel because its central dictum, "Only connect," is a prescription for the moral life. It was assumed that making connections was a sign of the mind's worth and purpose. Only connect; things fall apart; these fragments I have shored against my ruins. Perhaps this effort to bridge and yoke was a consequence of the big bad Bomb, and of a world growing up under the persistent threat of disintegration. Perhaps it was simply an invention of the academy in which exam questions insisted on one's making sense of this as related to that.

A couple of weeks ago, on a Tuesday night, the country was treated to a very different this and that in the simultaneous broadcast of the State of the Union address and the announced verdict of the O.J. Simpson civil trial. Observers on television and in print tried to only connect--the President's reference to race troubles and the allegedly mythic figure of O.J. and the appearance of J.C. Watts Jr., the African-American Congressman who was selected to give the g.o.p. response. There was no logical relationship among these pieces; connections had to be forced. It was too hard to give disintegration its due, much less to take satisfaction in it. We are naturally antianarchic, pro-stability, pro-union.

Some years ago, I was watching the Academy Awards on one channel, staring at the shimmering people. And then I flipped to another channel where the news was showing some 80 dead bodies swaddled in body bags on the floor of an auditorium. They were the victims of the Happy Land social club fire in the Bronx. Flip: the Academy Awards. Flip: the dead of the Bronx. I wondered how these things fit together in the world. Would there be a movie made of the Happy Land fire? Would it win an Oscar?

So I sympathize with those people who sought to create a unity of thought and emotion out of O.J., J.C. and the President, but I also believe that trying to fit parts into a whole makes each component smaller, less interesting and inauthentic. There is a life of parts, as valid as the life of the whole. Simply noting is often enough. What right have I to give the universe a shape other than the one in which it presents itself without comment? There: Madeleine Albright is Jewish. There: Ecuador's President sings A Madman in Love to win the hearts of his people. The world steps forward as Dennis Rodman more often than as Grant Hill, bad as it wants to be, still loco after all these years.

The sad truth (Is it sad?) is that no great story ever makes sense, nothing important is to be understood, and no part fits.

On the snowy beach I thought of an old friend who just got married to the wonderful woman with whom he had been living in perfect bohemian splendor for a dozen years, in a high Episcopalian ceremony so beautiful it took your breath away. And I thought of an old enemy and his new wife who are about to have their first child, and I wished them great happiness. I thought of other things I cannot name. Then I thought of my mother, 89, her once fine and witty mind assaulted by Alzheimer's but otherwise, and cruelly, in excellent health. I thought of her sitting on a beach under a striped umbrella holding a vanilla ice-cream cone, while I, at a distance, built a fort.