Learning to Fall

Prepared by : Jirah R. Ensaan

June 9, 1912, in Wando on Daniel Island, South Carolina .

Philip Simmons was Associate Professor of English at Lake Forest College in Illinois, where he taught literature and creative writing for nine years before being disabled by Lou Gehrig's disease. He was a frequent speaker and workshop leader for churches and civic groups, and was contributing editor of the UU World, the journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association.

THE AUTHOR

B.A. in English and Physics from Amherst College, his MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis, and his Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan.

His short fiction has appeared in Playboy, Ploughshares, The Massachusetts Review, TriQuarterly, and the Alaska Quarterly Review. His criticism has been published in numerous scholarly journals, and his book, Deep Surfaces, on postmodern American fiction, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 1997.

Paperback:  176 pages

Publisher:  Bantam;

Reprint edition (April 29, 2003)

Language: English

Philip Simmons, Ph.D., was just 35 years old in 1993 when he learned that he had ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, a fatal neuromuscular condition that usually kills its victims in two to five years. With two young children and at the start of a promising academic and literary career, he suddenly had to say goodbye. And by learning the art of dying he succeeded, against the odds, in learning the art of living. Already a widely published author of fiction and literary criticism, he now shares his hard-won insights with this book.

“Learning To Fall”

By: Philip Simmons

New Hampshire’s White Mountains

SettIng Hospital

House Mountain

Chocorua

Characters : Philip SimmonsKathryn (wife)

Aaron (seven year –old son)Amelia (six year-old daughter)

Two Brothers Two young friends

Learning to fall (Summary)

He spent the happier parts of his life at the southern edge of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, two peaks rule his imagination:

(The legend of the defiant Pequawket Indian chief and his wife climbing Mount Chocorua.

He was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. His wife Kathryn and seven-year-old son Aaron were climbing

Mount Washington. Actors and stunt men learn to fall: as kids we watched them

leap from moving trains and stage coaches. Christian theology of the fall, we all suffer the fall from grace,

the fall from our primordial connectedness with God.

We all suffered, and will suffer, our own falls. (styles)

Zen parable 3 years later he course of an illness that kills most

people in or five years, He belonged,statistically,in wheelchair, not on the side of a mountain.

He watched rain storm. He reward his self reading, "The women’s

magazines in the check-out line”. “ Three weeks to Thinner Thighs,” “Ten Successful Men Tell What they Really want in Bed.” Working Mother magazine. “working Mother.” illustrate –the whinny child , the fussy eater- then let down to business of dishing out nuggets of advice set off in the text with bullet points.

He had a toothache.Gabriel Marcel, is fundamental: problems

are to be solved, true mysteries are not. He said that “ We can participate in

mystery only by letting go of solutions. This letting go is the first lesson of failing ,and the hardest.

He driveway to compost pile . He practiced Buddhist meditation . His wife and son left for their hike. In the hospital top of the Mount Tripyramid.

Analysis Actors and stunt men learn to fall: as

kids we watched them leap from moving trains and stage coaches.

Athletes learn to fall, and most people who have played sports have at some point had a coach tell them how to dive and roll. Devotees of the martial arts learn to fall, as do dancers and rock climbers.

Christian theology of the fall, we all suffer the fall from grace, the fall from our primordial connectedness with God.

falling forward and down into the scarred years of conscious life, falling into the knowledge of pain, grief, and loss.

learning to fall is more than merely a matter of posing, more than an opportunity to play it for laughs. NEXT

Zen Parable The man who was crossing a field when

he saw a tiger charging at him. The man ran, but the tiger gained on him, chasing him toward the edge of a cliff. When he reached the edge, the man had no choice but to leap. He had one chance to save himself: a scrubby branch growing out of the side of the cliff about half way down. He grabbed the branch and hung on. Looking down, what did he see on the ground below? Another tiger.

Then the man saw that a few feet off to his left a small plant grew out of the cliff, and from it there hung one ripe strawberry. Letting go with one hand he found that he could stretch his arm out just far enough to pluck the berry with his fingertips and bring it to his lips.

Back

Rain storm invented describe : “AWESOME and Majestic.”

“I felt something more than beauty. Seeing such a storm come at me now across that vast space I felt the astonishment of the sublime, which Edmund Burke defined in the eighteenth century as "not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror." It was as though I had been privileged with a glimpse of my own death, and found it the most terrible and beautiful thing I had ever seen.”

levels life is not a problem, but a mystery“from the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, is fundamental: problems are to be solved, true mysteries are not. Personally, I wish I could have learned this lesson more easily—without, perhaps, having to give up my tennis game. But each of us finds his or her own way to mystery. At one time or another, each of us confronts an experience so powerful, bewildering, joyous, or terrifying that all our efforts to see it as a "problem" are futile. Each of us is brought to the cliff’s edge. At such moments we can either back away in bitterness or confusion, or leap forward into mystery.

We are all—all of us—falling. We are all, now, this moment, in the midst of that descent, fallen from heights that may now seem only a dimly remembered dream, falling toward a depth we can only imagine, glimpsed beneath the water’s surface shimmer. And so let us pray that if we are falling from grace, dear God let us also fall with grace, to grace. If we are falling toward pain and weakness, let us also fall toward sweetness and strength. If we are falling toward death, let us also fall toward life.

Theme Mystery

Simmons distinguishes between “problem” and “mystery.”

Acceptance

Simmons writes, “All of us at certain times in our lives, in the face of failure, loss, illness, and finally, our certain ends, find ourselves asking: why get up this morning? And, given what I’m facing, what work is there for me to do in this world that can possibly make a difference? Lately I’ve come to feel quite strongly that answering these questions begins with acceptance. Not resignation, not passivity, but a profound and thorough acceptance of our place in the natural order.”

Resurrections Do you agree that “in order to be reborn, we first must die”? Die in what sense?

Genre

Non-fiction ,Essay or Diary

Moral Lesson Don’t wait for a tragedy to start appreciating the little things in life. We shouldn’t have to be chased by tigers or leap off a cliff to savor the sweetness of a single strawberry.