“Heaven is beautiful, it’s almost like home.” These words are sung by Edie Brickell on Paul Simon’s Seven Psalms, a song cycle about God and Death and Belief and Unbelief that dropped over the summer, a few crises ago. It is a journey we will all take, and we never know when we will make it. Paul Simon and Edie Brickell have been a May-December marriage for over 30 years, so, in the natural order (no guarantees, of course), she would be there to comfort him when the real deal came. Paul wrote the line but gave it to Edie to sing. There is the idea of heaven and then there is the real deal of living and dying. “I lived a life of pleasant sorrows until the real deal came,” he sang, meaning it. He finished this album with only one good ear. He has made his farewells, but he keeps making more of them.
You got out of your hometown a long time ago. Your house has not been your home for decades. You got out to be in the world, to go to college, to plant a flag somewhere bigger, someplace that is somehow more, at least that was how it looked in youth. You remember Robert Frost, the idea that a home was a house built in earnest, then you remember this.
‘Warren,’ she said, ‘he has come home to die:
You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.’
‘Home,’ he mocked gently.
‘Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.’
‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’
You look at the names of the streets, as if the memory would take you back to something, the thing you ran away from, that would somehow solve the mystery of you, these little boxes. You did not grow up in a tourist destination. Just you and your neighbors who seem like they live in another galaxy. The idea of coming home to heaven is something you are wrestling with. You don’t believe in heaven or hell, but if you did, would it really be almost like this thing you ran away from?