Qohelet, in the final scene of King Lear, yet another stage is strewn with dead bodies: Lear and his entire family, all dead—three daughters, two sons-in-law, along with a trusted counselor and his bastard son, and the jester. Well, the jester was done in in an earlier scene, but, for me, his absence hovers over this bloodbath. You see his humor turn sour and satiric, but his fool’s honesty and loyalty are not enough to save him. The death of laughter. Thus Lear veers precariously into dementia; he must become his own fool. So it is that, as your namesake declares, even kings who have achieved great deeds, built great houses, and accumulated great wealth, have no advantage under the sun . . . O how the wise dies just like the fool! . . . All is vanity and the pursuit of the wind.

I know you know this narrative, but let me, the fool, be your resuscitated guide through the seasons of men. Further . . . the race does not belong to the swift, nor the battle to the valiant. So, too, bread does not belong to the wise, nor wealth to the intelligent, nor favor to the clever, for a timely incident befalls them all. That is, if you have a chip on your shoulder, think again about how the chips have fallen, fairly or unfairly and for no good reason. Why are you angry, and to whom or what can you direct your anger? What revenge will finally assuage your pain? This is vanity and the pursuit of the wind. And you are a fool if you think that just men receive justice and that fools, like me, are condemned. Human life is vanity, or to translate it more literally: a breath, a whiff, a puff, vapor—illusory and ephemeral. God’s hand is pervasive but inscrutable. You cannot know your destiny. No amount of knowledge can make you truly wise. But, and this is a big but, there is a small compensation: the gift of joy. A small, potent gift of the daily. Hold the hand of the small one. Embrace your companion. Give away your bread and your coat. When times are good, enjoy; when times are bad, see . . . So I have commended joy because there is nothing better for people under the sun, but to eat, drink and enjoy . . . Go, eat your food in pleasure, and drink your wine with a merry heart.

They say Ecclesiastes contains instructions from an old sage to youth, but like every other ancient text passed dubiously over centuries, its authorship is contested, and some say it never really belonged in this sacred canon. Who is this narrator whose message is read as contradictory, pessimistic, and skeptical, radical in thought, and far afield from the God of divine covenants and prophetic hope, exceptional interventions, and targeted retributions? This is neither the word of God nor of prophets. It is rather the observation of a wise man. Materialist that I am, I find these recommendations finally sane, outside of special promises to special people and special homelands. No one in this world gets saved. Death is the great equalizer.

Homer would note that the narrator of Ecclesiastes likely lived in Palestine under the governance of the great Persian Empire between the fifth and fourth centuries BCE and that the context of his concerns was the crossroads of commerce, the standardization of coinage, the imposition of taxes, and the economic volatility that made humans unequal. And Vyasa would remind us of the traveling nature of story and meaning, the narrative flashes recalling the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh or perhaps the Assyrian sage Aqihar, his Proverbs discovered in the Egyptian Elephantine. Who can know the origins of this text said to be penned by the mercurial narrator, Qohelet? Then, Ishi would comment on the anthropology of the narrative, its grounded humanism, and Ananda on its insistence on the worldly as ephemeral and illusory, the cyclical nature of life. But then, you could suggest what John might say—that Ecclesiastes marks the threshold and particular promise of Jesus, his teachings about charity, and, finally, his resurrection and the death of death. I have to quibble greatly with John and admit that I don’t believe in the death of death. Not believing in death as the end and great equalizer is in part why, I think, we continue to kill each other.

From time to time in the postwar years, John was invited to preach at Howard Thurman’s Fellowship Church. Sometime in 1949, he gave this sermon: The Laughter of the Human Soul. Of all the notes, scribbling, letters, and post-stroke essays, this sermon makes most sense to me. Here, laughter is a sign of and a sense of self-integrity, as he says, feeling at home in one’s world, with a kinship to others and the self-confidence of direction. It has taken me years to understand this very simple but, I know now, nearly impossible way of being. Now I see that at every turn, this is what he looked for in others, and this is what he hoped for, for himself, for his family, for his children. Death was always a heartbeat away, and life, therefore, not to be taken for granted. And laughter allowed for spontaneity and exuberance and extravagance, giving balance to the tough practice of responsibility, play in the diligence of political action, freedom in intellectual pursuit. Even if all is vanity and the pursuit of wind, John thought we should stop occasionally for a belly laugh.

Two weeks ago today, John’s fourth great-grandchild was born. Born three weeks early, he was almost immediately carted away to a neonatal unit for observation. A sophisticated cart contraption enclosed his six-pound, velcroed-in mini-person, hooked up all his vital signs to a digital dashboard, pumped oxygen to his little nostrils, fluids to his tiny veins, and lifted and wheeled itself onto an ambulance. All this for transport only three blocks away. It was the NASA capsule of an astronaut. In the brief space of his transport, I watched the new infant, not yet a day old, through the thick, shatterproof plastic window. Where’re you going, I chuckled. To the moon?

His dark eyes suddenly opened for the first time and communicated to me his first thought, Hey, when did I sign up for this?

I answered, Astronaut what your country can do for you. I laughed at my own joke, but the nurses and paramedic crew, all at least a generation younger than me, kindly smiled and shrugged.

Now when I think about it, every one of John and Asako’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren opened their eyes to some possible, but in my mind sardonic, and defining first thought.

Are you my mommy?

Fooled you; I’m a monkey.

Who are you?

Who knew?

Do you love me?

They sent me to the wrong place.

You have no idea.