The Lesser Beauty

When I was studying Japanese in the languages, literatures, and cultures department at UMass Amherst in the early 2010s, I became enamored of a now-obscure school of medieval Japanese Buddhism called Ji-shū, the Time School. Ji Buddhism was in most respects within the mainstream of Pure Land Buddhist thought, whose characteristic features include the belief that final enlightenment in the present world is no longer possible and the best course of action is to pray to a cosmic buddha called Amida for a rebirth in his Pure Land, a universe in which practicing the dharma is easier. Pure Land is the most widespread and popular type of Buddhism in Japan but has historically not been appealing to Western converts. Where Ji and its founding figure, an itinerant monk called Ippen Shōnin, parted company with mainstream Pure Land was in the belief that by invoking Amida’s name, a practice called the nenbutsu in Japanese, one effected a sort of spiritual time travel back to Amida’s own enlightenment, in which one then partook. The school’s name derives both from this belief and from the related practice of chanting the nenbutsu at particular times of day, somewhat similar to the set times for prayer in Islam.

I attempted to induce something similar to this recently, for secular reasons and involving my own past. On the way back from a road trip to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania from my apartment in Upstate New York, my housemate and I passed through Bordentown, the New Jersey river town where I spent most of my adolescence after my mother and I relocated from rural Vermont. I have not lived in Bordentown for a decade and had not even been there for almost eight years; I had little idea of what to expect from returning, but I did expect—and want—for it to involve a powerful emotional and even numinous reaction. I went out of my way to elicit this reaction by putting on Riot!, a Paramore album from 2007 (an extremely influential year in my life), while approaching the Delaware River from the west on Interstate 276. It worked. The two hours or so that my housemate and I spent in Bordentown overawed me so much that now, two weeks later, I have found myself waking up and lying in bed for half an hour thinking about it, remembering.

I remember the routine I developed in that great year of 2007, when I was old enough to be a latchkey kid and my mother worked full-time at a legal services firm in Trenton. I would get off the bus after school, go into my house, drop off my backpack, then leave the house again and go to Boyd’s Drugstore. Turn right out the front door, northwest on Second; turn left, southwest on Railroad; kitty-corner across the intersection of Railroad and Farnsworth, a quick glance over my left shoulder at the new war memorial (the old war memorial being a statue of an eagle perched on a cannon in front of the post office at Prince and Walnut), and into Boyd’s. Buy a bottle of Ocean Spray cranberry juice—the bottling plant was in Bordentown at that time, across from a retirement home for Divine Word Missionaries that now houses Bordentown’s city hall—and oftentimes also a small bag of sour Skittles and some pretzels. (I don’t like that this memory involves specific brands rather than generalizations like “sour candy,” but it does.) Then out of the drugstore, either across to the war memorial where I would sit for a few minutes eating my snacks or back home to sit around reading, posting on LiveJournal, or watching Avatar: The Last Airbender reruns until my mother got home two or three hours later. I only had this routine for about a year and a half but it made me feel, frankly, more normal than almost anything else I have ever done. More normal and yet more conservative; almost nobody has this kind of picture-perfect after-school bumming-around experience nowadays. All I was missing was friends who lived in walking distance, since I went to a private day school with an enormous catchment area.

From Boyd’s one could proceed to the northwestern end of Farnsworth, near which there was a beautiful old redbrick house with a gate into a garden that was always absolutely wild with wisteria. There would be a white cat sitting on the stoop; I wonder when the cat ever moved or went inside to eat or sleep or use the litter box. Now the wisteria is gone and the house seems to be abandoned; the upstairs windows are boarded up. I don’t know why, or what happened to the cat. At that end of town one could also descend from the bluffs to a wetland area with walking paths and somewhat dubious, murky creek water that I always wanted to try going swimming in but never did.

Or from my front door I could walk southwestward in an almost Euclidean straight line—or segment, rather—down Church Street, and end up at Christ Episcopal Church, a conservative Anglo-Catholic parish that I went to on Christmas Eve mostly for the aesthetics. Christmas Eve 2007 was when I suddenly started believing in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, a belief that I developed before I developed a firm belief in God. Christ Church has a leafy, mossy graveyard like something out of This England; still to this day it does. I was an enormous Anglophile in those days and still have a distaste for the performative hatred of people and things English that characterizes a lot of what currently passes for American leftist rhetoric.

The subject of foreign cultures with which I became enamored during this period of my life brings us to the subject of the Jade Island, also known as the U-Turn Route 130 Chinese Restaurant—a New Jerseyite touch if there ever was one. The Jade Island served sushi too; it, along with a downtown Bordentown Japanese restaurant called Tsukasa, was where I fell in love with Japanese food, and the anime and manga fandom culture of those days was where I fell in love with Japanese writing. The first girl I sort-of-dated was heavily into that scene, and got me into it. The Jade Island is still there but has switched to an all-takeout model now—regrettably, since the interior used to be and still is gorgeous. When I went there with my housemate I sat reading a Japanese pulp sci-fi novel for old time’s sake while we waited for our order. It wasn’t quite the same, and not only because Otherside Picnic is a very different kind of story from Azumanga Daioh, or for that matter whatever Takahashi series my quasi-girlfriend had recommended in a particular week.

Old downtown business that are gone: App’s Hardware, which is understandable because I think there was some kind of sex scandal. Jester’s Café, which is understandable because of the pandemic but still must have been an axe blow very near Bordentown’s roots (the same roots that push up the crazy-paving brickways that will probably never change). Tsukasa, moved to a larger location outside of town and then closed there too, probably also because of the pandemic. The Beanwood Café, where I would sometimes go see live music with my best friend when she would visit me on our respective breaks from college. What’s still there? Under the Moon, for one, which I think is an Argentinian restaurant. Marcello’s. The Old Bookshop. Probably Thompson Street Halloweens. Possibly my childhood cat Pando’s drifting spirit, within that little white nineteenth-century house with its Doors-of-Durin ornamental living room pillars. Edna St. Vincent Millay would not have been resigned to all this; Christina Rossetti probably would have.

Am I? Perhaps. It depends on what the meaning of “resigned” is. In a way there’s nothing to which to be resigned to; the attempt to induce a Ji Buddhism-esque original enlightenment succeeded in the sense that I did feel catapulted back in time even though the current state of Bordentown has changed. Time, from a Christian theological or even theoretical-physical perspective, is less an arrow or a cycle than a particular entity, in its own way as concrete as objects in space, a dimension that from God’s perspective is just as firm and all-knowable as any of the three spatial dimensions but through which God, for reasons best known to Himself, only suffers us to move in one direction. St. Bonaventure and other medieval scholastics added to time and eternity the aevum, eviternity populated by eviternal beings like angels, demons, the saints, and the damned. This borderland or interstice between the temporal and the eternal, changeable in some ways and unchangeable in others—was I catapulted here by a Paramore album, the way we talk about high explosives blowing one to kingdom come? I don’t care. I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful that I believe it exists. In it is Bordentown the Eviternal City, always in my heart.