Finding and Losing

I just finished reading The Earth is the Lord’s by Abraham Joshua Heschel, and wanted to share a thoughtful story from the book, of which there are a few:

In the elementary school textbooks of Hebrew in use a quarter of a century ago, there was a story of a schoolboy who would be in great distress every morning, having forgotten where he put away his clothes and books before he went to bed. One evening he arrived at an answer to his problem. He wrote on a slip of paper: “The suit is on the chair, the hat is in the closet, the books on the desk, the shoes under the chair, and I am in bed.” Next morning he began to collect his things together. They were all in their places. When he came to the last item on the list, he went to look for himself in the bed – but his search was in vain. (pg. 106)

One is made to think: Is this a humorous story of an absent-minded little boy, or does it have a deeper symbolic value? My first impression of the story was similar to the inquisitive wonder I experience when I read or hear a Kōan.  A part of me wants to look at it realistically, to see the little boy’s note as a real catalog of the objects he needs for school and their location. On the other hand, when I un-examine this passage extra-rationally, I see the boy’s role as the creator of the note which demarcates his own existance as nullifying the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” imperative. The self-consciousness by which we know that we exist unravels in the final line of the story; the cycle of referentiality that necessitates our ‘place’ in the world is broken. This explanation hit me at the moment that I finished the story and I chuckled, how post-modern, I thought continuing with the essay.