After Thanksgiving at my mother’s house I spent a few days in the city. They were fine days – I saw a stream of friends, went to the New York Public Library, saw a former student (who has become a teacher himself), and spent probably ten hours playing with young nieces, nephews, or cousins. (I played them the Florida-Georgia Line song “Cruise” with Nelly and we danced around like maniacs and had a blast.) I went to Montclair for the first time. I found a copy of the Burton translation of Giovanni Battista Basile’s Pentameron – for eight dollars in hardback.
But the whole time I was sensitive to a kind of insanity or unhealthiness in my mood – a dissatisfaction with who I was, with what life was, with everything, in general. I plotted and schemed ways to make me more loved, to make life better, to deliver myself from who I was and break into something that maybe would satisfy my sense of who I ought to be. I felt sick of playing with other people’s children. I felt sick of visiting nice couples who loved each other. I wanted love and children for myself. I wanted something other than what I had.
I drove back north Sunday, near tears as I often am on that drive, for whatever reason. I felt the thumping of the truck under me as I drove over the Hudson – I suppose they’ll never fix the pavement on the Tappan Zee ever, will they? There will just be a new bridge. I came back to my cabin in the late afternoon and found it 31 degrees inside. The water I had left there had all frozen. (Thank goodness I returned after first leaving to put antifreeze in the toilet, or else I would have had to install a new toilet – not for the first time, either.) It was dark and cold, the very image of loneliness.
And yet, within a few hours, sitting before my fire, everything had changed from loneliness to solitude. I’m not even sure I can explain how this works. But when I woke up the next morning in my cold cabin I was in a completely different place. I went to work at the Maple Syrup farm – this is my first full week there – and was happy all day, outside in the cold. It was snowing all morning on the mountaintop where we were working. I had forgotten my hat – left it in the city, I suppose – but I didn’t care. I came home and made my pasta dinner on my wood stove, and then worked on my Arabian Nights book. When I went outside to clean my dinner plates I stopped in my tracks, just standing there on my deck, hardly comprehending the beauty that was mine – the darkness all around me, and the stars of night my companions. It is almost as if some genius astronomer-contractor had built the cabin to face Orion’s nightly winter rising over Red Hill. Someone might have wandered the whole world to see a sight so beautiful, and so perfect a vantage point from which to see it. I had merely happened on it. Who was I to ask for more than this? How could I? If no one loved it the way I did, what then? Did that mean I could bear to be parted from it?
I went back inside, and opening at random my volume of Thoreau, I read:
However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse… Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society. If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me. The philosopher said: “From an army of three divisions one can take away its general, and put it in disorder; from the man the most abject and vulgar one cannot take away his thought.” Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights. The shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us, “and lo! creation widens to our view.” We are often reminded that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of Croesus, our aims must still be the same, and our means essentially the same. Moreover, if you are restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most significant and vital experiences; you are compelled to deal with the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from being a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher.
And I felt so happy to be alive, and so happy to have precisely the life I have. The feeling has not yet left me.
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