5012. It’s Different from the Ones in Peru
No age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings,
and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems
final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest
inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the
earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock,
and reflect that there are plenty more to come.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Once you get to be one of those old-timers in Peru, though, new agitations, different from your first earthquakes, come along to threaten your peace.
Remember the first time you knew for sure that the person you thought you’d make a life with had pulled his stakes out of the grounds you shared? Remember that? Of course I d[o] … it almost broke my heart (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway).
Remember how we survived that one? You don’t? Neither do I. But we did, just the same, and here we are now to talk about it.
But wait: that’s not what we’re here to talk about. Now it’s something else that promises to pull the ground out from under us. That’s what we’re here to talk about: the latest thing to shock our world.
But wait: we can’t talk about that yet. It’s hard to talk in the middle of an earthquake (especially a new one: you don’t know where the tremors are coming from or how large they’ll get or how long they’ll last). It’s hard to talk about an unclear and present danger.
Just you wait, though: sooner or later the dust will settle, and we’ll live to tell the tale.
At least, as much as we can.
Note: “Consent, with as much courage as Plotinus did, to every dimension of human experience, and to everything within it that is mysterious, inexpressible, and transcendent” (Pierre Hadot, Plotinus, or, The Simplicity of Vision).
Wallace Stevens, “Idiom of the Hero”
—but I sure can be moved.
Note: “befriended” (“Idiom of the Hero”).
5016. “Where every paradox means wonder”
Nearer to that green lake
Where every paradox means wonder.
James Merrill, “The Black Swan”
It’s like the way you feel sometimes when you first wake up in the morning, still wet from some plunging dream. You’re a little older and a little younger. You’ve let people down and you’ve given them a lift, all on one drive. You feel more lonely and loved by the minute. You have infinite hope, not for yourself, but you hope for someone else. You’re nothing but mistaken and still true to the mission. You feel more fright and more fortitude than you ever possibly thought you could feel all at once. You’re sure you’ve seen everything and you’re sure that everything remains to be unhidden.
You’re ready to start the day.
Note: “the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun” (Whitman, “Song of Myself”).
The quick vision that his life was after all a failure.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Then the curing vision that it’s not: on those days when you’re convinced that you’re pretty much a total fool, consider the people you might have helped to hope that they themselves don’t have to be.
Note: “catechize you under that name” (Middlemarch).
5018. “how he got out of the room”
Deronda did not know how he got out of the room.
George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
If he knew, he’d tell you. Maybe’s he a little stiff, but basically he’s a sweet guy, and if he could give you a map or a manual that would show you how to pass through the most painful parting, I’m sure he would.
Meanwhile, though, he wanted me to tell you something (he comes to me sometimes in my sleep). What did he want me to tell you? I’m not exactly sure, now. Something about how there’s always someone waiting to tell you something. It could be something big.
I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to hear it better once you’re out of the room.
5019. The Strangeness of Tears
—he struck her as confessing with strange tears in
his own eyes, to sharp identity of emotion.
H. James, The Golden Bowl
I guess the secret to receiving a confession like that is to avoid thinking you know its secret before you do. Just because you’ve heard someone’s name, rank, and serial number doesn’t mean you can tell right away where he’s from or where he’s going. The same goes for tears: no matter how much they make themselves at home with you, they’ll always take their orders from some secret ministry you’ll never see.
Given all the advances in transport that make the world smaller every day, it’s good to know that there’s still someplace so far away.
Note: “religious mysticism proper” (William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience).
5024. “We are going to be in for trouble”
David: Mama. We are going to be in for trouble. You understand that?
Fanny: I understand it very well. We will manage. You and I. I’m not put together with flour paste. And neither are you—I am happy to learn.
Lillian Hellman, Watch on the Rhine
A day doesn’t go by that I don’t partly spend worried to the point of distraction about something. If it’s not about something I said, it’s about something I didn’t say. If it’s not some blemish I see in the mirror, which I’m sure means the further degradation of whatever it is that makes me fit to be seen, it’s a blemish in my field of vision, which I am sure means the further failure of my fitness to see.
If it’s not the fear that I’ve lost or will soon lose someone I love, it’s the fear of the loss of the world that I share with those I love or have loved.
I’ll tell you about a day when I wasn’t fearful, though, at least not that I can remember—thirteen days, actually. Many things terrify a four-year-old, but one thing that didn’t terrify me when I was four years old was the Cuban Missile Crisis, though it might well have, since it took place shortly after my fourth birthday, and I was fully prepared by then to be scared by anything that proposed itself for me to fear. My mom and dad sure were scared. “We thought it really might be the end of the world,” my mother told me later. But she didn’t tell me that then. I don’t remember her saying anything unusual, anything that stood out from the usual carousel of practical, moral, and intellectual instructions that made my early childhood one long, repeated lesson in Self-Improvement.
I wonder if she knew that the example of her self-restraint was the most important lesson of all.
Note: “You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and the best that you have to give” (Eleanor Roosevelt to Edward R. Murrow).
5025. “where nobody was looking”
He liked finding things where nobody was looking.
Susan Sontag on Walter Benjamin, “Under the Sign of Saturn”
Same here. I like finding things where nobody was looking—me included. There I was, my head buried in some old book or bad mood, and suddenly, when I was least expecting it, someone came along and took me to the place I was looking to go. Strange: I didn’t even know I was looking to go there until I actually got there.
It’s like the way the most labored sentence (hard labor!) suddenly gets commuted by some simple phrase whose sole power is to set you free.
There you go!
Note: “all the places I got found” (Coldplay, “Speed of Sound”)
5026. Coming up Empty
The inexpressive haunts and even hollows these poems.
John Updike, “Christian Verse”
It looks to me like one of those half-empty, half-full situations—the hollowness you feel when you first wake up: hallowed be thy name.
Note: “The central hollowness” (James Merrill, “The Black Swan”).
5027. “It was now too late and too far to go back”
We changed again, and yet again, and it was now
too late and too far to go back, and I went on.
Dickens, Great Expectations
He’s just learning the first lesson of growing up: you have to hurry your good-byes or you’ll never really leave, and once you really leave you can never really go back. The second lesson is figuring out how rules are made to be broken.
Note: “Have you escaped, sir, the Locked Door policy?” (from a dream of E. M. Forster).
brother (boyhood)
It was with sincere modesty that I called it a “note.”
Roland Barthes, “From Taste to Ecstasy”
—modesty, and a moving sense (a sense that’s moved me anyway) that anything I write may be the last thing I ever write.
It’s like what old people are forever telling young people, one way or another: when you part company with someone, just imagine that you are parting from him forever.
You give him your best and you hope for the best—it’s the same best that someone, just before you never heard from him again, somehow gave to you.
Note: “One might … speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it” (Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”).
5032. “where lost was found”
… here in final state, where lost was found
James Merrill, “The Will”
That’s what it feels like as we sail into some final phase of a season or a sonnet or a song or a swan or a sermon or a swell or a swelling or a sentence or a—well, you get the idea (it’s an idea of something beyond the Endless Summer sound of a single consonant).
There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, or that you’ve been meaning to tell me, something forgotten along the way. It’s like how at the end of Moby-Dick, the narrator finally gets around to telling the families (he sure takes the long way) that their sons and fathers and husbands have been lost at sea. (Turns out that was his task all along: who knew? He sure didn’t tell us. Talk about getting off message!) Finally, though, in the end, he remembers what he’s come to report. He starts the last chapter of a book as big as the Bible, practically—it could have been as brief as one of those telegrams from the War Office—by quoting the servant who comes to tell Job that what he loves has been all destroyed: And I only am escaped alone to tell thee (Job 1:15; Moby-Dick, “Epilogue”), and then he goes on to say that all that’s left are orphans.
How did I get on this again? Oh yeah: how in the end what got lost along the way will be found. We all get so didactic or otherwise distracted and detached sometimes, but in the end we remember what we forgot.
Or we find something better.
Note: “I always cry at endings” (Belle and Sebastian).
5033. Loving on Time
Ave Maria! ’tis the hour of Love!
Byron, Don Juan, Third Canto
Sometimes, after the hour has passed, you still want to talk about it.
Then you wind up loving the ones (their own hour still to come) willing to hear a little about the hour that’s passed.
Love changes hands. That’s how it lasts.
Note: “that face so fair!” (Don Juan, Third Canto).
5034. “lost for lacke of telling”
Here is a great deale of good matter,
lost for lacke of telling.
Spenser, “Julye,” The Shepheardes Calendar
Sometimes I worry that my mother tells me her stories too often. (It’s surely a sign of old age.) Do you have any idea how many times I’ve heard how “Old Man Tannenbaum (sp.?)” got separated from the rest of his hunting party, but had the good sense to light a fire and stay put until his friends came to rescue him?
Sometimes I worry that she can’t tell them often enough.
Note: “Still to recall, to praise” (James Merrill, “Christmas Tree”).
For this relief much thanks.
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Can you imagine a book that would catalog every human kindness? Neither can I. And we both know why. It’s because no one could ever say much about the best things that people do for one another—they’re too large or too small (largely, too small). You can never really define them. The strength that people help send your way: well, that’s as much beyond your power to measure as the weight of the weaknesses that it works a little to lighten. And the feeling that others, near and far, bring you (so many Messages, so many Messengers!)—the feeling of being with someone else: that’s as much beyond all telling as the loneliness that this feeling puts a little to rest. It’s kind of like what some philosophers say about Evil (how it eludes all efforts to comprehend it), only equal and opposite.
Well, anyway, all I really want so say is all anyone can say, under the circumstances: Thanks for that.
Thanks for that.
Note: “that surpasses all understanding” (Philippians 4:7).
Now beyond the reach of scandal, his best writing
validated by time, he comes before us still, a towering
figure, laughing and weeping, with parables and
paradoxes, so generous, so amusing, and so right.
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde
Actually, he was wrong a lot. In fact, he was wrong most of his time. Being wrong was what made his Clubhouse famous. Infamous, more like: it’s what brought him down.
He was wrong to believe that being witty would always save him from the worst: wrong to think that those taken in by his charm would take him in when he had nowhere else to go: wrong to imagine that his sayings would make people wonder so much that they would exempt him from every rule, grammatical and ingrained.
But here’s the best way he was wrong: He really believed that if he just talked quickly enough he could bring everyone over to his side: the un-blind side: the side where everyone gets to play.
Sometimes when you lose the Game on errors, you wind up winning in the end.
Note: “Oscar Wilde was always right” (Borges, “About Oscar Wilde”).
Only from me can they hide nothing.
Whitman, “The Sleepers,” Leaves of Grass
—but only when they’re sure that there’s nothing I can hide from them.
Of course, this rule of reciprocal disclosure only applies to those of us who failed the test to become a secret agent or an old-school confessor (the types behind a curtain or a screen, iron or ironic, or something in between). Those types: wow! It’s like you have to tell them everything since they’re not telling you anything and somebody has to be giving something up to someone, pretty much all the time. That’s just the way the world works. It’s some general law of circulation or hydraulics discovered in the Renaissance or thereabouts. (I’m probably not explaining it well, but you know what I mean.)
Speaking of the way the world works, have you ever noticed how a kid will sometimes show you her angel side, but only when she’s sure that you really need to know it?
Note: “no white-winged angels now … [b]ut … a hand … which leads … forth gently towards a calm and bright land … the hand may be a … child’s” (George Eliot, Silas Marner).
