5191. How to Live
The object of all art and learning is that we may know how to live.
Ludovico Sforza, qtd. in Burkhardt,
qtd. in E. M. Forster’s Commonplace Book
—which is as good a reason as any I’ve ever heard to take up art and learning. I don’t know about you, but just when I think I’ve got things figured out, something comes up and I get all confused again. (It’s like what Bob Dole said, when he was running against Bill Clinton in 1996 and some reporter asked him what he thought the big issues of the campaign would be. “I don’t know,” he said. “Somethin’ll pop up. Always does.”)
He was right. (Bob Dole was right about a lot of things, in my view, but that’s a whole other issue.) The point is that something does always come up that’ll throw a wrench in your works—a pageantry of fear (Wordsworth, “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont”), a knowing that you’re gone, the feeling that you never will be, a love of the world that will never be enough to save it, the fact that my mother, no matter how much I write about her—anyway, you get the idea.
Now, where am I going with all this? Oh yes: a picture of Peele Castle or a picture of anything that reminds you of some calm and cool place that was once a big part of your life and that you come back to later only to realize that while it may have stayed the same, there was no way you could. What do you do with that? I’ll tell you what you do with that. You try to get brave and calm and even a little happy with that (though you can see where it’s trending—you’re not an idiot):
welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
And frequent sights of what is to be borne!
(Wordsworth, “Elegiac Stanzas”)
How do you do that? Well, you can start by looking again at the picture and realizing during your review session that most pictures which remind you of some peaceful, easy place from your past know that they’re gone now (if they were ever there in the first place). Say, for example, it’s a picture of some quiet beach:
So pure the sky, so quiet was the air!
So like, so very like, was day to day!
(Wordsworth, “Elegiac Stanzas”)
And then you notice that the picture reminding you of that beach is all beaten up by storms and scars and scares and sadness:
This sea in anger, and that dismal shore.
The lightning, the fierce wind, the trampling waves.
(Wordsworth, “Elegiac Stanzas”)
You feel less alone now, right? It turns out you’re not the only one who sees something darker and different from a basic day at the beach—So like, so very like, was day to day! (Wordsworth, “Elegiac Stanzas”—God, I can still hear my Romantics professor reading that line out loud, softly but distinctly enough to reach across the distance of a lake or a decade full of dreams). So you’ve lost something. You lost someone—some peace, some person who meant peace. But look! Someone’s here who’s good with storms and sorrow.
He knew they were here before you did. Now, he’s here to show you through.
Note: “lessons at love’s pain and heartache school” (Jackson Browne).
