Without disagreeing about the period of gestation, for me one of the best things about writing is when the putting of “word against word” sometimes comes seemingly without labor. When I sit and take up the pen and words follow each other’s sense and sound onto the page through my willing hand. It doesn’t happen reliably or often, but when it does it is a kind of transport.

Another one of the best things about writing is when I come upon something that I’ve written, after some interval of time, and, reading it, think: was it really I who wrote this? I was a conduit for something other than myself: some fragment of a recognizable truth or beauty that used me for its articulation. This perception is usually accompanied by a feeling of loss or anxiety: that whatever I was at the time of that writing is now no more, or that, in any case, the record of it will never see light of day and will be lost along with all of the rest of me.

Thoughts about what letter-writing used to mean to me, from the vantage of this new world of electronic correspondence: in faraway places, I used to sit down and put my world intimately down on paper for familiar eyes. Fold up the filled pages, seal them inside a time capsule and trust them to the postal service. Letters were time capsules and time bombs and time had to be allowed to operate in its own way. With e-mail we now rush back and forth at each other. There is not much in the way of gestation, we build up no treasury of thought or event that can shift its way into our being for one another. We have no impression of one another that we can press to our hearts, no trace of fervor to be felt for on indented paper with blind fingers, no residue of perfume, no petals, no newspaper clippings.

It’s time for a vacation. Los Angeles. Newport. Madrid. Granada. Barcelona. Mexico City. Writing in pursuit of health will only ever get us so far. Sometimes what the doctor orders is silence and wandering, warm conversation, shared meals, and surrender to the sweet music of days that pass without any trace save what’s left in mortal memory.

–Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (185).

Even as I orchestrate my living with the intention of stretching my years out to a distant and barely imagined point–tottering and gray, but neither too infirm nor witless to be self-sufficient to some degree–I realize that the extended length of life can pose a dire risk to the quality of it. Over an extended period of time, we may tend to see the days as repetitive. The major beats, at least, are regularized in a settled life: days and weeks fall into a rhythm. There is the morning time and the things that are done (coffee made, cats fed, swimming, showering, dressing, etc.), the departure for work, the day of work, the return home to all of the things that are done in an evening. If we see this rhythm of doings extending forward for months or years, it’s all too easy to forget that there is, in fact, no pattern.

Hemingway’s Robert Jordan knows, or strongly feels, what most of us do not know or feel strongly enough: he is two days away from his likely death, and the countdown heightens the value of every passing moment: every doing done, every detail registered, the final pixels of each day attended to with perfect attention. There is not a passing breeze that is wasted on Robert Jordan.

“Stop complaining and asking for what you will never get”–this is sound and even familiar advice, and seems as likely as anything to yield the desired outcome: a good life, pixel by pixel. Whether we have two days or sixty years, the trick to the goodness lies in not allowing our senses to be dulled by the illusion of uninterrupted pattern. We need to stay sharp now and look more closely now: feel sun-showered by these small sweet interruptions of difference and resemblance that compose our view of the whole.

As it turns out, the next book on the second shelf is a first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, published in New York by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1940. There is no dust cover, so it’s of little or no value to a collector. Still…this was an important book for me, one of the best novels on the Spanish Civil War, with some unparsed influence on my own trajectory.

The “medicine” Robert Jordan refers to is absinthe. A description of its curative properties follows:

“There was very little of it left and one cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafés, of all chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards, of book shops, of kiosques, and of galleries, of the Parc Montsouris, of the Stade Buffalo and of the Butte Chaumont, of the Guaranty Trust Company and the Ile de la Cité, of Foyot’s old hotel, and of being able to read and relax in the evening; of all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy” (55).

A taste of absinthe, the “liquid alchemy,” brings back to Robert Jordan “all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten”–shifting his condition within space-time. If we can believe the description, here is a medicine that offers something better than wholeness, for it restores only those things that were “enjoyed,” imbuing any present circumstances with the warm glow of simple pleasures remembered.

The “idea-changing” property is the most definitive. Too often, we may find ourselves caught up in webs of ideas that stick and bind, keeping us trapped, sometimes in dark and uncomfortable places. Releasing ourselves from the shackles of our own thinking is rarely a bad idea: any medicine that can work this liberating magic deserves a place in our pharmacy.

Next on the shelf: Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson, published in New York by Random House for The Modern Library in 1950. This is a book that hardly bears reading by a contemporary audience. It is a long epistolary novel that doubtless titillated its eighteenth century, largely female, audience. For hundreds of pages, Clarissa is pressed to yield up her virtue by a certain Mr. Lovelace who keeps her prisoner for much of the book. We see her held in an endless suspense of letters: writing is both a feature of her torment and her sole avenue of release. She is emblematic of a certain class of women of her time: a caged animal, there is no range of motion, however restless, that will ever get her anywhere satisfactory.

We can imagine the restlessness of Clarissa‘s readers as a mirror-image of Clarissa’s own restlessness. On they must have gone, turning page after page in breathless suspense, their breathing constrained by their uncomfortable clothing, their faces flushed, their reactions muted by the necessity of maintaining a certain appearance in drawing rooms, perhaps amidst family company. On and on, page after page, hardly able to admit to themselves, perhaps not even knowing, the sort of release they hoped for or expected. Clarissa’s safe deliverance into marriage, perhaps: that never unsealed vault within which fiction of the times stored a young woman’s inchoate longings along with the adult mysteries of life.

How healthy was this sort of endlessly protracted titillation for eighteenth century women? Few once-popular novels present us with a starker contrast to the readerly tastes of our own times, where every supermarket magazine rack is stocked with explicit guides to an allegedly healthier sexuality. The taste for titillation has obviously not gone anywhere, but the current consensus seems to be that there is no reason to tolerate titillation without eventual climax, that in fact it would neither be healthy nor normal to do so.

Writing, then and now, is a vital supplement for auto-eroticism. Is the stimulation of desire for desire’s sake good for our health? Clarissa “knew not what to do” with her suspense and frustration, besides writing another letter, but we do, and we’re doing it. Desire is stimulated and satisfied in a perpetual cycle…which begs questions about both desire and satisfaction which only those who are suspicious of desire are bothering to raise or answer.

This book is, of course, familiar to many. Less familiar to today’s readers is The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which is to Come by John Bunyan, the Christian allegory published in 1678. Alcott evidently knew it well, as the four March sisters play at being pilgrims early in Little Women, and Alcott derives a number of her chapter titles from Bunyan’s work: “Beth Finds the Palace Beautiful,” “Amy’s Valley of Humiliation,” “Jo Meets Apollyon,” “Meg Goes to Vanity Fair,” “The Valley of the Shadow.”

Though The Pilgrim’s Progress is no longer on my shelves, it once was. I bought and read it in childhood after reading Little Women for the first time and found it remote and off-putting. Bunyan makes no attempt to represent warm-blooded human characters with any of the quirks and foibles that can make well-drawn characters seem as real to a reader as any flesh and blood acquaintances. Instead, as in medieval religious painting, Bunyan gives us one-dimensional cartoon characters representing ideas. All of the rebellious details of life are overlooked entirely.

People who already have their minds made up about life naturally have a tendency to perceive the world in this way. Rather than meeting someone and seeing mostly unresolved mystery, people with an allegorical bent are likely to see types, classes, functions. All that is, is perceived in the narrow terms of whatever it may signify to the observer.

To her credit, Louisa May Alcott couldn’t sustain the parallel. Though her novel traces the perennial pattern of life (childhood, marriage, children, death), she soon abandons Bunyan’s programmatic chapter headings in favor of such titles as “Being Neighborly,” “Gossip,” and “Tender Troubles.” Instead of medieval cartoon characters representing fixed ideas, Alcott gives us characters whose inevitable types are at least upheld and verified by a close observation of actual people. Little Women throws us a curve or two, and so is truer to life than Bunyan’s allegory.

As we make our own way through the world, every encounter presents us with a choice. We can type, categorize, and file people and experiences away based on our interpretation of the surface that greets the eye. We can dispense with everything this way, and slip along the surface of things following some trajectory that we think we understand. Or we can allow ourselves to see the surfaces as reflective, and recognize that what we think we see is, in all likelihood, mostly just what we think. We can observe a bit more closely and see the surface rippling with the surge of the inaccessible whole.

We are cosmic bodies in motion and our unknown trajectories are subject to collisions and attractions that we can’t foresee. Our joy and our health, equally, depend upon our resilience.

While untroubled souls seek refuge from the storm, Lear seeks refuge right out in the open heart of it: “Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!” When we awake to the flash of lightning and crash of nearby thunder, perhaps in an unfamiliar room far from home, we may experience a peculiarly heightened sense of comfort. However distracted, dislocated, or out of sorts, our perspective with regard to our internal state is shifted by the fury of the heavens. If nothing else, in our upset state we may feel, for once, that we are at least matched by the cosmic clamor: shudder for shudder, it’s as if we and the heavens were each other’s mirror. There is a companionship in this, a sense of tangible reciprocity. Calm weather, by comparison, is cold and existentially heartless from the perspective of a soul in any kind of turmoil: it stands as a reminder that the heavens are indifferent to us, that there is no correspondence, no relation.

If we are calm ourselves, the raging weather outside only heightens our snug sense of comfort. We certainly feel no obligation to accompany the heavens in their fury–but we are possessed not by indifference, but by gratitude: our recognition of the modest comforts of this unfamiliar room far from home is heightened, the lightning’s white flashes etch humble details in memory.

Memory links to memory: this morning’s Georgetown storm carries me back to storms in other faraway places, even to storms of childhood. I can still smell the summer rain coming across the dry plains of Castilla, can still remember showering naked in the night beneath the falling sky of Vieques, hunkering in a dry spot beneath a boulder in the Laguna Salada wilderness.

The heavens do not mirror the mind’s tossings and tempests with anything like sufficient frequency. Our flight, we may feel, does lie “toward the raging sea”–that’s the anxiety of our mortality–and more often than not we have no bear to turn to face instead, but only the plodding calm of indifferent days, uncounted and unremembered. We do well, then, perhaps, to take a lesson from these cosmic proportions and trust that the raging sea ahead is more likely an expanse of unremarkable calm into which all of our own tempests will subside. Embrace, then, every bit of the tossing–inside or out–it is the thunder crash and lightning of our brief vitality.

This little room, how well I know it!
Now they’ve rented this and the next door one
As business premises, the whole house
Has been swallowed up by merchants’ offices,
By limited companies and shipping agents…

O how familiar it is, this little room!

Once here, by the door, stood a sofa,
And before it a little Turkish carpet,
Exactly here. Then the shelf with the two
Yellow vases, and on the right of them:
No. Wait. Opposite them (how time passes)
The shabby wardrobe and the little mirror.
And here in the middle the table
Where he always used to sit and write,
And round it the three cane chairs.
How many years…and by the window over there
The bed we made love on so very often.

Somewhere all these old sticks of furniture
Must still be knocking about…

And beside the window, yes, that bed.
The afternoon sun climbed half way up it.
We parted at four o’clock one afternoon,
Just for a week, on just such an afternoon.
I would have never
Believed those seven days could last forever.
–Lawrence Durrell’s “free translation from C.P. Cavafy.”

Ortega y Gasset’s mute circumstances draw me back, perhaps too soon, to Durrell’s Quartet: to his “free translation” of C.P. Cavafy’s poem, “The Afternoon Sun.” “These old sticks of furniture” have been “knocking about” in my consciousness ever since I first found them here in the end pages of Clea, along with the unelaborated poignancy of this parting “just for a week” that ends up lasting forever.

Cavafy’s poem nails the vividness of memory. “The shabby wardrobe and little mirror” may be slightly displaced in space-time (“No. Wait. Opposite them”), but this displacement only sharpens by heightened contrast the photographic precision of the afternoon sun “half way up” the bed of all memory most closely held.

Rays of sunlight measuring out time on sticks of furniture: squibs and pixels of our experience. We never know which stabs of light may remain luminous for us long past their evanescence, nor which partings may be final. Surrounded always by mute circumstances, stabbed repeatedly by light so strong that it casts black ice shadows, parting again and again from those we love–amidst this terrible drama of consciousness it is small wonder that we build stable homes for ourselves out of memories and tend to shy away from too close or regular an encounter with the present’s jaggedly emerging edge.

We may, in time, have memories enough to furnish great manor houses, haunted by shrill and mournful ghosts of forever partings. We may attempt to live in these houses, among the sheet-shrouded forms, in the dust, and amidst the shadowy whispers of persons long gone. Or we may see instead that we are always stepping out, that for us there is only that leading edge, the stabbing of every moment’s fiery light, the partings and comings together and partings again.

We are in pursuit of something that we will not be able to keep or hold, even in memory. We lighten our own way by letting go as we fly past.

Meditations on Quixote by José Ortega y Gasset, published in New York by W.W. Norton & Company in 1961. This was my father’s book, he bought it on June 22, 1973. I read it over the course of several wintry days in Vienna in 1987, and was permeated.

Circumstance. If we are well and have any share of clarity, we may look at “the mute things which are all around us” and see with some satisfaction that we do not always “walk blindly among them.” If we have succeeded in making a home for ourselves, we may see that we have “consciousness of [our] circumstances,” a modest litany of daily gratitudes: the flourishing of a houseplant, the kettle in its place on the stove top, the gleaming coat of a robustly healthy tomcat, a certain aesthetically pleasing arrangement of books on shelves–even items of nearly beloved disarray: dresser drawers left open, a crumpled tissue on a night stand, a bathing suit left hanging to dry. Mute: they are our communications with a universe that scatters truth in squibs and pixels for us to compose into rich personal histories.

In travel we trade in our well-known circumstances, and stimulate our consciousness with grander prospects, a shift in focal length. The new circumstances, also mute, are strangers: sticks of hotel furniture, anonymous wall hangings, details that we do not anticipate in the face of the attraction of cityscapes, landmarks, monumental features of nature and history, communications on a larger than human scale. Yet, even traveling, we will find our focus recalled to scale if we know what’s good for us. The mute details of our circumstances are what make the world real (an early taste of winter in a cold October blast of air, the smell of approaching rain, a comfortable chair by a window in a Georgetown library)…otherwise, we are lost in our heads, out of touch and out of balance, mute ourselves or babbling, or both by turns, leaving nothing to be remembered by and nothing to remember.

“To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement. The sensation may be caused by the panoramic glide of the stars past earthly objects, which is perceptible in a few minutes of stillness, or by the better outlook upon space that a hill affords, or by the wind, or by the solitude; but whatever be its origin, the impression of riding along is vivid and abiding. The poetry of motion is a phrase much in use, and to enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilised mankind, who are horizontal and disregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars. After such a nocturnal reconnoitre among these astral clusters, aloft from the customary haunts of thought and vision, some men may feel raised to a capability for eternity at once.” –Thomas Hardy

You don’t have to live in Hardy’s mythical Wessex countryside to have easy access to sidereal time, this “poetry of motion.” The elements of his prescription can, with some small difficulty, even be found in the midst of crowded cities. Stillness is a matter of personal discipline and can be applied anywhere, at any time. I have found “the better outlook upon space that a hill affords” on the outskirts of Salamanca, in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, on the small height above the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, and standing atop the roof of the Park La Brea apartments in the heart of Los Angeles. The “sense of difference from the mass of civilised mankind” too can be heightened and cultivated in any circumstances, sometimes even just by stepping aside out of the pedestrian traffic, or by walking a few yards away from the easiest access point to any beach where people tend to gather in flocks together, leaving the long strand quite vacant in either direction.

Just yesterday evening I paused on the edge of the bay facing westward, and felt all the world’s power of wind blowing at me through the Golden Gate from the other side of the Pacific. Exposed, at the front edge of time, reeling backwards on the planet while the wind created in me the sensation of flying forwards…I was standing still in free fall through space and time. Hardy calls this poetry of motion “epic”…it is also orchestral: seagulls find their stillness in midair, the surface of the bay was a stillness of endless ruffling: everything in motion, contrariwise and harmonic, no one and nothing getting anywhere.

What does it mean to be “raised to a capability for eternity”? Simply this: if we stop here, we can know that rush and flight, wheel and turn and hovering flutter of stillness are what is and what will ever be. We are all caught up in poetry of motion and sometimes stepping out of the main current for the sake of freshened perspective on space-time may be the indispensable medicine for our always ephemeral ailments.

I will not get stuck forever in The Alexandria Quartet. Next on the top shelf is Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor by R.D. Blackmore. This hand-sized volume was published by the Collins Clear-Type Press of London and Glasgow. There is no publication date, but wikipedia tells us that the novel was initially published in 1869 and has never been out of print. I read Lorna Doone in the seventh or eighth grade, and acquired this edition at the Morningside Bookshop across from Columbia in 2006.

Blackmore’s colorful rendition of Exmoor dialect (sample above) makes the book a linguistic treasure. It’s also a classic of romance, and as such it derives much of its dramatic tension from the obstacles that stand in love’s way. Not least of these is the obstacle of the disapproving father. Lorna Doone’s aging father forbids John Ridd from ever seeing his daughter again. He tells him: “There is nothing in this world to fear, nothing to revere or trust, nothing even to hope for; least of all, is there aught to love.” He follows this dour statement with: “All marriage is a wretched farce, even when man and wife belong to the same rank of life, have temper well assorted, similar likes and dislikes, and about the same pittance of mind. But when they are not so matched, the farce would become a long, dull tragedy, if anything were worth lamenting.”

Marriage is, of course, the goal in romances such as this one…and it’s the business of hero and heroine to overcome all obstacles on their way to this goal. Arguably, the flourishing of proper romance depends on the existence of some opposition, and ignoring the skepticism of the elderly with regard to marriage is a classic trope of the genre. Romantic love is hardy and defiant this way, and books like Lorna Doone shore up the foundations of their innocent readers’ natural inclination to believe before any of the fictions can be tested against any of the facts. Love is certainly a pandemic and in some it seems to be incurable. Books such as these are highly infectious agents, and at the same time they inoculate their readers against opposition, skepticism, and doubt. It’s a condition: we who love go on trusting and hoping, time and time again, in the face of everything.