January 19, 2015 - Monday, Monday
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Almost every morning – or every Monday morning: Roz is up and in the shower, and I’m lying on my back in bed, hands clasped behind my neck, trying to look through the ceiling (and the attic and the roof) to the sky - and I say (half-aloud!), “He walked away. Just . . . left!” And I am “he,” but I don’t. I go to the shower, and I get dressed and walk downtown to work.
I don’t leave, because I don’t know – any more than a small boy running away from home does – where I could possibly be going. But where the boy might just wander – until he came to a street he wasn’t allowed to cross – I can’t; it’s no longer possible to go without going somewhere, without some sort of destination. Among the lessons I’ve learned: Life must lead toward something, dammit!
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How little we change, how little we learn, from sixteen to fifty-six. My mother was right: adulthood is a myth. We hunt and gather and pick and peck, then sit down at the kitchen table to put the pieces together – this way and that way and another, but there is always one, often more, that (no matter how much we squint it) doesn’t fit; so we have to start again. We’ll get it though. We will get it!
How little we learn and how much much we unlearn – particularly how to be idle, “the delicious sensation of lying on thick grass, far away from everyone, alone” filling up with the sun. That’s Turgenev (First Love). Here’s a less likely source, Evelyn Waugh (from Brideshead Revisited):
The languor of Youth – how unique, and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth – all save this – come and go with us through life; again and again in riper years we experience, under a new stimulus, what we thought had been finally left behind, the authentic impulse to action, the renewal of power and its concentration on a new object; again and again a new truth is revealed to us in whose light all our previous knowledge must be rearranged. These things are part of life itself; but languor – the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, . . . the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse – that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.
We unlearn ease. We come to believe, “Life is hard, y’know.” Because however many times you take the pieces apart and put them back together, there’s always that one left over, and there’s the damned adult necessity of getting it all to fit.
Plus, there’s death – and taxes. And death.
But there is a meanwhile; so why not time (come summer!) to lie in the grass again and fill up with sun? And even in winter, to lie in bed or on the couch to wonder and to whimsy? - because it’s not just death you can’t escape (because, rich enough, you can escape taxes); it’s the absurd: From the first staggering step out of bed in the morning, you are veering into nonsense. What can you do but wonder?
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Here’s a word we need, butso. Not but – meaning “however.” Or so – “ it follows that.” Butso – indicating what one doesn’t want will follow . . .
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. . . disasters “choreographed by Ignorance, as though it were some god from a tragedy” (Lucian, Slander), uncaring, because no god worth his salt, her pepper, or its cumin can really be bothered by what happens among us absurd beings.
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It’s difficult to overestimate the value of distance, a cynic’s eye view, a calm, deliberate standing-aside, though let it be well-addled with irony and thank god for it.
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To be left behind when “he” does walk away: envy of, anger at, frustration with; expectations or fear of; great hopes for; deep trust in. No one can leave everything, however, so let’s be reasonable: he can keep the shirt on his back and what he can fit loosely into his Gladstone bag. (I suggest a clean white shirt, a good pair of khakis, a change of underwear and socks, a sturdy jacket, and a paperback good enough you can swap it for another.)
But then . . . here’s the inevitable rub. He will stop to pick up something, some gewgaw he thinks he might need sometime.
lucky
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“What are you doing?” Roz asks, though she can see, as I can when I look: I’m still on my back in bed, staring for the sky through the roof, the attic, the ceiling, and before she interrupted, my eyelids. “Oh,” I say, “I’m getting up. I think . . . ” I pretend to be making the effort. “Am I getting up?” I ask. She pretends to look closely, shakes her head as if astonished: such effort to no avail. Feigning pity, she turns to go.
“Well, wish me luck.”
She looks back at poor me, trying hard not to mope, not to whine, not to crab, not to obsess, to let things go, really trying. She smiles with a shrug, “Good luck.”
The shrug. That’s it! “Shrug it off.” What’s the origin of the phrase? I imagine a king shrugging off the robe of state and taking to the streets. Turning away again, she smiles innocently as if she didn’t know that (just as Ignorance loves the ignorant) Luck favors the lucky.
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