Excerpts
My friends and I all seem to be going through our ‘papers’—old letters, literary memorabilia, drafts of things long forgotten, exchanging e-mails that say ‘can you believe?’ This is more than just cleaning house, but what is it? Nostalgia, curiosity, or the need for some confirmation that the life has actually been lived. We forget so easily—time sweeps up over everything, a tide that hits its limit and then slowly withdraws.
I did this? We met for lunch? Did I write him back? Who was I? Who am I?
It’s not a smooth sail, appearances notwithstanding. But the unobserved onlooker sees no evidence, just the hands shuffling papers and the eyes moving left to right. No sign of the inner turbulence, the flights and episodes of free-fall.
But it’s all there. The date on the letter reads 1983, and this is, or can be, an existential confrontation. I was 32; that was forty-two years ago. I feel a chasm open inside. The numbers are so abstract and it’s very hard to get a grip on ago. Like when people say ‘back in the day.’ I feel vertigo: the day. What was that, when was it? Forty two years between the person addressed in the letter and the person here at his desk. It’s overwhelming, yes, but there’s exhilaration in it, too. The years represent grace conferred. Always the thought: it could have been otherwise. I feel I got away with something.
And then there’s the photograph that slips free of the envelope. Dazzling—how thin, how the face shows angles and defining shadows! The evidence more telling than the phrases and references in the old letters. I can read the letters and feel wiser, more resolved. But a glimpse of the person in his jeans, shirt untucked, smile almost roguish—there is no way to spin that.
So the hand moves among the pages and the eyes go left to right, and there is no expression giving anything away. No way to guess what self-confrontation might be going on, what reckonings, what rationales and evasions.
My friends and I are all in the same boat, looking through our holdings in the hope that things had to be how they were, that any thought of alternatives turns on the fallacy of hindsight. There is only one road in the yellow wood—the one we took.
It’s a slippery—and therefore intriguing—business. I have in mind what I think of as one of my core memories, which means that I return to it, or it to me, often. It’s nighttime. I’ve come up the stairs from my bedroom, I don’t know why, but there is my father at his drafting table in his alcove. There are curls of smoke in the light from his architectural lamp. He hasn’t heard me. He is completely absorbed in what he’s doing, and I hesitate to interrupt. I might have the sense, even at my age, that this kind of absorption is something special.
I don’t remember why I was there, nor what followed my standing there. I question the status of the image. Was this a single occasion that I vividly recollect, or have I created the scene out of separate occasions? Or could it be I have made it up, drawing on a great many childhood impressions? Maybe I remember a time, but then embellish. My father did sometimes smoke. Or is that from the noir side of my adult imagination?
Illusions created by illusionists can be unpacked, restored to the realm of reason. But our memories—who knows what they are?
At some point the veracity of the past ceases to be the point. What matters is how the past is speaking to us, and why? The image, by now so fixed, gives me something, but what is it? If there are such things as personal archetypes, this is one. My father—looking back he is my young father—fully absorbed in his work, oblivious to everything else, including me. The warm light, the smoke—I saw something that I’ve come to idealize over time, and eventually came to think of with an echo of Yeats in my head: Like a long-legged fly upon the stream/ his mind moves upon silence.
There comes a time in his life when a man is most himself, most free, when he is alone, behind the wheel of his car, parked somewhere, just sitting. Years ago I became aware of them—men in cars. I saw them everywhere, usually older, indistinct presences disappearing into that public invisibility that takes all of us. What were they doing? I would look in furtively as I walked by. I saw they were drinking coffee, staring at pages of a carefully folded newspaper, but often enough just sitting. Grown men, inert. I didn’t understand. And now—I’m not sure what has changed—I do.
There was no abrupt change. I did not one day say ‘I will sit now.’ Rather, I experienced a kind of slow-motion exposure. At first, I noticed that when some occasion—a school pick-up—required me to sit and wait for five or ten minutes, I didn’t mind. In fact, I took pleasure. For that little interval, there was nowhere to go, nothing to do. I had a few minutes where I was completely disconnected from the rest of my life, and I savored them.
The enclosure felt safe. I had my essential comfort, my view of whatever street or sidewalk scene I had in front of me, and that special conducive silence that rises up when an engine has been shut off. I could unbuckle my seat-belt and take my feet off the pedals. I could watch the world move past at an unstructured pace. It was what I imagined a fish might feel during a slow afternoon at the aquarium, looking sidelong as the shadowy shapes move past, every now and then some moony face drawing in close, magnified by water and glass. But here, on the street, or in front of the high school, no one was leaning down to inspect. There was just the ambient criss-crossing in front of my windshield—shoppers carrying bags and oversized cups, or teenagers sauntering by in packs. None of them would think to look over.
To realize that you are being glanced past, not brought into anyone’s focus, confers a sense of negligibility, but also a certain power. All that time spent dreaming of invisibility as a boy—here was the adult version. To be and not to be. A tricky philosophical position. But of course not being seen depends on not seeming to see. People felt to be looking are noticed. I understood even in these first instances that it would not do to have a watcher’s presence. Better to fade as far as possible into the car’s murky interior. And with the removal of all assertion came what felt like a heightened peripheral vigilance. A new kind of seeing took over—less an active looking, more a full-field awareness.
I want to know what river it is that has been feeding my life in the dark, filling me with scraps of stories and feelings that on waking seem so unlikely. Could that be the true me—the underlying self before it’s shaped into a viable personality? While the dreams are chaotic and loose in their links, behind them, integral to them, there is always a feeling that is not a feeling I have in my waking day, that seems deeper.
Here’s my confession today, and do not judge me. When I’m at home, living my peripatetic mental life–reading magazine submissions, trying to solve some problem in a former student’s essay, making notes for my own purposes—I will once or twice a day get into bed, and just lie there, eyes closed, listening to sounds coming in from outside, trying to push away all surface thought, those febrile mental spasms that get me jumping from thing to thing. I tell myself that I’m slowing down so that I can greet the world at its own pace.
It is restorative, this abrupt passivity, and it can last for some time. But there always comes a turn, a moment when the indolent ease starts to ebb away, replaced by that feeling—no outrunning it—that I should be up and active, somehow earning my keep. There is the pressure to be doing something, anything, rather than this, never mind that lying in place I often feel most fully ‘myself.’ What ‘myself’ might mean is, of course, grist for the profoundest inquiries.
I’ve been at war with the ‘doing’ ethos my whole life. It’s what happens to the kid who can’t stop asking why. Why are we supposed to run up and down the field kicking a ball; why are we studying this or this or this? The inevitable because never satisfied. How is all the doing more important than thinking or imagining? I can’t escape it, my sense of a universal cold eye cast upon inward activity, which can never be grasped by another and looks so much like doing nothing at all.
It bothers me that after all these years, I should still feel guilty, that I’m somehow failing to meet some basic human expectation. I’m not. In a contentious mood, I counter that so much busy activity is actually an evasion, an end-run around Gauguin’s great ask: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Those remain the questions. And really, what other business is there?
Pleasures forgotten and then re-discovered. This is one of the purest, I think. We are up at a beautiful lake for a week, one, as I wrote before, that we have come to many times over the years. But there has been a lapse, enough of a lapse that when I first walked down the steep stone pathway to the shore and saw the three kayaks on their rack, I didn’t immediately feel like going out. It was hot and my knee was hurting, and the boats themselves looked scratched and neglected.
The night was full of loons, and the next morning, stepping to the window, I saw that the lake was completely calm, holding that soft pewter glow. The muscle memory took hold.
I’ve never been limber, even when I should have been, and I’m less limber now. So while wincing over the rough rocks around the deck and dragging a kayak off the rack was manageable, actually getting into the thing was a challenge.
Tilting the kayak toward me, I hoisted my right leg in. Then, penitent and prayerful, I held tight and tried to get my left—my obstacle leg— in. It worked. With a shock, all those long-ago mornings merged with the rush of the first momentum, the slide. So much fuss getting in, but now the smooth propulsion, the surge coming with every pull of the oar.
I made my way toward a small white boathouse on the far shore. In the middle of such an expanse, I felt I could let everything go. And then the grand white clouds came into view. There in the distance above the trees, but their massy white shapes printed on the water right in front of me. I thought of Holderlin’s ‘Half of Life’: The land with yellow pears/And full of wild roses/Hangs into the lake.
His is an autumn poem. For me, it was the second day of summer. Leaning back in my seat, cutting into the glassy illusion with every stroke, this was as close as I was ever going to get. The solstice was just the other day. My fellow Latvians had just been celebrating the night by jumping over bonfires. This trance-like movement into the clouds was my connection.
It was a single phrase that struck me—enough that I pulled to the side of the road and typed it into my phone. Why that, why then? I don’t know. The world is always trying to tell me something. This was from my reading. I had remembered a character, an investigator, standing at the scene of the crime, asking himself: What am I not seeing here? I didn’t try to puzzle it out just then. With unexpected gifts, I don’t ask. Such gifts are proof against rational pressure—they yield best if left alone.
What am I not seeing here? It was only later that I thought of Poe, his Purloined Letter. Another investigator, the celebrated Dupin, is searching high and low for a document. He has looked in every possible cranny. Nothing. Finally he asks himself ‘what’s the least likely place someone would hide the thing?’ The answer comes right away. It would be hidden in plain sight. These detectives, the best of them, are metaphysicians.
Then, later in the day I remembered Henry James’ story, The Beast in the Jungle. The protagonist, Archer, has lived his whole life convinced that he will be granted some great revelation. He passes his days, his years, poised in expectation, his attention attuned elsewhere. It’s only when it’s too late that he realizes that there will be no such event, and that in the waiting he had missed the thing he had been given. I offer a crude summary of a subtle story and I apologize.
When the philosopher Pascal died, it’s said that his servant found a folded note sewn into his waistcoat. It was a written record of a profound spiritual experience that he wanted to keep always near, lest he forget.
I understand that. We have our great insights and then we move on. I don’t know how many times I’ve marked a moment: always remember this! Only to then forget. These revelations shine in their occasion—it seems then they might solve everything. But the occasion is displaced by all the other occasions.
What am I not seeing here? The question is, I see, a bookmark, a reminder taking me back to something I seem to have known forever, which I can’t keep in the forefront of my mind. It’s embarrassing. Because it’s the awareness of the gift itself—the thing that all the actions of living so effectively obscure. I don’t need to put it into words. It can’t really be put into words. There’s the saying Don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff...Who ever came up with that?
Nota bene: it’s not.
Sven Birkerts is the author, most recently, of The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing. He is the former director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and co-editor of AGNI. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.