Mom’s ninety-year-old friend, Dorothy Jones, is in the hospital with a broken hip. She lay in the driveway behind her house for an hour before she was found. An unfeeling doctor told her she would never be able to put on her own underwear again. So there she lies, trying not to be depressed. What was he thinking?
Standing in the kitchen, I thought of all my friends and their burdens: sickness, loneliness, children who won’t talk to them. All the protective circles we try to construct around ourselves are illusions or, more accurately, are temporary and do not hold.
Last night, I had dinner in Richmond, Virginia, with some friends who live in a Gatsby-like pile of stone with endless rooms impeccably furnished, surrounded by rolling lawns, ivy-covered walls. “You must feel like you’re in a movie,” I said to the husband. “At first it was daunting,” he confessed.
Although I have no desire to be part of that world, something pleasant tugs at me when I drive through neighborhoods full of massive oaks, brushed velvet lawns, and fortress-like mansions. I passed a couple of young teenagers in shorts leaning against a parked car. They seemed wrapped in privilege, staring at me through layers of protection that they wore as casually as their own skins.
This morning I awoke with a prayer: “Help me to have the courage to finish what I have begun and to begin what I want to finish.”
What needs to be recorded is my widening belief in personal prayer. For not very long I have tried to go to bed each night praying for different people I love. Last week, prayers were answered. I don’t know why this new conviction, that there is a connection between my prayers and prayers being answered, but it has descended upon me like a cloak around my shoulders that the prayers I send and the improvement I witness are joined.
Reading Emerson “On Virtue”—which he distrusts—I think that by and large I am not virtuous. But I would say that I am susceptible to and appreciative of people who are virtuous and wish to be like them. But crossing the room, so to speak, is difficult. I just stand on my side admiring what could, by imitating them, be mine.
Yesterday, on the tennis court, I battled to remember that I was in Ashland, not Monterey, playing tennis with Mother’s friend Reber, not my brother Tony. The imagination always wants to “digitally enhance” reality, make it easier and more entertaining to be alive. But I knew the truth was better and tried to stay with it.
One thing I notice is that when I fall behind in a tennis game, I give up. Reber pointed this out to me some time ago, and he is right. I want so much to win that when I’m not doing well I lose heart and want to stop. The vigor to persist leaves me. Where does this lack of confidence come from? And how can I punch through it?
On writing, I wonder if I am now a shade tree for younger writers rather than a fruit-bearing tree myself. But how would I know? It’s like wondering if I am an athlete when I stay indoors.
It is dangerous to ask questions if you’re not prepared to accept the answers. I asked Mother whether I had a short attention span. “Yes,” she said, “except when you’re writing. You focus for a moment, but then it’s gone, so that many mundane things go by the board. You’ve got so much going on in your head.”
Then the question I don’t ask: Do I share what’s going on inside my head? It seems to me that the larger the concern, the smaller is my instinct to divulge it—out of a desire to control the outcome.
Another question to myself: Am I learning anything new, putting myself in new situations, or staying in the same familiar “rooms” I’ve been in for so long? Do we fool ourselves into thinking that we are going into new territory? Last night I sat quietly in the living room after supper and read my friend Jean Emerson’s poetry from her latest chapbook, Cycles of the Moon Vine. She answered the last question for me.
We smile beneath our constant worries
We cherish our obligations.
They shelter us
From the howling emptiness of possibility
From our responsibility
to recognize our own reality.
Later, in bed, I read an interview with a man trying to wean us away from the advertising culture. Everything is a billboard, he said, even the clouds. (IBM recently put a laser image of its logo on a cloud in San Francisco.) It is true. We are inundated with messages and consider reading a J. Crew catalog intellectual activity. I personally read three last night—a summer sale catalog, a regular-price catalog, and another I don’t remember—thereby wasting for all eternity fifteen minutes.
I had a strange thought this morning. If I were to imagine myself walking through the upper floor of a large house with different parts of myself in different rooms, which door would I be afraid to open, what self would I be afraid to meet?
The self I would be afraid to meet would be the self I had neglected. She is the self who gets pushed aside by the optimistic, practical, reality-denying self who moves in front to protect and deny the self who might otherwise pull everything down.
But now, after years of keeping that neglected self at bay, I miss her. She is my heart, and only when I am in a position of command do I let her in to guide me. When I’m teaching, she is there: advising a friend, comforting a child, any area where I am dealing from strength. But that strong part is, for the most part, unsoftened by tears. I won’t let her cry in front of me. So she doesn’t, except when taken by surprise.
The self behind the door I am afraid to open is the self who had her innocence taken away from her, who longed to be loved by her husband but was criticized and cuckolded instead. She lived in fear that something horrible would happen to one of her children, that she would die of terror not knowing where they were. Lost, wailing, trapped, in wet diapers behind crib bars, they would be weeping for their mother and I would not be there.
Jeanne Moreau’s interview on 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace struck me hard. When Wallace asked her if she thought it was true that women of a certain age should be done with passion, she nodded. “It’s true what they say,” she replied. “With passion you are up and down. Love is steady, even.”
Yesterday I received a rejection letter from Hope magazine (which strikes me as a funny fact). They had torn off the return address from my letter and taped it to their envelope, which contained an unsigned form letter.
This is the first rejection letter I’ve gotten since the late sixties, when I used to send out old stuff and get it back quick as a boomerang. Well, I was sending out old things again, albeit previously published, so perhaps there is a lesson to be learned. But I decided not to let the feeling of rejection demonize the rejecter, who is probably a very bright well-meaning junior editor sitting in front of a huge stack of unsolicited manuscripts.
Then, at racquetball a little later, my partner commented on how well I was playing. I said I had gotten a rejection letter that afternoon and was probably profiting from the sense that I didn’t have anything more to lose. The ego should be monitored like an automobile tire—not too full, not too empty.
IN WILLIAMSTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS, TO SEE [MY YOUNGER SON] JUSTIN, IN A PLAY
Just writing down the name of the play, Observe the Sons of Ulster, Marching Toward the Somme, brings tears to my eyes. When he stepped onto the stage into that pool of bright gold light, my heart was stunned by his truthfulness, the command and sharpness of his presence. And in the end, when he prayed for his men, so soft and cherishable going to the slaughter, I wept again.
Now I am home, nursing an ache that is at least partially an ache for my own youth—longing to be thirty again, surrounded by other thirty-year-olds who are so bright, clever, and beautiful. “Accept your place on the conveyor belt,” I say to myself. There is nothing so unattractive as someone trying to run backward. But the sadness that we will never be on the same portion of the belt, that one day I will be dumped off it, remains.
This morning, as I woke up and got dressed, I found myself searching in my mind for friends, the way I search my closet for clothes. Who are they? How many do I have? We live in a world of s
hifting affections, mine as well as others, but it seems to me that to relate to myself in such a lateral way, taking my measure by how others weigh me, is false. I must go inside, where my ability to relate to life is not dependent upon who relates to me, and take my own internal soundings.
Yesterday, sixteen-year-old Miranda Longaker came to visit. She brought her flute and played it for me—very well. Then she asked me how my writing was going, and I told her the synopsis of my Christmas story so far. I confessed to being stuck. “You can’t give up on it,” she said. “Just start in a new place if you’re stuck in the old one.”
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
[journal empty.]
SEPTEMBER 12, 2001
Yesterday, America’s whole world changed when we were attacked by terrorists who hijacked four commercial jets, flew two of them directly into the World Trade Center towers—which collapsed with thousands of people inside—another into the side of the Pentagon, and a fourth, destined for Camp David, into the ground.
It began at 8:45 A.M. Minutes before, I had been downstairs in the kitchen, listening to the radio and its daily sadness. Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat couldn’t agree on a place to meet for peace talks. I said to Mother, “The world is so sick.” She agreed. And then, minutes later, the first plane struck the World Trade Center tower. I was upstairs in my office. The phone rang and my friend Pat said, “Turn on your television.” The country watched as the second plane approached and struck the second tower. Within less than two hours both of them had fallen to the earth, and the skyline was empty where once they had been. The shock waves will be endless.
All commercial travel has been halted. The president got on the air and made a brief, not particularly forceful statement that terrorists and the countries that hide them will not be tolerated. But he is clearly in shock, too. This is the first time in my life that the bubble of protection has been shattered, that my capacity for happiness has been radically altered from the outside. We are at war, but the enemy is unlabeled, and I pray that we don’t go on a shooting spree that plunges the entire world into darkness.
I dread opening a newspaper or turning on the television. And I pray that every person killed was instantly plucked by an angel into the next world.
SEPTEMBER 13, 2001
At eleven-thirty last night, Justin called on his cell phone from New York City. He had been working in Toronto but managed to rent a car and get back to the city, where he returned it and tried to take a cab to his apartment. But the driver wouldn’t take him any farther than Fourteenth Street. As he walked down an empty Manhattan street pulling his suitcase behind him, the air was full of smoke. He could not believe what he was seeing—all the thousands of New Yorkers beneath the rubble, a five-story crematorium. The image of a young man dragging his suitcase behind him on a dark deserted street, horrified and awestruck over the desolation, remains with me.
Bill Moyers on television the other night, trying to sort out the horror of the last days, said, “I don’t believe that life has meaning. I believe that we give life meaning.” Yes, this is what I believe, too, that every moment is a moment of choice, whether to invest our lives with significance and love or not.
Images: the wrecked sections of the World Trade Center lying like jagged shards of a cathedral on the rubble. The way the dust has soaked the air in a white bath. There is no color. The light cannot penetrate the dust. New York is a city covered with pictures. Find this man. Help me find this woman. Who has seen, or knows, where he, she, is.
SEPTEMBER 16, 2001
Justin at La Guardia, waiting in line to check in for a flight to Los Angeles. He sounds solemn but calm. We talked about living in the present, embracing fear and then detaching from it. I told him he was in God’s hands, that I felt he would be fine. He said he needed to keep doing what he did for a living, because to stay put would be to cycle between depression and fear. I asked him to repeat for me the prayer he always says before he goes onstage so I could write it down. (“God, remove my fear and direct my attention toward what You would have me be.”)
Thinking about how our country was taken unawares by the terrorists, how we had no idea that we were going to be attacked, reminds us that the demand for human intelligence depends upon human community. This is where America is primitive and the third world is sophisticated. We are a nation of isolated people, living in planned communities slashed by six-lane highways. We do not know who our neighbors are.
My mother’s cigarette man in Ashland is an Arab who lost six friends in the World Trade Center. She asked me to drive her to the local florist, where she bought six red roses in a vase, and then we drove them over to Kassam. He saw us park, and when I walked in with the flowers he knew what they were for and from whom. He had already put a carton of Mom’s favorite American Spirit cigarettes into a bag and pushed them toward me—a gift. “You never know,” he kept saying, about his dead friends. “You never know.” I told him how sorry I was and put my arms around him. It was such a small little piece of thread, but my mother had seen it, blind as she is, and plucked it off the ground. We must be looking out for each other, not at each other, to make these connections.
IN ITALY
Sitting once again in Villa Spannocchia’s living room, a fire burning quietly, a pitcher of purple wildflowers on a wooden table, bright morning light coming through the shutters.
Spannocchia is at its most beautiful this time of year. A light dew covers the lawn, the orange geraniums in earth-colored pots are sharp against the blue sky. Walking up the hill this morning toward the pigpens, I turned around and saw the tower swathed in fog, the cypress trees framing it at the base. Yesterday we went down to the vineyards and picked grapes. By evening they were pressed and heaps of skins lay in the fattoria courtyard, red plastic buckets rinsed and ready for new service today.
Back at the villa, I found the artist Anne Truitt’s journal, Turn, in the bookcase. On her father, she writes:
It never, I think, occurred naturally to him that the kernel of a human being is divine.
On making the right choice:
The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s character is ease and contentment, and an ample, even provision of natural energy.
On aging:
I have come face-to-face with age itself. Inelasticity. An unrelenting wall of physical weakness that no amount of willpower denied. I could not have done more. And no spring of energy rose in me as it did only five months ago when I caught Charlie at the beach. I am not exactly ashamed. That would be silly. I am changed. Irreversibly changed.
Truitt is a light to read by.
Last night I took my writers to a nearby convent for a vespers service. I never tire of looking at those Italian nuns, most of them quite young, sitting sideways to the altar. Their faces, gazing down at their missals, are as still as ponds while their fingers methodically replace the ribbon markers on a new page as they move through the service. I thought how safe they are, many centuries away from the world we live in, with planes crashing into skyscrapers and people afraid to get a hamburger in a Siena McDonald’s.
OUR LAST COMPLETE DAY AT SPANNOCCHIA
The papers are full of terrorism—anthrax, the FBI bungling. All of us fly back to the United States next week. Despite the dangers there, as opposed to the peace here, I am more comfortable at home.
In front of me outside the villa living room window is the beauty I never tire of: lawn, stone walls, cypress trees, and the rolling hills beyond. Other little notes in the margin: wood smoke, doves cooing, nipitella mint in the grass. Last night, walking down the hill from the restaurant in Orgia, the sky was thick with stars. My friend Jennifer Storey and I gossiped quietly about some of the villagers: Eve and Vittorio, always with their eye on the main chance, don’t sit well with the other villagers; Nina and Federico have erected a gate to keep out Eve and Vittorio’s marauding cats. Beneath the stars we think pretty small, but perhaps it keeps us from being overwhelmed.
At Jennifer�
��s house, I had a chance conversation with a Portuguese man, sixty-six, who said he had recently finished translating Saint Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle. I asked him if the experience had changed him. No, he said, but he had concluded that her mystical experiences were true visions, not the work of the devil or the hysterical thoughts of an over-heated female mind. “They have the hallmarks of true love as I have experienced it,” he said. I asked him what he meant. He said that the experience opened her heart to others, deepened her compassion, inspired her to be of greater service. “This is part of my experience, too.”
The trip to the Uffizi in Florence was unsatisfying this time. The headsets were difficult to work, the treatment of the rooms cursory, and none of the guides knew how to find Ghirlandaio, my favorite Renaissance painter. So after an hour of traipsing distractedly through rooms full of masterpieces, I emerged outside into the long alley that runs between the two gallery wings. Suddenly, I heard the most angelic soprano voice singing “Ave Maria.” There, standing by an open guitar case, was a young woman singing with such purity and passion that my eyes filled with tears. There is so much beauty in Florence, yet it took a real experience, a flesh and blood girl singing her heart out, to move my own.
A conversation with Jennifer that I’ve been meaning to record. We had been talking about feeling locked, or trapped, in our lives. Jennifer remarked that when this occurs in her she knows, on some level, how to unlock the door, how to free herself. The solution, or key, is right there, on the table, so to speak. But she doesn’t want to use it. She ignores it.
Back in Ashland with winter coming on, the trees racing with color and the sky bright blue. Dorothy Jones’s younger brother, Hunter, died last week. He was eighty-two. The Jones family has been in their best clothes ever since, as the town comes to call upon them. I am one of the first, signing my name beneath some of the community’s aristocrats, Jim Pollard, Susan and Woody Tucker, people who form the “long bones” of the town.
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