The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  In my reading, I sought a contemporary, someone who lived what I thought of as my “other life,” the one not lived, but so lavishly imagined and desired that it felt not like another life, but a version of my own. You feel—I did—deep contentment when you find such a life expressed by a writer who has lived it, as if in reading that life you (sort of) live it too. Even better, if the writer is someone you have “discovered,” the way people think they discover a landscape—this long-beloved landscape of France, for example.

  Just before I came to France to visit Montaigne’s tower, I found in a bookstore by accident just such a figure—Gustaf Sobin, born in 1935, so not my generation, but nearer than Mavis Gallant, nearer than W. S. Merwin or James Wright. I didn’t know anyone who had read him. Good. My find.

  You, though, with your deep reach in American poetry, especially the experimental edges—friend of Ginsberg, promoter of Thom Gunn and Robert Creeley, encourager of Ed Sanders and the Fugs—you maybe had heard of Sobin. Possible. But you weren’t talking, not anymore. Just me, still muttering around the house to you, the dog looking at me steadfastly, worried.

  In spite of the intriguing continental name, Gustaf Sobin, I found, was an American. After graduation from Brown (he was born in Boston, had a private school education), he made the leap to France, looking for poetry. And found it in his hero (eventually his mentor and friend) René Char. Sobin arrived in Paris in 1962. He lived most of the rest of his life in the Vaucluse department of Provence, almost Montaigne country (given that Montaigne went to school in Toulouse). Sobin met and married a British painter there, and they had two children. He was already dead—from pancreatic cancer in 2005, just sixty-nine years old—when I discovered his books.

  According to an online tourist site for the region, his town, Cavaillon, has a market every Monday morning along its main thoroughfare. “It is probably the least charming market of the Luberon,” the text reads, “somewhere that locals shop for cut-price clothing, bargain underwear multi-packs, fabrics, leather goods, bedding, bags, household products, etc. As such it is ‘real,’ but reality probably isn’t why you come to the Luberon.”

  By the time I read this line I felt I knew Sobin well enough to see him smile, shake his head—some gesture to note this irony—the What-ever quotation marks around the word “real,” the frank sniff that a person doesn’t travel to the Luberon looking for reality. Not now perhaps. Though clearly he had. Sobin would have relished, I felt certain, that his market town had not succumbed to the creamy charm of artisanal-proud Luberon with its stratospheric land prices for ruined cottages, one of which he had bought decades earlier as a young man looking for poetry.

  It wasn’t his poetry that let me feel I knew him and could conjure his dry humor. Not even his fiction did that. Though I admired his slim novel, The Fly-Truffler, about a widower whose Provençal tradition of hunting truffles allows him to encounter his dead wife in dreamlike meetings while searching in the damp underworld of the woods—there was too much magical realism for me, I suppose, or maybe I was becoming allergic to widow books, determined never to write one. Though—look at me.

  It was Sobin’s essays that grabbed me. His final work. Appropriately, for someone who had written a novel making a metaphor of finding the reclusive truffle hidden underground, and for a man who watched as the ancient quiet of the region he had chosen for its reclusiveness flipped into a real estate boom, his essays are about what he calls “vestiges,” the bare traces of prehistoric and medieval life in his adopted landscape. The world before change overwhelmed the furthest, deepest reach of history.

  He often found these vestiges as he walked the isolated territory near his home in the Vaucluse, and in his reading of obscure accounts of the region, memoirs, old civic documents, scientific papers. His essays are about these encounters with the deep past—the lost, invisible past beyond memory and reckoning. He delicately stitches together tatters of the historical fabric rent by time.

  Breathtaking essays, reconstructing (it’s tempting to say resurrecting) Provençal fossils, while never letting go the urgency of inquiry into the buried past we live atop. “Obscure, usually encrusted, more often than not illegible,” he says, “these artifacts . . . establish points from which we might situate our own existence today.”

  Who cares about fossils? Not me. Even Sobin admits laconically that “for myself, the past per se holds little interest, and the present offers only the profound malaise of a culture increasingly devoid of the protocols of self-reflection.” Another leisure man, for isn’t it leisure alone that safeguards reflection? That cloistered nun years ago, maybe she started all this (you and your nuns). I had asked her what her way of life was based upon—love of God, the search for meaning? What was the foundation of contemplative life? Oh, she said, without a pause—leisure, it’s based on leisure. I put her in a book years ago. And here she is again. Bears repeating.

  She didn’t say her life was about leisure, but based on it. Sobin’s fossils, his shards and chips, don’t expose the recondite obsession of a pedant. They form a lens of penetrating inquiry. His essays bring forward what archaeologists uncover with their tiny brushes, their manicure-set tools and their infinite patience. But he does it in language—a world lost but still there. Which is to say, here.

  It’s important to the power of these prose pieces that Sobin is not an expert, that he’s determined to understand, sheerly by pondering the evidence, what is hidden in the charnel house we live upon. That’s why they’re essays, and not studies. Why they pulse with urgency, and are humble and passionate, even as he is grateful, almost reverent about the scholars and paleontologists he counts on for expertise.

  I read all these late books—Luminous Debris, Ladder of Shadows—and brought along on the trip the bare sheaf of pages that comprises the final one, Aura: Last Essays. He had more essays projected, and in the thin trail of sentences at the end of Aura, his widow—his editor—provides an appendix of these unfinished, perhaps even unstarted essays: an account of a trip he planned to undertake following the exact pathways of Petrarch’s 1336 ascent of nearby Mont Ventoux; an essay on the scarcity of light in medieval homes and the sacredness invested in candles and oil lamps; an essay on leprosy, another on the “extrasensory function of church bells.” On and on his inquisitiveness goes in this list of unwritten essays—pieces about “Madder: The Color That Vanished,” about Van Gogh’s Arles bedroom, another on “Charles Plumier and the Adamic Naming of Flora” (another person seeing the botanist as organizing angel). Finally, “The Death of Provençal,” the last in his billowing list of anticipated essays, “a long essay,” his final notation says, “recounting the last liminal traces of a language and, inseparably, a millennial culture on the very point of vanishing altogether.”

  Vanishing altogether. The very thing he was in the process of doing as he listed these never-to-be-written essays. He had found his subject, and his form—the traces of lived life—vestiges, a stone, a fossilized bone, a statue’s torso.

  In these prose pieces, he moves beyond his earlier literary forms (poems, novels) to the mind itself—ruminative pieces recounting his fascinated study of loss and remembrance as evidenced in the bones and shards of Provence. What he calls vestiges are the physical evidence of what I’ve been calling, in narrative terms, vignettes. Both prove the enduring presence of life in the teeth of death, in the lived aftermath of death’s reality. The fossil. The bone chip. The memory of the hand grasping mine. They are still here somehow, not quite lost to the touch.

  And so Sobin, who came to deep France to be a poet, finally becomes an essayist, heir to Montaigne. He retired early to his cottage, if not to a château—seeking the reflective mind, its presence in life and history, and in himself. Looking not for “a self,” that thing modernity keeps saying we’re looking for when that is the last thing we need, choking on our individuality. Looking for his mind.

  “There is a need . . . to
situate ourselves in regard to our own evolving,” Sobin writes, trying to explain his dedication to obscure texts and buried bones. The dead are not about death. I get that. Now. But he is making the point not as personal recognition of loss and its uses, but as history, on this stretch of land where the model of the human, lost and lost and lost yet again, layer upon lost layer—is found in the patient pursuit of vestiges over time.

  “Reading books, visiting museums, or simply stopping short before the vast, gold umbrella of some chestnut tree in mid-autumn,” he says, “aren’t we always, in a sense, looking for ourselves?” And who would that be? Not the psychological self, musing over its wounds, mother, father, faithless friends, lovers, the What-ever of personal history.

  You weren’t for any of that either. Free your mind, you’d say. Let go of all that stuff. We loved Sobin—oh, right, you weren’t part of that. I found him on my own. After.

  Sobin’s essays display a contemporary Montaigne mind pondering, interpreting. The job of being human is not figuring things out, but getting lost in thought. Isn’t that what holding a vestige to the light is? Holding a vignette in mind? Shards, bits. Considering them, lost in thought. A wonderful figure of speech, you said one day when the phrase came up, wry and amused as you often were by a turn of phrase (the first gift you gave me: a dictionary, followed soon after by a thesaurus). Isn’t thought supposed to find something, find an answer? But lost in thought is where we often were, where we wanted to be, you and I across the yellow kitchen table, another cup of coffee.

  * * *

  —

  Annette and I motored on to Bordeaux, stood before the giant statues of Montaigne and Montesquieu facing off in the yawning Place des Quinconces like two figures made of salt. Somehow a city—even Montaigne’s city (he had been the mayor of Bordeaux)—was not for us. Back to the Route du Foie Gras, into the tourist town of Sarlat, birthplace of Montaigne’s beloved friend Étienne de La Boétie whose house, wedged into a turn, facing the main square and rising to a peaked roof, is marked with a historic plaque, the whole area chockablock with shops selling—what else?—jars of foie gras.

  Had his beloved friend lived—no essays. Or so Montaigne felt. Death and loss threw him into the imaginary friendship of “meddling with writing.” But Étienne de La Boétie did die, in 1563, only thirty-two, leaving behind a handful of writings, on the subject of political intelligence and power, that Montaigne revered. “I know no one who can be compared with him,” Montaigne writes in “Of Friendship,” an early essay. “If you press me to tell why I loved him,” he says, “I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.”

  Love, they say, is a constant interrogation. Montaigne says it differently: “Friendship feeds on communication.” But love is not an answer to anything. Friendship of the sort Montaigne speaks of (and experienced) is “a harmony of wills,” he says. Being together, getting lost—in each other, lost in each other’s thoughts.

  It was windy in Sarlat, the narrow streets crammed with narrow shops stacked with tins and jars of goose liver pâté, whole alarming lobes of pale livers in their shrink-wrapped jackets, looking as if they might start pulsing outside the plastic. Annette took my picture in front of La Boétie’s birthplace, my windbreaker billowing out as if I had been force-fed too, my face seeming to grimace. But that was from the glare of the sun.

  In spite of Gustaf Sobin and his vestiges, after we left Sarlat we didn’t stop at the museum for the Lascaux caves. But I made a sharp turn off the road when I saw notice of the Château des Milandes, the grand property of Josephine Baker, who was born in St. Louis in 1905, reborn in the freedom of Paris in the 1920s. She bought the château after the Second World War, filling it with her “rainbow family” of adopted children. We wandered around the giant stony place, hardly any other visitors that day, the gardens and lawns vast, yawning, a whole caged area given over to “birds of prey,” falcons and owls, eagles, hawks. The Web site makes it all look like Disneyland, cheery and bright, offering exhibits and events for children. But when we were there, it was a shell of memory, a large forlorn photo of Josephine Baker sitting on the steps by the kitchen the day she was evicted from the place. She was broke, her dream taken from her. Still, her enormous glorioso smile, her lithe body on the postcard I bought. Her radiance. Her bravery. She was awarded the Croix de Guerre for her work with the Resistance, was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur by de Gaulle.

  Her indelible image no matter what she lost is evident in the postcard photo—those famous faux bananas strapped around her bare waist like a ring of male trophies stiff with excitement to be encircling her flesh, her lissome form breaking all the rules. You feel the transgressive thrill even now when there seem to be no rules—at least not for nudity onstage.

  A visit to the scandalous Josephine Baker, free of St. Louis, shimmying her danse sauvage across France—she not only got away from segregation, she achieved the midwestern Elsewhere. This was the right prelude to visiting Montaigne’s tower, he who displayed undisguised (naked) envy in the Essais as he listened to the description of people living naturally, naked and unabashed in “that other world which has been discovered in our century,” wishing that he could strip naked in his writing. The only way to write.

  * * *

  —

  Montaigne’s château, huge and somehow haughty, is a separate building from the tower. It was completely reconstructed after a fire in 1885 damaged it, the original château built by Montaigne’s grandfather. The family was mercantile (fish and wine), only a couple of generations ennobled, his mother apparently from a Spanish converso family.

  Any visit to Montaigne’s tower is not about the château in any case. He maintained he had no interest in domestic arrangements—unlike his beloved father, Pierre, who spent his life making improvements to the vast place. Montaigne’s widow was the last of his family to inhabit it. It remains, as it always has been, a private residence—whose, we didn’t know, though as we approached the entrance to the tower, an SUV pulled up, crunching over the sand-colored gravel entry area across the way. Three people, a man and two women, got out and entered the place, as if they had pulled up to an overwrought suburban McMansion, loose-limbed in jeans and windbreakers. They didn’t turn toward the tower.

  I think we were both startled to see how simple the visiting arrangements for the tower were. At a little outbuilding, almost a hut, a young girl had pointed the way to the tower, down a vaguely tended path with a hand-lettered sign—Tour. It seemed that we could just wander in.

  Annette said I should have it to myself first, go in alone. La tour. There were no other visitors around.

  I climbed the staircase, past Montaigne’s private chapel that took up the dark entry level, niched with an altar, a shrinelike cavern. And finally, I stood alone in the round room, his library, the light-filled chamber where it all happened, once ringed with books, the stony enclosure where he devised his pieces, some shorter than a page, some long enough to make a chapbook, the writing he called his Essais—thinking it was a throwaway word.

  The windows never had glass, and he refused to outfit the library with a fireplace (imagine the cold in winter) in order to safeguard his books. The lines of wisdom he had inscribed on the ceiling in Latin and some in Greek had been reinscribed in modern times in a restoration effort. The room was surely emptier (no books) than he knew it. His desk—or a desk—was positioned near the back wall, centered across from the windows on the other wall. A chair pulled neatly up to the desk. Nobody around, no forbidding sign, no ribbon across the chair. I sat in it, feeling slightly criminal nonetheless, or just silly. It was a long way to come to sit in a chair he’d never sat in, regarding an empty room with words on the ceiling I couldn’t decipher.

  I wandered over to an opening at the side of the room and checked out the adjacent alcove where he had allowed a little fireplace, a cramped space to warm himsel
f. This was the room, a sign said, where he slept. To the side, a kind of chute, a peephole down to the chapel so he could hear—even see—Mass without going down there. So the tower wasn’t a “study.” It was almost a bachelor den. What do they call them now?—a man cave. Except his was a tower, rising, not sinking into the ground.

  The chapel—the fact of it—surprised me. That the habits of religion—the old cult of Catholicism, not the new freedom of Protestant individual faith—mattered to him so much. He built liturgy into his privacy, this first “modern man,” this man we claim as a skeptic. He was a skeptic—and also a believer. He bridged the gap. He lived above with his books in the unheated tower, and he tended, faithfully, the rituals down there in the candlelit dark where mystery abided.

  On the walls of the alcove bedroom I made out what was left of the painted frescoes (naked nymphs and godlets mostly, bundles of chipped floral décor) and the graffiti of earlier visitors—boldly scrawled Emma 1882 and Pierre 1920, and someone whose name and message I couldn’t decipher, the date 1989, the most recent I found.

  I looked out the window of the alcove to experience (or think I was experiencing) his view. A great blossoming marronnier, part of an allée of lofting chestnuts marshaled along a gravel path leading to the tower where I was, where he had been—with or possibly without chestnuts, or these chestnuts anyway. Nearer by, just below, a triangular untended parterre garden where it was easy to imagine herbs in careful arrays. That parterre garden sent a brief thrill through me—that, I thought, could have been here when he was here, could have been what he looked down upon. Because surely he ate well—he tells us he loved rich sauces, delicately flavored.

  I turned back toward the main room, his writing room. I wanted to take some descriptive notes, hoping for an insight for the book I was—I am—writing (an earnest essayist acting the part—notes . . . the ineluctable consequence of one’s greatest inward energy). The parterre of herbs was a start, but what else? Turning quickly, gaze angled down to the notebook where I was drawing the shape of the triangular garden, I misjudged the doorway (an earlier century, a smaller scale) and smacked my head—hard—into the stone wall, just above Pierre 1920.