If time were blood and the executioner struck off my head now, there would be nothing left in me for a crowd to see. A drained and cured carcass only. For I have been gutted and cleaned and hung up by time like a pig in the cellar. They say—do they not?—that I have the pig’s eye. Just so.… I can find no fault now with that. What is gossip may sometimes be poetry.
“Old men are twice children,” the proverb says. Perhaps he will bear with me for the sake of my second childhood.
He rubs his eyes. Outside autumnal light is fading. Fog rising in the air. Fine-pointed rain in the fog. Pressing his eyes closed, he can still see that single, dark-boned tree with small birds, nameless, huddled there. Can open his eyes to see a sunset in the rude fireplace. Near, the candle flames are burnished blades with honed edges; the quills are sharp; the crested paper clean and crisp. In a silver cup Madeira wine flashes its own fire, color not of sunset in England or the Indies, but of sun upon a windy sea among the southern islands. There where the ships turn westward to follow trade winds.…
Fire, not fever now, warms the man’s veins. His fingers, steady, grip the quill. In his heart, center of the fire, he wrestles tall shining angels of memory and desire.
His mind is still wedded to this world, but ever aware of the imperfections of that wife. He loves life most, doubting that he has ever loved the world as much, even when he has embraced it most eagerly.
Must make accounting to his son.
No wonder that old men, wishing to preserve a last shred of dignity while they live, shutter their senses, lock the gates and doors of heart and mind, and settle for silence.
Let the boy read the History when he’s able to. Let him read the other works in prose and the verses as well. If he chooses to and can lay hands on them. Let him read them all, realizing they are addressed to strangers and not to him.
And Ralegh cannot succumb to the temptation to present himself naked, as in a statue. For he is too inconstant to write the true chronicle of himself. Yesterday his words would have been the work of a man captured by a fever, anxious and uncertain. Now he can write out of a sense of relief, of comfort with himself. And if, by the will of God or the King, he will live to return to this chamber for dinner tomorrow, he will be yet again another man. That’s certain.
Yet this is no reason not to follow the heart’s desire to render to his son a form of accounting, a part of his invisible estate.
It is much the same as the paradox put in the Preface to the History. Following an appraisal of the peculiar follies of ambitious worldly men, based upon authority, reason, and experience; demolishing the idols of riches and honor. Only to take a turn, as if to reconstruct something else from the jagged shards he had made:
“Shall we therefore value honor and riches at nothing, and neglect them as unnecessary and vain? Certainly not. For that the infinite wisdom of God, which hath distinguished his angels by degrees; which hath given greater and less light to heavenly bodies; which hath made differences between beasts and birds; created the eagle and the fly, the cedar and the shrub; and among stones given the fairest tincture to the ruby and the quickest light to the diamond; hath also ordained kings, dukes, or leaders of the people, magistrates, judges, and other degrees among men. And as honor is left to posterity for a mark and ensign of the virtue and understanding of their ancestors, so, seeing Siracides preferreth death before beggary; and that titles, without proportionable estates, fall under the miserable succor of other men’s pity, I account it foolishness to condemn such a care; provided that worldly goods be well gotten and that we raise not our own buildings out of other men’s ruins.”
Just so. And provided the father shall not raise up the memory of himself out of the ruins of his son. Provided he check his expectations with an awareness of his pride and vanity. The impulse and desire, however ambitious, to leave something of himself for his son, ought not to be denied.
That, too, could be called foolishness.
The young man, ignorant as Adam, takes possession of the world as it is given to him. Never dreaming or imagining any more than Adam could, anything lives before him. He may love or despise what he is given, but never knows what has been before; and, not knowing, cares even less. Therefore all change startles him equally.
For the new generation the former one was always old.
For each generation there is a naming day. All things of this world are discovered and are named anew.
It is only the old who know (with a yawn) the names will be the same.
What can be spoken of, written, shared, then, is neither experience nor wisdom. But only a kind of news. A sense of the recent times, the passing world which the young man has never known to be and will never know of unless he is told.
Not that he will believe it. For it will all be as vague as a half-forgotten dream. But to have dreamed it at all is something.
In telling what he can of the dream, the father can, by oblique courses, tacking against wind, eventually arrive at his original destination.
He must exercise his own stiffened and weary imagination. Remembering always what it was like to have been young once.
And then perhaps he will be worthy to be believed, whether he is believed or not.
Ralegh crumples the paper he has written on into a loose ball and tosses it into the fire. Where it rests for a moment, riding like a white frail cockle boat, then opens like a summer rose, blooms bright, and dies into ashes.
To begin again …
My son, there was a gentleman in London who commissioned a picture maker to paint an extraordinary portrait of himself. Himself in large, seated at a writing desk with pen and paper—as I am now—while all about him, in miniature, as if the scenes were his thoughts and memories, were depicted the chronicles of his life, from the chamber where his mother holds him, an infant, in her arms, to a stately funeral procession moving toward a well-wrought tomb. We see him at the wars and in his travels. We see him feasting, at council table, seated with friends around a virginal, joining together, flute, viol, bass, and lute, to make music.…
He was a gentleman who served his country well in peace and war. And yet how we laughed at his vanity!
“He lies, he lies! I give him the lie!” Sir John Harrington said. “He professes to have shown everything, but he lies.”
“What, then, is missing?”
“Look and see for yourself. I see everything depicted, eating, sleeping, dancing, reading, writing, dying.…”
“God’s death, would you have the man show himself naked, coupling his wife, or, more likely, a whore?” said the Earl of Southampton.
“There are limits to candor and confession,” Harrington said, “though I suppose they shall have to be bended if you choose to follow his suit and have your own life painted.”
Southampton flushed red-faced as a Dutch burgher. And Essex laughed and gave him a slap on the back that rattled his teeth.
“If you don’t order the thing done, I shall do so myself. And I shall see it hangs in the gallery at Whitehall as fair warning to all chaste Court ladies.”
“Harrington always smiles so nicely,” Southampton grumbled. “Except for that smile, I would box his ears.”
Essex said, “You will not box his ears, because you fear he’ll pull out your curls and snip off your beard.”
“What, then, is missing, Sir John?”
“Do you see a privy anywhere? You do not. Yet a man spends more time there, at the absolute mercy of his bowels, than he shall ever spend at feasting or at music. His groans and sighs, the trumpets and whispers of an infinite variety of farts, these are the music a man knows best.”
“But who can paint a groan or a sigh?”
“Find me a man who can paint a fart,” the Earl of Essex said, “and I’ll give him a pension for life.”
Oh, we laughed at the man’s folly; for that is the way of the world with every man’s reputation. The dead answer no challenges. But the laughter is not malice, not truly, for the dead are
also beyond injury and insult.
Even as I smile now, recalling the painting, I understand his wish to preserve some of what he had been. And if I had time aplenty to spare to waste, I would be tempted to seek out that painter and order one much like it for myself.
The picture is not wholly true. It does, indeed, conceal and equivocate. But it tells no outright lies. And it leaves all inference and judgment to the beholder.
Still and all, it seems to me painting is more innocent of guile than words; less liable to end in misunderstanding. Yet likewise lacking the power of words to ring like chimes and bells and to echo long after.
I speak of the value of words, my son, because you are such a quiet child, keeping your secrets.
Your brother, Wat, had a tongue that flapped like a banner in a fair wind, and the voice of a herald at the gates. Words were sparrows in the eaves, larks in the sky, blackbirds in a bush, a falcon in the clouds.
Poor lad, he has God’s plenty of silence now.
Try to remember your tall brother sometimes and remember to pray for him too.
I would not try to persuade you to turn against your natural humors and seek to be like him or like your father. But much as I often felt the need to caution Wat against giving his tongue too much license, so I caution you against too much silence. Words fail and falter often, but they are the best servants we have. Do not neglect them. Certainly do not ever fear them.
Old men are citizens of the kingdom of what has been, ambassadors from far places. They frame tales in a light of wonder like travelers home from India and Persia.
They are not to be completely believed, no matter how eloquent, or how marvelous their adventures may have been.
When I was a boy in Devon, I listened to the stories of the shipmen, believing half and loving all. And dreaming, without hope or promise, to sail wide seas and see the wonders of the world myself.
After my lessons, which I loved no more than any other boy, I turned to certain books and cut my mind’s teeth on the adventures of the explorers of new worlds and especially the shining, fearful conquistadors—Cortez, Pizarro, and Balboa.…
Strange now to think the first heroes I had were Spaniards.
I believe the child who changes, grows, and vanishes into the man, does not die so long as the man lives. I think that after all accounting of experience, good reason, common sense, my rage against the Spaniard had within it the small voice of a child, disappointed, who saw these mortals as the degenerate heirs of heroes.
Some have said this last voyage of mine to Guiana was a child’s play, an old man playing out a child’s dream, to come upon a secret kingdom as Cortez came upon and conquered Mexico.
I deny that. But I affirm there is a measure of truth in it.
If I had never dreamed of Cortez as a child, I could never have gone so far and risked so much.
But I will not trouble you with apology for the things done or left undone. You will come to your own judgment and understanding in due time. Most of all I would hope to be judged as one who loved you. Leave the subtleties of guilt and innocence to time and to strangers.
I speak of my dreams as a child because I do not know your dreams or what may waken the drumbeats of your heart. What you love now you will love until you die, through many changes and disguises.
What you dream now will somehow, in surprising shapes and forms you cannot yet imagine, come to pass.
There was a world before you and will be after. And both are your inheritance.
All I can do with small time remaining is speak as an old man (which I am) of the world, as I recall it. So that you can make that part of your history too.
Judge for yourself in the fullness of time. I trust that my own surmises will not be restraints, but will free you to find your way. What we do not know is what we fear most. I pray that you can face the future with only fears which you can master. It may be some comfort to face the future without fearing the past.
There is talk now, much talk of the golden days of the late Queen. I imagine the young are weary of that and able to doubt it.
And no wonder, judging by the evidence at hand. Even a fool knows that we had wars and perils, times of much famine and sickness, disorder and anguish. And the same fool knows the present time, vexed as it may be, if not a feast, is likewise not a famine.
And we are still at peace as I write this.
And thus it may seem perverse for the old to cling to a memory of something that never was.
Think on this: when I look into a mirror glass, I see what my eyes see of myself, but I can never see what you see. I can think of you and what you see, remembering that you have never known me without gray in hair and beard, have always known me as a man with one stiff leg. You have no reason to imagine I was not born with the wounds and scars I received. To me the gray and the deepening lines of my face are late intrusions upon my property, impositions enforced against me. I see them, but cannot credit them wholly. And each wound is from a date and a time. Before I felt pain and fire and the cracking of my bone, I could run and dance as well as most men. And sometimes my stiffened leg can seem to remember its former liberty.
The truth of mirrors, then, is more than meets the eye.
Thinking of mirrors, I remember the late Queen. She, as a young and beautiful woman, whom I knew not, began our age and she lived to end it.
At the last there was melancholy in her secret heart. In common (I know now) with all who live to see the strange ends so many bright and fair things come to. There were hard times in this kingdom, reflecting, as it were, her inward sorrows. And she was required to be not herself, but much like a player, like any boy actor with a high voice. For she must wear a wig and cover her wrinkles with thick powders, flush her cheeks with rouge, brighten her lips with paint, not smile for fear of showing her last few blackened teeth; must perfume away the stink of aging, wear many jewels and stiff padded farthingale dresses to divert the eyes from frail flesh and bones.
I tell you this so you can know things you will never understand until you live to be old yourself. Body decays and fails and flesh disgusts. Yet there is no man so deformed or so ugly that he believes himself to be beyond love or admiration. Easy enough to regret what one has once been, to curse the young with shine on their flesh and green sap in their limbs, and to wish them a long life too, and the same bitter fruits at the end of it. Easy, as well, to huddle in shame and wish only to be dead.
Still in all, I think no man is so loathsome that, even in self-disgust, he cannot cleave to the belief that in some way, magical, as in some myth or child’s tale of transformation, toad into prince, sow’s ear into silk purse and the like, that in some way he is far more beautiful than he seems or knows. I venture there is a hidden truth veiled behind this illusion. We are said to be in the image of God—which we take to be the soul eternal and not the corrupted and corruptible flesh—and to be in the image of God, is, therefore, to be beautiful. And therefore the naked truth of us, veiled though it is, is beautiful, and would be most beautiful if we could behold it. This illusion, then, though it be denied by every wrinkle and deformity of flesh, may be the one true apprehension of our true condition. It is a sad wish that is more than a wish, because what it asks for has already been granted.
Yet even without thinking of mysteries beyond understanding, we see how those whom we love are transformed. And being loved by another, we find that we ourselves have been somehow remade and restored. Indeed, through the power of love, we feel the surety of this in the lover’s eyes. Who is to say that this fantasy of human love is not true for as long as love lasts? If human love is a weak reflection, a wavering image of the light of infinite and eternal Love (to the extent that it is caritas and not the fevered fancy of our lust), then it may be that in the transformation of lovers, each one to the other, we are given a sign of hidden truth. No, more than that, are seeing true and clear for the first time. In love not deluded, but the scales of our eyes fallen away.
An
old and arrogant man, no mood and little time left for argument, I say experience teaches that the same happens with all the creatures and all the things we love. If so, then love has within it the power to transform all of creation, though none of us will ever live to see it, until Judgment Day brings us to life again.
Return to the Queen.… Consider a woman with more than a woman’s will and all of woman’s vanity. Consider that she had a woman’s harsh and ruthless eye for the truth of herself. For women, in proportion as they are sensitive, know their appearance as well as the finest players.
In the myth Narcissus is depicted as a man. And rightly so. Only a man can fall in love with his own appearance. For it is a stranger to him. The woman at her looking glass sees what she sees and knows it. And therefore, I do think, women justly demand a slight subterfuge of flattery from us.
The Queen ordered the mirrors in her palaces removed or covered up in the last years. And this has been taken by some as a sign of her vanity and self-deceit. They do not know, or do not remember, that her inmost bathing chambers, where she was alone with herself, as naked as God made her, were made of mirrors—walls, floors, and ceiling. To see herself. And not in delusion or vanity or self-love. But naked from all sides, as no one sees himself, so that she would know and never forget the truth of herself.
She knew her appearance as well as any who make a life’s study of themselves. Yet she took that aging body, that withering face, and she painted and daubed and costumed and disguised it until, at a proper distance, she was the very picture of a queen. Not out of the wish to deceive, but out of the compelling necessity to be what she must be to rule, and never to permit the expectations and the pride of her subjects or this kingdom to be diminished.
She was willing, then, to sacrifice even her own integrity of person in the name of her office and for the good of the kingdom.
I think it was too much to ask her to look upon herself in the disguises of public mirrors and to beam approval and signify thereby a total self-delusion.
We deprived her of her youth, forbade her from the natural life and joy of a woman, and in the end denied her even the privilege to be old.
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