left over for the dark hours. I took my rather sparse dinner (vegetables, rice, and chunks of canned pineapple) into the television room to watch a wonderful Danish film, Babetteâs Feast , sent to me by a son-in-law, Bob Emerson, who was concerned for my sanity, I supposed, in this period of solitude. I loved the film. Even the elegance of the Parisian food that Babette provided for her country employers did not make my pedestrian supper seem insufficient.
In cities where I spent my young days, I was unaware of the power the sunrise could generate. Usually I slept through it, but had I not, I still would have been unable to see it, sunk down as I usually was in second- or fourth-floor apartments. But here I celebrated the whole process throughout the day and well into the evening, when often it would have been reinforced by the might of a blood-red sunset. The thought of their combined glory tinged the events of thirteen hours, lasted by coloring the invisible air in the house red and orange and yellow and purple, suffused it with the pleasure of feeling alive once again.
In solitude I felt the humane force of the sun rising and setting, the temperature, atmosphere, weather. Nothing came between them and me. Nothing, and no one with me, was required to increase (or, if everything was dim, sunless, dark, and uncharitably frozen, decrease) my inner felicity, the climate of my at-peace spirit.
S YBIL wrote to me that she had read Paul Austerâs New York Trilogy and was delighted with it and at the same time confused by it. She decided not to read the next Auster volume we had stacked up (our mutual habit was to celebrate writers we liked by reading everything we could find by them) but to slip instead into an old Rex Stout Nero Wolfe book. She wrote that she liked the idea of clearing her heated literary palate with the sorbet of a cooling mystery before going on to the next serious work.
O NE late afternoon, in the midst of a heavy snowstorm, twelve inches of a predicted two feet having already fallen and the power having momentarily gone off, I stood in the center of the house and heard the absolute silence. It reminded me of what someone told me Samuel Beckett had said in an interview when he was asked what one of his plays meant. âDonât look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.â
The music in the pause or the significant rest in John Cageâs compositions, the long-held stillness choreographed into the middle of whirling ballet steps, the black, still places of a Francis Bacon color-filled painting in which a faceless figure sits in darkness, seeming to have been exhausted, almost obliterated, into silence, the inner light that is able to shine for the Quakers only when the human voice is quieted, the meaningful dashes between words or phrases or sentences in the poetry of Emily Dickinson representing sound ceasing: all these are heard or seen even when nothing is spoken or painted.
But then again: Absolute silence becomes noisy. This I learned standing in the middle of a quiet room in a quiet house while, like a curtain, the silent snow fell at every window. I heard all that quiet. It made noise.
D ISCOVERY: I found that the more suitable form of reading matter, in solitude, was poetry. Lyrics especially. Their length and the single cry of their message suited my relatively short attention span that was characteristic of the long time span available to me living alone. Why this was so I could not determine. It might be that time offered me too many possibilities for what I might do: I could not concentrate for long on one thing.
I was not entirely sure of the meaning of Yvor Wintersâs early poem, âSong,â but I liked it well enough to copy it out and then read it again and again throughout one stormy morning. To run before oneself from silence only to fall into an even better silence. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, if anything means anything, this means something,
In cities where I spent my young days, I was unaware of the power the sunrise could generate. Usually I slept through it, but had I not, I still would have been unable to see it, sunk down as I usually was in second- or fourth-floor apartments. But here I celebrated the whole process throughout the day and well into the evening, when often it would have been reinforced by the might of a blood-red sunset. The thought of their combined glory tinged the events of thirteen hours, lasted by coloring the invisible air in the house red and orange and yellow and purple, suffused it with the pleasure of feeling alive once again.
In solitude I felt the humane force of the sun rising and setting, the temperature, atmosphere, weather. Nothing came between them and me. Nothing, and no one with me, was required to increase (or, if everything was dim, sunless, dark, and uncharitably frozen, decrease) my inner felicity, the climate of my at-peace spirit.
S YBIL wrote to me that she had read Paul Austerâs New York Trilogy and was delighted with it and at the same time confused by it. She decided not to read the next Auster volume we had stacked up (our mutual habit was to celebrate writers we liked by reading everything we could find by them) but to slip instead into an old Rex Stout Nero Wolfe book. She wrote that she liked the idea of clearing her heated literary palate with the sorbet of a cooling mystery before going on to the next serious work.
O NE late afternoon, in the midst of a heavy snowstorm, twelve inches of a predicted two feet having already fallen and the power having momentarily gone off, I stood in the center of the house and heard the absolute silence. It reminded me of what someone told me Samuel Beckett had said in an interview when he was asked what one of his plays meant. âDonât look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.â
The music in the pause or the significant rest in John Cageâs compositions, the long-held stillness choreographed into the middle of whirling ballet steps, the black, still places of a Francis Bacon color-filled painting in which a faceless figure sits in darkness, seeming to have been exhausted, almost obliterated, into silence, the inner light that is able to shine for the Quakers only when the human voice is quieted, the meaningful dashes between words or phrases or sentences in the poetry of Emily Dickinson representing sound ceasing: all these are heard or seen even when nothing is spoken or painted.
But then again: Absolute silence becomes noisy. This I learned standing in the middle of a quiet room in a quiet house while, like a curtain, the silent snow fell at every window. I heard all that quiet. It made noise.
D ISCOVERY: I found that the more suitable form of reading matter, in solitude, was poetry. Lyrics especially. Their length and the single cry of their message suited my relatively short attention span that was characteristic of the long time span available to me living alone. Why this was so I could not determine. It might be that time offered me too many possibilities for what I might do: I could not concentrate for long on one thing.
I was not entirely sure of the meaning of Yvor Wintersâs early poem, âSong,â but I liked it well enough to copy it out and then read it again and again throughout one stormy morning. To run before oneself from silence only to fall into an even better silence. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, if anything means anything, this means something,
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