Fifty Days of Solitude (3 page)

Very late, in fact during these fifty days, I discovered the new pleasures about which Jessamyn West (in
Hide and Seek
) wrote. “Alone, alone, oh! We have been warned about solitary vices. Have solitary pleasures ever been adequately praised? Do many people know that they exist?”

D
ISTURBANCES
to the pleasure of being alone:

The first
: taxes to be paid. The old year was over. I could empty my drawer of the year's receipts and returned checks and start to figure deductions, expenses, income. A morning, then an afternoon, were lost thinking about how unprepared I was to encounter the weighty presence of the Internal Revenue Service in April. Then I was foolishly distracted from another morning's work by suddenly realizing what odd proper nouns those were. Service? How was internal revenue a service? To whom? For what? It was during such persistent, irksome worries that the small gains of solitude were lost. The world outside flooded in and drowned me in feelings of inadequacy and a hundred slips of evidential paper.

Next
: misunderstandings. I had told people of my intention to be alone for a time. At once I realized they looked upon this declaration as a rejection of them and their company. I felt apologetic, even ashamed, that I would have wanted such a curious thing as solitude, and then sorry that I had made a point of announcing my desire for it. I should have hidden the fact that I wished to be alone, “like a secret vice,” as Anne Morrow Lindbergh described it in
Gift from the Sea
.

To the spouse, or the long-time companion, or the family, and to the social circle, as it is called, the decision to be alone for any length of time is dangerous, threatening, a sign of rejection. “You do not like me or my company.” “You are critical of me (us) and want the world to know about it.” Having never felt the need to be alone themselves, having always lived happily in relationships, they looked upon my need as eccentric, even somewhat mad. But more than that, they saw it as fraudulent, an excuse to be rid of them rather than a desperate need to explore myself.

Last
: page proofs of a book I had finished six months ago arrived in the middle of the fifty days. No interruption could have been more catastrophic. My isolation was flooded with errors, mistaken judgments, poor constructions, my quiet inundated with dubious opinions. In the midst of new work it was fatal to be reminded of the insufficient efforts of the past. I decided writers should be cut loose, violently, from their work when it comes out of the typewriter or the printer, the way a baby's umbilicus is severed at its birth. In this way, all errors disappear from the writer's memory, leaving the mind clear for better work, or more errors, but at least fresh ones. I had to subtract three days of solitude from the fifty I had planned in order to accommodate this intrusion.

A
LONE
, I discovered myself looking hard at things, as if I were seeing them for the first time, or seeing them properly for the first time. I wondered if solitude promoted this activity, or whether it was a result of having more time for everything, more time to look and see, more to concentrate on what I was seeing.

I was interested in this question because so often in the past I had thought it preferable to be accompanied to the theater, to the opera, to the ballet, on travels and vacations. I had thought that there was a value to having someone along to “share” (how I have come to hate the flat, soft, sentimental sound of that word) the experience. But I began to see in these weeks alone that a greater value lay in hearing and seeing from within that mysterious inner place, where the eyes and ears of the mind are insulated from the need to communicate to someone else what I experienced. The energy necessary to express myself to someone else seemed to have been conserved for the harder look, the keener hearing.

B
Y
chance, as I was considering this, I came upon Susanne K. Langer's
Problems of Art
. She quotes the art critic Roger Fry's view that, because of the needs of everyday existence, “the sense of vision becomes highly specialized in their service. We learn to see only what serves our immediate purposes, what we need to see. Useful objects ‘put on more or less the cap of invisibility,' and are seen only so far as practicality allows.”

But, he says, “it is only when an object exists in our lives for no other purpose than to be seen that we really look at it.” This, in his terms, is “pure vision abstracted from necessity.”

Langer thinks that the only way to separate pure vision from the fabric of real life is to create it, so that what I was looking at was “nothing but appearance,” the unreal becomes real because I have written it (or composed or painted it).

Just recently I learned the truth of this. The real occupants of the house were the two young men I had put into my fiction, more actual than I was, the “real” tenants of my study and kitchen. I believed they were here and so I saw them far more clearly than the pictures of my grandchildren or drawings framed on the walls.

Fry and Langer were not concerned with the fate of ordinary objects when, in quiet and isolation, I looked hard at them. But I found that interesting. They turned into
new
objects, seen in a curious, hard original light, no longer ordinary or familiar.

R
OBERT
A. R
OSENSTONE
,
Mirror in the Stone
:

A Japanese artist was commissioned by an American to do a painting. The completed work had, in a lower corner, the branch of a cherry tree with a few blossoms and a bird perched upon it. The entire upper half of the painting was white. Unhappily, the American asked the artist to put something else in the painting because it looked, well, so bare. The Japanese refused the request. When pressed for an explanation, the artist said if he did fill up the painting, there would be no space for the bird to fly.

Many years ago I bought a colored etching from Donald Furst, an artist then living in Iowa. Called
Into White
, it is filled in the top seventh of the rectangular page with winter trees and distant snow-covered fields. The rest of the long sheet is white, untouched by any lines or colors, so that most of the work is blank, leaving a great deal of space for the snow to lie heavy and impenetrable on the ground. I went to my wall to look hard at
Into White
, at the pure snow of my imagination, the way the Japanese artist must have seen, clearly, the bird in flight.

Another lesson learned in solitude: To look hard at what I did not notice before and even harder at what is not there, at what Paul Valéry called “the presence of absence.”

M
Y
solitude was, for a long time, untroubled because I had ruled out all news and thoughts of racial disturbance in cities and on campuses, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, social upheaval, civil wars, revolution, starvation, and homelessness everywhere. If I failed to read the newspaper or listen to the radio, they seemed not to exist.

Nothing outside the house, beyond the woods and the cove, was happening. But that tranquil state did not last. In the third week I was informed, by letter, that Tracy Sampson's brother Craig, who came to dinner at our house last fall, had died of
AIDS
in San Francisco. At the same time, in the mail, came word from Ed Kessler, my former colleague in the English department at American University, that his friend Jim, whom we had known well in Washington, had been murdered in Boston, presumably by some toughs he had befriended when he was ill. And a week later I learned that my small granddaughter Hannah was slated to have her skull cut open by a plastic surgeon to correct a slight birth defect on her forehead and one eye.

Through the most minute crack, the catastrophes and tragedies of the world outside intruded upon the serenity of my life. A death by cruel virus, a murder by knife, an operation-to-come on a one-year-old relative have left their unmistakable mark, like the piste of a wild animal.

L
OOKING
hard at what I had not noticed before—the shape of snow around the bird feeder where the feet of birds have tramped a wide circle in their search for fallen bird seed, the lovely V-shaped wake of a family of newly arrived eider ducks as they cross the cove, the sight of a green log sputtering and drooling sap in the woodstove as if in protest against my feeding it prematurely to the flames—was tiring. The weight of new experience, the storing of it on the front burner of my memory, and then recovering it for use in this record: all this took more energy than the old, careless, eyes-once-over-the-object practice.

In these days alone, was I perhaps preparing myself for the final deep freeze, the eternal hibernation, the last, empty room, the eventual, never-to-be interrupted solitude: death? and the deaf-and-dumb, blind, under-restraints quietus: dying?

S
NOW
again. Trees were reduced to white skeletons. Still there was a towering greatness to them, stretched to their great white heights. The little new crabapple tree was now a mere sketch. Familiar shapes were transformed into indecipherable humps, mounds, gravelike knolls, the “alabaster chambers,” as Emily Dickinson called them. It was hard to remember that under the blankness lived seeds, bulbs, and roots, perennial and phoenixlike, immortal in a way. It was only the deceptive appearance of death I was staring out at, which, after all, is not death at all.

W
OULD
I have been as content alone if it were not for the beauty of this place? Was it true, as Sybil asserted time and again, that I cared more for the cove than for company? Would a prisoner be happier tied into a hut alone but within sight of the sea than if he were jailed in a windowless cell?

I was reading E. M. Forster's
Howard's End
one evening when I came upon this interchange. Margaret says: “It is sad to suppose that places may even be more important than people.”

Helen asks: “Why, Meg? They're so much nicer generally.…”

Margaret: “I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them.”

O
NE
early morning I came downstairs to make coffee. I sat before the kitchen window looking out to the black sea to watch the sunrise. Tired of waiting for it, I began to read, became engrossed, looked up after a while to find that streaks of brilliant yellow light had filled the sky over the reach. I was disappointed at having missed the moment when the spectacle arrived, the way one must feel if one has watched at a death bedside for a long time, gone out for a breath of air, and come back to find the beloved dead.

The sky grew more startling—red, blue clouds, the horizon at Deer Isle almost black—and I watched for a while. But, despite the wonder of the sight, my interest waned again. I went back to the book I had been reading, Elizabeth Drew's
The Modern Novel
, in which she says that “the test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.”

No, I thought. At the moment I missed the sunrise by looking too closely at the printed page, I had diminished my life in a curious way. The intensity literature aroused in me, I believe, was often less than what happened when I listened to, felt, and saw the world around me.

I F
OUND
there was a relation between cold and silence. The temperature in my bedroom at night was usually less than fifty degrees. The silence, the absence of another person, intensified the cold. The cold made the silence absolute. It seemed to lower the temperature of the room and to extend the size of it. Death is the great cold, I thought, and turned on the radio. Sound, I found, was somewhat warming, even the sound of a talkative host interrogating sleepless callers who wanted to air their views about the state of the world's evils.

I was dressed for the cold, having put on a flannel nightgown and bathrobe, a woolen scarf, high woolen socks, a Navy watch cap, and a pair of Sybil's old mittens. They rendered my hands useless for turning the pages of Marian Engel's novel
The Bear
, which I had taken upstairs to reread before I went to sleep. Sybil's mother had brought the furred sacks back from the Soviet Union years ago, and now they were stretched, overly large, but wonderfully warm and comforting. They conjured up Sybil's presence. I put Engel on the floor, turned out the light, moved further down under the quilt, and, in the absence of sound and cold, in the imagined company of an absent friend, fell asleep.

I D
ECIDED
I would break my quietus by going to church on Sundays and on Wednesdays, for midday liturgy. I resolved to arrive late, just as the services were starting, and to leave at the moment the final words of blessing were spoken, in order to avoid the pleasant chitchat that always surrounded ecclesiastical rites at St. Francis. I managed to do this, leaving behind, I imagined, startled parishioners who remarked to each other about my sudden unsociability and wondered if I had gone “all queer,” as they say up here.

Did I think talking to my acquaintances would affect the purity of my fifty days? I suppose I did, being an intolerant absolutist and believing, I think, that any break in the tapestry of silence would cause the whole plan, the unconditional experiment, to come undone.

In the afternoon I worked for a while, keeping the fire going in the woodstove in the living room. Then I lay down under the afghan my daughter Elizabeth Cale had crocheted for me and finished
The Bear
. It is about a lonely woman, working in the isolation of an island in Northern Canada, who finds companionship and then love, yes, with a bear. I read the novel nearly twenty years ago for the
New York Times Book Review
and was impressed and startled by its originality. I had never heard of the Canadian writer Marian Engel, so I went to the Library of Congress and read her six previous novels, all in order to report that
The Bear
was unique among her writings.