Measure of My Days (6 page)

I
t has taken me
all the time I’ve had to become myself, yet now that I am old there are times when I feel I am barely here, no room for me at all. I remember that in the last months of my pregnancies the child seemed to claim almost all my body, my strength, my breath, and I held on wondering if my burden was my enemy, uncertain as to whether my life was at all mine. Is life a pregnancy? That would make death a birth.

W
hen I recall those nights
when I tried to understand, letting the thrust of truth teach me a deeper truth, how sexual that was. This has never occurred to me before. Then understanding can resemble impregnation. My understanding was not thought, so I wonder what it was. Could it have been feminine thought, right for us, not dry and arid as man’s thought so often is when it is used by women; or could it have been assessing by true feeling? It was a highly disciplined acceptance of the value of truth, no evasion allowed, so it may have been a feeling judgement.

T
he enchantment of the sky
, ever changing beauty almost ignored. Beyond words, without fixed form, not to be understood, or stated. It ravishes away dullness, worry, even pain. It graces life when nothing else does. It is the first marvel of the day. Even when leaden grey it is still a friend, withdrawn for a time.

E
volution is necessarily slow
since we resent it so. A large proportion of our energy is used in holding it back, wanting to stop it if possible. The new good is refused countless times before it is accepted. The rare, the beautiful, the admirable are taken as rebukes, making us feel inferior, suggesting our improvement. Anything but that, so we mock at the new, recoil from the rare, be-little the great, until finally grown accustomed … to ignore is easy.

I
am ashamed to admit to myself
that I am disappointed in humanity. Nothing less. That is the ache that lies behind other aches. Not disappointed in this beautiful world, owing much of its beauty to man, but somehow broken-hearted at the incorrigibility of man. The animals know how to live and be beautiful and themselves; primitive peoples evolve religions that give meaning to their lives. But as soon as consciousness arrives man begins his blunders. His genius
is for creating insoluble problems, every cure creating new difficulties. How could it be otherwise since consciousness is the intolerable registering of pain and pleasure, opinion and belief. Consciousness seems to be both what life strives to evolve and its greatest danger.

M
ercy seems an undoubted good
, yet it can bring ill results. Everyone wants it as I would want it; one side of me would plead for mercy for all my blind acts, for all I haven’t been. I think, I cannot be sure, but I think I would rather be cleansed than granted mercy. No, no, I am quite sure, I want both, and because I need mercy I pray that I may feel it for others; that I may make life a little less hard, still seeing clearly that we have to give pain, cannot avoid it, that we are unceasingly burdens one to another. We are indeed each beholden to each. Oh love is truly the child of need, but realism, just realism, admitting what we are and what we do, is the smiting of the rock that makes tenderness and pity flow.

I
have to go on with my thoughts
, knowing they are not thoughts, but more like sobs or counter-blows, perhaps just worries of an old heart. I could not see more clearly than I do that impersonal judgements are beyond me, beyond all but the very wise, the well-informed who relinquish judgement and observe. Yet if some kindly priest remonstrated with me saying, “These are not matters for your concern”, I would say—“If my heart aches for humanity, let it be so”

It feels right to take humanity into my heart, or out of my heart and examine it and be eased of it. Poor, poor mankind what a marvel it is, what marvels man has done. His buildings alone would make one assume him an archangel. His music, his order, the richness of his acts—it is because of marvels accomplished that we have high hopes—and when man refuses much of the time to live up to the range of the mighty creature he sometimes is, then hopeful people like me make a to-do. When we see what mankind can do, and be—and we have no idea why it is so
much easier to do than to be—and when with equal clarity we see what he usually is, then childishly, shamefully we cry, “Won’t more people be strong, and wise and lovable, because I try and I can’t”. Yet even in my despair I see man rise to such noble heights in his fateful struggle, that more often than we guess the gods may regard him with brotherly awe.

O
f course
one is forced to deplore and revere humanity. Its variety, disparity, and complexity make it the great cross on which we are stretched. We are crucified in experiencing ourselves. The cross is our cross because it is we who are the nobilities and beauties and delicious happiness, and the horrors and the indifference and the blindness. How could we react to suffering and joy with anything but the full range of our possibilities? With my thoughts stabbing like spears it might be supposed that I have waited for my eighty-third year before I noticed
mankind. This is not so. I never found it possible to ignore man’s plight even when I was busy living it, and now in my idleness it has me by the scruff of the neck. I have to endure it as though there was a final bite that would yield a last drop of understanding blood. Can this be true? What must I see?

O
ne thing I see clearly.
These notes are not thoughts. They are the creaks and cries of a heart opening slowly. So love has nothing to do with liking. I see. Concern lay in the depths when on the surface I felt recoil. I do see.

D
o we then begin to see
that all evil is ours? Not belittling evil in the hopes of remaining little ourselves. Do we prepare for a wholeness never yet attempted with open eyes; wholeness large enough to contain what—who dares define how much?

Are we about to say—at least within centuries
of saying—“With the help of the God within me I accept responsibility for my own acts—all, all, especially for those I did not know were mine”? If that great task is beginning, then we live in an age of promise, and who would not be reckless enough to hope?

T
here is youth in me
, in most of us, who would be carefree and happy, “bird happy”, and would find it natural and enough. Knowing that destruction and creation are twin brothers, that the gods destroy and create—why else are they called gods?—I hear without surprise someone in me saying: “But life is delicious, what beauty, what interest, I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds. Look at the day, feel the air, you see for yourself, all is well.”

C
hrist gave love
as the sole solution for man’s justified hatred of man, and we try, and we have improved, but we don’t make it work. Christ
asked us to choose God, not life, and now many choose life without God. If God is the central meaning of life, and it feels so, we do not know how to live that way. We have tried so many ways and have let them become bigotry, or tyranny, or dreary pretence. We crave for that which lies behind the terrible play of the opposites. We pray to have the conflict resolved, but life would end if it were resolved. To endure it must be our creative role, nothing else seems true. If it is only at the centre of our being that suffering is resolved, is it not there that we are nearest to God? Is it even the road to him if we knew how to travel it?

M
y presumption
in thinking badly of life mortifies me. What do I know? How dare I judge? I don’t. I feel shame, and yet—life is cruel; and exquisitively kind. Put the sound of softly lapping waves and a clear green sky in the scales, and how many woes would it take to strike a balance?
If I regret none of the bad things that have happened to me, knowing that I needed them all to reach any ripeness, then is all hardship justified if someone learns by it? No, there is much too much. So I do judge? Yes, every second of the day. I say to life: “You are very hard”, and I also say: “We are blind, we prefer to be blind. It is easier. We are mean and small, we choose to be small. It has a bite to it”. Life has to be hard to have any effect on us; even now we hardly notice it. Beyond that can one go? I must. I add, “We are also blind to the miracles of good that come to us. We hardly heed them, we even protest against them”. Then I am left where I was, appalled by the hardness of life, knowing we are forced to be unwilling heroes. Suddenly I wonder—is all hardness justified because we are so slow in realizing that life was meant to be heroic? Greatness is required of us. That is life’s aim and justification, and we poor fools have for centuries been trying to make it convenient, manageable, pliant to our will. It is also peaceful and tender and funny and dull. Yes, all that.

G
ood things have gone
, some good things will always go when new things come, and we mourn. We may mourn rightly, for the outlook is uncertain, perhaps very dark. Destruction is part of creativity, that is the terrible truth we shrink from, knowing it may be misused. This truth is everywhere, almost too obvious to be felt. It is leaden in the old who are being destroyed by time, and I admit that it takes more courage than I had known to drink the lees of life.

M
y note book
shows me how much I mourn. Perhaps the forms of life that are passing should be mourned, and this may be the right role of age. Perhaps our wail should be part of the paean of life that is being lived. I do not mourn for lost happiness, I do not mourn for myself. I mourn that life is so incomprehensible, and I mourn for this confused age. We old are the wailers. I hear us everywhere.

Within the last month I have had two odd encounters. After waiting for some moments while heavy traffic passed I crossed the road with a comely woman of seventy or so. As we arrived safely on the other side she bowed and said, “It was such a beautiful world they destroyed”. I bowed and we parted. Then a week later, waiting in a small railway station, I heard a woman with clear, brave eyes, well over sixty, saying that she had lived for the past thirty years on the edge of a desert, and she commented to all of us, “I think you lead a dreadful life here”. The woman next to her spoke and gave what was almost a cry, “Life could be glorious if we would let it be”. I felt she was perhaps a little mad, but what made her so?

I
wonder
if old people want truth more than anything else, and they cannot find it. Perhaps truth is diversity so each seeks his own. Is truth a thing in itself, a state of consciousness to which we are opaque or clear?

I
admire a contented mind.
I revere enjoyment of simple things. I can imagine that contentment has a high degree of truth. But the human tendency is to take good as normal, and one’s natural right, and so no cause for satisfaction or pleasure. This is accompanied by the habit of regarding bad as abnormal and a personal outrage.

T
he woman
who has a gift for old age is the woman who delights in comfort. If warmth is known as the blessing it is, if your bed, your bath, your best-liked food and drink are regarded as fresh delights, then you know how to thrive when old. If you get the things you like on the simplest possible terms, serve yourself lightly, efficiently and calmly, all is almost well. If you are truly calm you stand a chance of surviving much, but calmness is intermittent with me. Sensuous pleasure seems necessary to old age as intellectual pleasure palls a little. At times music
justifies living, but mere volume of sound can overwhelm, and I find silence exquisite. I have spent my whole life reading, only to find that most of it is lost, so books no longer have their former command. I live by rectitude or reverence, or courtesy, by being ready in case life calls, all lightly peppered with despair. This makes me rest on comfort. I could use the beauty and dignity of a cat but, denied that, I try for her quiet.

April 3rd

I
am home
, I am home, I am home. I have been home for a week so that it is now natural to be here, but my joy is more than natural. I have life before me, better health, and less pain, less pain; the biggest pain gone for good, only bits of chronic pain left, sharp discomfort say, left to bother me. Not to have pain, even my degree of pain, which was always bearable, is a constant elation which will always be part of me.

When the surgeon looked at me with honest
eyes and said I must have an operation, that my age was not against it, that I could not be out of pain with so bad a gall bladder, and that without it I had every chance of normal health, everything became simple and settled. I was given medicine that dulled the pain while I waited for a room in the Nursing Home. My spirits danced. I was gay, gay that I was to lose pain. Everyone was full of concern but I laughed inside. All that time when I had been in pain, when I was a burden to myself, a problem to doctors, and unconvincing to my family and friends, was over. I basked in the respect paid to an operation. People said I was brave. I wasn’t brave, I was happy.

Of course I might die, I had heard of the heart giving out under an operation, it was possible, but then I would meet the great mystery. It almost seemed my chance. A mean way of slipping out though, not fair to the surgeon, and I want to be conscious that I am dying. I did not want to die, but I have lived my life—or so I used to feel. Now each extra day is a gift. An
extra day in which I may gain some new understanding, see a beauty, feel love, or know the richness of watching my youngest grandson express his every like and dislike with force and sweetness. But all this is the sentience by which I survive, and who knows, it may matter deeply how we end so mysterious a thing as living.

I
had one fear.
What if something went wrong, and I became an invalid? What if I became a burden, ceased to be a person and became a problem, a patient, someone who could not die? That was my one fear, but my chances were reasonably good, so all was simple and settled and out of my hands. Being ill in a nursing home became my next task, a sombre dance in which I knew some of the steps. I must conform. I must be correct. I must be meek, obedient and grateful, on no account must I be surprising. If I deviated by the breadth of a toothbrush I would be in the wrong.