Fifty Days of Solitude Read online

  A CATALOG came in the mail at the end of an unproductive morning, from Daedalus, a company that supplies bookstores with remainders. It was addressed to Sybil, of course, for she does all the ordering of such books for our single remainder table at the front door. Nonetheless, I scanned its tightly printed pages to find out which of my friends’ and acquaintances’ works were being cavalierly disposed of for sale (cheaply) in new bookstores, and some old-book stores, like ours.

  How self-centered we writers are. Anxiously I first looked to see if my book was remaindered, if Joe’s or Bill’s or Ellen’s or Pete’s.… The good thing about the catalog is that it does not tell which printing of the book is being emptied out of the publishers’ warehouse. So charity allowed me to believe that John’s book was in its fifth printing when it was placed on remainder tables in drug- and chain stores, not its first.

  I realized how much more I was aware of my vices (envy, gloating, egotism) when I was alone. In the presence of others, it was possible to ignore them, or even deny that they existed. In solitude, they are there, omnipresent and bountiful, unable to be dispelled by the unknowing flattery of kindly others.

  HARRY, a kind neighbor and friend, came to the door at three in the afternoon yesterday. Was I OK? Did I need anything? He said he had not seen me about after the big snow storm and wondered how I was getting on. Did I need more wood from the pile across the driveway? Groceries? Company?

  Nothing, thank you, I told him, disturbed by the interruption and yet I was tempted to ask him in for coffee and, yes, for his company. But I didn’t. I thought of explaining my experiment to him but decided against it, thinking it would sound foolish, even somewhat mad. I thanked him again and closed the door, having preserved my solitude a while longer even as I was aware that I was not eager to.

  Jessamyn West (Hide and Seek): “The prohibition against solitude is forever. A Carry Nation rises in every person when he thinks he sees someone sneaking off to be alone. It is not easy to be solitary unless you are also born ruthless. Every solitary repudiates someone.”

  The rebel against solitude arose in me when Harry appeared at the door. I realized that I was not so sure about my desire to be alone. And I was surprised by my willingness (fought off reluctantly) to have company. Perhaps I was not so good at living this way as I believed.

  PRAYER: Deciding to say Evening Prayer at the end of my days alone in addition to the Morning Prayers I had always read, I found a short prayer at the back of the Book of Common Prayer that I loved, and learned, and said aloud every night as I lay in bed looking across the whitened and featureless cove and the frozen reach: “O Lord, support me all the day long, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and my work is done. Then in thy mercy grant me a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.”

  Those were wonderful phrases—shadows lengthen, the fever of life over, the world hushed, work done, holy rest. Unlike so many other prayers, not hallowed names, kingdoms to come, and grace, righteousness, the power and glory forever and ever, the resurrection and the life; but instead safe lodging and peace at the last.

  For days I considered the secular and earthly contents of the prayer. I thought about Simone Weil who wrote a profound essay on the nature of the Lord’s Prayer. Should I be granted the boon of knowing when my last day on earth comes, I hoped I would have the strength (and the memory) to say it to myself, over and over, until the last moment.

  Thinking of Simone Weil, the saintly Jewish philosopher who hesitated on the threshold of Christianity, I took down my copy of Gravity and Grace which she wrote almost fifty years ago. With the kind of luck that had marked most of my reading during the fifty days, I opened to this: “Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your isolation. The day, if it ever comes when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse.”

  This was reassuring to come upon. Not any affection but true affection (which I was parted from for the time being but hoped to return to when my walkabout was over) was not likely to disturb the interior solitude I cherished and feared, in a way, to abandon.

  A NOTE from Molly Sholes who owns a blueberry farm in Rockport reminded me that when she was visiting us here she was the ideal early-morning guest. She came downstairs in her bathrobe, nodded to me as I sat reading at the kitchen table, took a cup of coffee from the Braun maker, and went silently upstairs to her bedroom to think and do paperwork for her second, elective job as selectman for her town, she told me later. There was something almost holy about the silence of early morning. It became even better when, without discussing it, it was shared by a house guest.

  A DAY began with a fine winter sunrise, a long view of the distant horizon slowly taking on color, the sky growing brilliant with yellow streaks transmuted into red, even a royal purple. As I watched, the fully lighted blue-and-white day arrived and the pale yellow-from-sun snow shone like polished ivory. This was the way every good day began. Inevitably the coffee tasted better than it had on a morning full of fog and then snow, and words arrived on the page with some ease, even occasional grace.

  The evening always managed to continue the benign sense that the sunrise had provided. There were still possibilities 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, Babette’s 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.

  SYBIL wrote to me that she had read Paul Auster’s 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.

  ONE 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. “Don’t look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.”

  The music in the pause or the significant rest in John Cage’s 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 see
n 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.

  DISCOVERY: 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 Winters’s early poem, “Song,” 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, but I was not sure exactly what. I thought the ambiguity lay in the image of running before oneself. But the little poem proved interesting and stimulating for half a day, surely proof of my theory about poetry.

  IN A learned book about words, word-play, and speech (by Peter Farb), I discovered an interesting fact. Throughout their lives the Paliyans of southern India speak very little. By the age of forty they are silent. Those in their community who continue to speak are considered abnormal, “their behavior offensive.”

  I thought about Ezra Pound who was jailed in an insane asylum after World War II for his fascistic and anti-Semitic broadcasts to the United States. After his release he returned to Italy where, until his death many years later, he spoke very seldom.

  To many people his was a mysterious silence. One critic thought he had realized his widely aired political views had been his downfall so he resolved to speak no more. Others believed his silence was due to an acute depression. But in an interview he gave late in his life he hinted at an explanation. Asked why he had stopped all the activities of his productive seventy-seven years, he said: “I don’t work anymore. I don’t do anything, I have become illiterate and unread. I simply fall into lethargy … and I contemplate.” He told her: “One strange day … words became void of meaning.”

  Two years later he said: “I did not enter silence; silence captured me.”

  One evening, at the house of an acquaintance, Pound was silent. He heard his mistress, Olga Rudge, say that they ought to go home. “We’ll never get there,” he replied. He said good-bye to his host and asked him: “Why is it that one always happens to be where one does not want to be?”

  His daughter, Mary Rudge, thought he spoke when he had something significant to say. She said: “I guess about the best thing [for him] to do is to keep silent” when people asked him silly questions. The silence was “the most wonderful thing that ever happened to him. Silence is an easy etiquette.”

  Olga Rudge thought his silence was due to his age. “Old people become increasingly silent.”

  Natalie Barney gave a party for his eightieth birthday. Pound said nothing all evening. Barney thought he had been “an eloquent listener.”

  Samuel Beckett called on Pound late in his life. Humphrey Carpenter (in whose excellent biography of Pound I found all these accounts) writes: “The two of them had sat together in complete silence for a while. Then Beckett, suddenly able to bear it no longer, got to his feet, embraced Ezra and let himself out of the house.” Carpenter called them “the two masters of silence.”

  One of Pound’s psychiatrists used a typical medical euphemism to describe his silence: it was a “retardation of verbal expression.”

  In my own silence I often thought about Ezra Pound. I decided that, contrary to what I had thought was the chattering practices of most old people, his silence was the more acceptable mode. It represented contemplation, as he said. I think it is entirely possible that a good critic, like Pound, would look back on his creative work as insufficient, “botched,” “a mess” (these were his terms when he was asked about the Cantos), not because it was but because, in hindsight, it never approached what the poet hoped it would be, thought it might be at the time. So, having written and talked so much for so long, he chose silence as the way of self-criticism. Present silence was a way of saying no to the past. I understood this.

  It was also a mode of behavior in which he could discover the truths about himself, an investigation Pound may have been forced into by his imprisonment and later by his ruined life in Italy. Perhaps there was too little time during his early life of fame and acclaimed achievement to conduct this search. Later in his life he was given the time, unpleasantly, it is true, but still.… In those last years he listened, eloquently, instead of talking eloquently. Having mastered his poetic idiom, he abandoned it to master silence. There was resistance to the people and the world around him in this: He was a “quiet rebel.”

  EVER since their founding by George Fox more than three centuries ago, the Quakers have had little faith in speech. In their eyes much talk is a sign of worldliness and a detriment to direct communion with God. During their worship service they sit silent for long periods of time to make way for direct conversation with the Holy Spirit, and the reception of an inner light. They are a notable exception among worshipers who traditionally evolve an elaborate spoken ritual to embody the tenets and practice of their faith.

  In many ways, I found, the Friends understood. God seemed closer to me during the rare, short periods of silence in the Episcopal rite. When I prayed alone in the morning and evening, God seemed nearby or at least available to my unspoken words. Without the distractions of other persons, without the extraneous sounds of their voices and my own, I felt the presence of God’s absence, to paraphrase Paul Valéry, not a noisy landscape of the mind but a still life.

  IN A landscape of snow and bare trees, I stood on the deck at noon, already tired and unusually aware of the black trunk of the scrub oak and the charcoal limbs of the poplars down the path. There was nothing left of these testaments to winter-death but their skeletons. I thought of the book I owned of photographs by Frank Horvat (The Tree, text by John Fowles) in which muted beeches (faux de verzy) in France, blooming ocotillo with no evident blooms, and the green twisted bare limbs of oaks in California, the wiry, bare lime trees in Derbyshire, England, stand in undistinguished, flat landscapes, reminding me of murdering winters in which only time and spring can effect a resurrection.

  My city-loving daughter, Barbara, once told me she did not wish to live in the country because, she said mockingly, she was afraid of trees. At these moments in the dead of winter (an accurate phrase: the dead of winter) I too was afraid of their unnatural, stiff lifelessness, their black anatomies without the softness of leaves. They terrorized me with their stationary and implacable threat. Every vestige of their former autumnal glory, and their lush, summer fullness, was gone. Their present was somehow ominous and intimidating. I had forgotten their past. It was beyond re-creation, and I could not believe in the possibility of it.

  The music I listened to every afternoon began to take on the semblance of menace. When I felt most desolate, the heavy tones of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs (Vier Letzte Lieder), the weary, tender words of one of them, “Im Abendrot” (“At Sunset”) by Joseph von Eichendorff, in the isolation of my sitting room seemed far more poignant than when I had heard Jessye Norman sing them at the Kennedy Center to an audience of almost a thousand persons. Alone here, her huge voice on a compact disc, carefully reduced to its softest and most eloquent contralto level, brought me to the edge of tears. It was unbearable to hear the gentle sadness and resignation of

  Vom Wandern ruhen wir

  We are resting from our wandering

  Nun überm stillen Land.

  now above the quiet countryside.

  Bald ist es Schlafenzeit,

  Soon it will be time to sleep,

  Das wir uns night verirren

  lest we lose our way


  In dieser Einsamkeit.

  in this solitude.

  O weiter, stiller Friede.

  O broad, deep peace.

  So tief im Abendrot,

  So deep in the sunset,

  Wie sind wir wandermüde—

  how tired of wandering we are—

  Ist dies etwa der Tod?

  could this perhaps be death?

  The words were not Strauss’s, but the music came from a very old man, a year before his death to which he seemed to be entirely resigned. The quiet countryside, the solitude of wandering and sleep, the peace of the dying sun, were all intimations of death, or, the poet Joseph von Eichendorff asked, were they death itself?

  Music like this is better heard among people, as part of an audience. I made a decision to choose my afternoon selections more carefully, seeking out the sunnier arias from Mozart operas or the Goldberg variations or the early Beethoven quartets.

  I TURNED the page of the desk calendar to a new month and came upon another daunting Edward Hopper painting, Approaching a City. Many-storied buildings with regular, empty windows occupy the top half. Cutting them off midway is an off-white wall ending in a blue-black empty tunnel. At the bottom are two sets of railroad tracks disappearing into the tunnel and appearing to be approaching infinity, coming to a single point just beyond the end of the canvas.

  In the painting there are no persons, no motion, nothing but static facades of buildings, walls, lines of tracks, and the cave of darkness into which nothing comes or goes: the ultimate representation of urban solitude, hard-edged isolation, unending inhuman structures, and implied human loneliness, for some arcane reason, although no person is present.