Fifty Days of Solitude Read online

  So deep into imaginings and questions that the meander wiped out the mainstream of my plan, I never got back to the computer.

  ONCE I had a character in a novel who had been a silent-picture star. He grew old living alone, his close friends having died. The film industry had moved into irrevocable, omnipresent sound. But he believed that the art of silence was greater than the ubiquitous spoken word and accompanying music. His loneliness was made more bearable by alcohol and by the imaged presence in his room of a stationary old camera. It sat on three legs, had a crank at the side which turned the loop of film, and a black box housing the lens which could be moved from side to side.

  My character, Willis Lord, would place himself before the camera. He imagined it was recording his actions as he cooked, or washed, or prepared for bed. His sense of his status as a star, a person at the center of every action, was thus maintained during his long, solitary days and nights.

  In an odd way, when I was alone, this fiction became predictive. At moments when I went through the ordinary acts of daily life, I too imagined the presence of a camera, a more modern, mobile, hand-held one, I suppose, that followed me everywhere. I was not conscious of another person operating the camera, merely the camera moving on its own in a pair of hands, giving a curious significance to my every move.

  I had an eerie sense of having been dichotomized, myself split into two, one acting, the other watching and recording for some higher purpose. But what? To make sure I was doing normal things? What I was supposed to be doing? I wondered if we were all always observing ourselves, even as we slept? Or did it happen only when we were alone, or most often in the late years of our lives when we had grown fearful of diminishment? When we were young we knew what we were doing, but now, did we need a witness to record any deviation from our youthful selves?

  I had no answers. I knew only that when I raised the shades in the bedroom each morning, the camera was there, watching to see if I succeeded in making them exactly level, if my eye was still accurate, my hand steady, my memory firm. At once, I was one with old Willis Lord and my old self, one and the same, and the camera was the second person singular, judge, censor, arbiter, and critic.

  THE month and a half I spent alone was the time of the first days of the Clinton administration. But politics played no part in my thinking. I had no newspaper delivered, the TV was down. My source of news was National Public Radio via a Maine station in Bangor to which I listened for twenty minutes at six o’clock in the morning and twenty in the late afternoon.

  I turned off all commentators on the air and I talked to no one about the political situation by telephone. These self-imposed conditions may account for my conviction that what was going on out there in the world was, inevitably, unthinkable, and that I ought to preserve my hard-achieved peace of mind by banning even the forty minutes I had hitherto indulged in.

  I used to be certain that writers needed to be au courant about everything that went on in the world of their time. This is probably good advice for the first fifty or sixty years they live. But later, I decided, I wanted to shield myself from as much of the terrible particulars of modern existence as possible to preserve my shrinking time for, well, let me say it, pompous as it sounds, contemplation of more important questions, of generalities based on a past I have stored away for review in the leisure of an elderly present.

  The horrifying details of life in the world today, of rape, wars, AIDS, starvation, assassinations, murders, drugs, floods, hurricanes, torture, abuse of women and children, racism, drunkenness, madness, homelessness, political chicanery could not be buried or wished away by an act of will, certainly. But they were held at arm’s length for the short period I had devoted to the exploration of solitude.

  Without their constant presence, my mind appeared to be a long, low, insensate, featureless plain. It contained no peaks of drama and no deep troughs of despair. It had been leveled by the temporary absence of the world beyond my own integument. In that state I felt somewhat barren but still comfortable, an arboreal intellectual sloth who could think but not feel very much. I was not stirred by indignation or repelled by sanguinity. “In violence we forget who we are,” Mary McCarthy wrote. Without the constant presence of violence in my consciousness I knew who I was. And, for short periods of time, that was enough.

  PAUL VALÉRY wrote one novel, Monsieur Teste. The man of the title is a severely introverted man living alone in a city with his wife. I phrase this last clause deliberately because Madame Teste (or anyone else) plays no part whatever in Teste’s consciousness or in his unending search for the contents of his thoughts. He is a man who limits himself and his existence to his mind or, as Valéry writes, “a man regulated by his own powers of thought.” He is friendless except for Valéry who wrote the book from his memory of his own “inward youth” while he was searching “in myself for the critical points in my powers of attention.” He had wanted to be able “to extend the duration of certain thoughts.”

  Most interesting to me, Valéry in those days put away writing in his solitude because “it seemed to me unworthy to divide my ambition between the desire to produce an effect on others and the passion to know and acknowledge myself as I was, without omission, pretense, or complacency.” Writing, thus, was an act aimed at impressing others, so it ran counter to his efforts to search for himself.

  Early in my fifty days I spent one day and one evening with Monsieur Teste, looking for assistance in my time ahead, alone. Most of the novel contains “snapshots” and “thoughts” from his notebook. They are merely sketched in; few are developed. Like a complex mosaic they compose the mind of the man, enough, Valéry may have thought, to make a novel.

  What I found in Monsieur Teste’s thinking was of some use to me, if not to act upon, then to ponder:

  —“The mind must not be occupied with persons; de personis non curandum.”

  —“What really matters to someone (I mean the kind of someone who in his essence is unique and alone) is precisely that which makes him feel that he is alone.… It is this that comes to him when he is truly alone, even when in fact he is with others.”

  —“I am not turned toward the world. My face is to the WALL. There is not an atom of the wall’s surface that is not known to me.”

  —“There are individuals who feel their senses separate them from the real, from being. That sense in them infects their other senses.… What I see blinds me. What I hear deafens me. That by which I know makes me ignorant. I am ignorant inasmuch, and insofar, as I know. This light before me is a blindfold and hides either a darkness or a light more.… More what? Here the circle of that strange reversal closes: knowledge as a cloud over being; the bright world as an opaque growth on the eye.… Away from everything, so that I may see.”

  —THE MAN OF GLASS: “So direct is my vision, so pure my sensation, so clumsily complete my knowledge, and so quick, so clear my reflection, and my understanding so perfect, that I see through myself from the farthest end of the world down to my unspoken word; and from the shapeless thing desired on waking, along the known nerve fibers and organized centers, I follow and am myself, I answer myself, reflect and reverberate myself, I quiver to the infinity of mirrors—I am glass.”

  But the best sentence, the one that echoed in my head long after I had put Monsieur Teste down: “One must go into himself armed to the teeth.”

  So it is, truly, I thought, not only armed to the teeth but also wearing a full plate of armor: helmet, beaver, paultron, breastplate, gauntlet, greave, and all the pieces of metal in between. Even so protected, one is still not safe from assault by the guerrilla forces of painful memories and deeply hidden guilt.

  I FOUND that when I was alone my hunger grew for opera, live music, ballet, and theater. True, I had a good supply of operas on video and audio tapes and compact discs for music (never the same thing as being at a performance, although at first I thought they would serve). I yearned for the sight of “live” art in galleries and museums.

&nb
sp; By good luck, on the day my appetite was greatest, there arrived in the mail a copy of the volume that served as companion to the Barnes Collection exhibition. The handsome book came to Sargentville on the day the exhibition opened in Washington, D.C.I decided to pretend (to what games being alone sometimes drove me!) that I was attending the show, in person, as they say.

  Slowly I advanced through the more than three hundred pictures, at least half of them in very good color. I thought I had seen all the Manets, Renoirs, Cézannes, Picassos, Matisses, and Gauguins when I visited the Barnes Museum near Philadelphia many years ago. But I found I had forgotten most of them. Albert Barnes’s eccentric decision not to allow his art, in all these years, to be seen away from his museum, made them all seem new to me and wonderfully fresh.

  I decided to spend an evening on each painter, to prolong the experience, looking at each picture again and again, thinking about them, and trying to remember them when I came away from the book. My daughter Elizabeth once went to the National Gallery, spent hours in the Impressionist rooms, came back to our house on Capitol Hill, and amazed us by discussing the pictures she had seen in the order they hung on the walls.

  I made progress until I came to the early Blue Period Picasso. I don’t recall ever seeing L’ascète before. Its gaunt, melancholy, starving figure became my companion for days. He is a white-haired man seated before an empty plate, with what appears to be a roll or a piece of bread in his bony fingers, the other hand empty, and a curious blue shadow behind him, possibly his own, but it is not certain. He looks ahead, unseeing, like the blind man in the Metropolitan’s picture of the same period, called The Blind Man’s Meal.

  The editor’s notes for the picture informed me that Picasso may have been depressed by the suicide of a friend during the four years of his Blue Period. He painted starving and suffering figures, sick and emaciated bodies, sunken faces sad to the point of utter despair. I recognized the universality of The Ascetic. Painted ninety years ago, it seemed to me to be prophetic, the open-eyed blindness, the cadaverous, decaying body and almost skeletal head of the old man had the inevitable appearance of a person in the last stages of AIDS. I realized how close to the condition of starvation were the men I had known in the AIDS rooms at Capitol Hill Hospital and my dying friends.

  Almost a century ago, under different conditions, Picasso had painted them: the same dire blue-gray skin, the premature aging, the deep-set eyes, and sunken cheeks of the unseeing sufferer, all there, then and now.

  FOR the fifth time in my life I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the one novel (together with, perhaps, a late novel by Henry James) I would want to reread were I placed in solitary confinement. With the kind of serendipity I have noted before in these days, I came upon an observation of Eliot’s that bore upon my present way of life: “There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.”

  Determined = formed? or, directed? But not, I thought, forever. There may be a time, such as now, when the search for the inward being cuts it away from determination by others, frees it for the moment from direction from the outside, gives it stasis, and more than that temporary peace.

  Desultory thoughts on solitude:

  I noticed that one keeps one’s friends better when one is alone. The corollary to this is that one loses one’s friends, slowly, when one sees them too often or when they visit for too long a time.

  “People who cannot bear to be alone are the worst company” (Albert Guinon).

  Inner resources: What are they? Are they like mineral resources, so deeply buried that they require a mining operation to raise them to the surface. Or are they simply there, so that they can be used at will, like the ability to follow a line of thought to its conclusion, as the young Valéry trained himself to do, or like the rich muck of memory that yields useful parallels and evidence for one’s ideas at the moment they are required, or like the ability to lose oneself in books and be comforted and interested in music and live in paintings, to be able to forget the world and remember only the faint shadow of the inner being one is searching for.

  I had closed off all the doors to the house except the one to the flight of steps equipped with roughened treads against the chance of my falling. So I had cut off the many means of egress, and thus the temptation to go out.

  My message on the telephone said: “If you must reach me call back after five.” I trusted to that gruff sentence to discourage callers. I did not promise to call back because I had no intention of doing so. But of course I knew that if a report of a catastrophe should be left on the answering machine I would return the call at once. The only way to avoid the arrival of bad news would have been to turn off the machine and unplug the telephone.

  A church’s charity is often known as “outreach.” Reaching out. I was trying for a kind of inreach, an “inscape,” in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term.

  The radio news, in a single day while I was alone: Disastrous floods in southern California. Two trains collide in Gary, Indiana, and six persons are decapitated. One hundred fifty miles from Ankara, Turkey, an entire village is buried in snow. The United States and its allies bomb Iraq, killing many civilians. An Estonian ship breaks up near Finland, spilling two hundred thousand gallons of oil.

  Here in Sargentville, on the bank of Billings Cove, two matters of great moment: two grosbeaks arrived at the feeder and the Eggemoggin Reach froze over for the first time in thirty-two years.

  After eight hours of silence, I felt dried out, like a well entirely without water. I found myself saying aloud to my computer: “Why are you sitting there mute, doing nothing for me?”

  When no thoughts of any value came to me I blamed it on my way of life, not on myself. Margaret Mead believed that “a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” But what of a person without thoughts? Is she an obstacle to progress and change?

  Only for wood, coffee, water, the toilet did I leave my warm study during the sometimes productive hours of the morning. On the way to and from the kitchen I discovered the need to straighten every object and to put on the shelves every displaced book I passed. Was I tidying up all the rooms outside in hopes that then I could make some order out of the scrabbly manuscript on my desk? Or was I putting off returning to the verbal battles in the study, like a soldier recovered from his wounds who dreads returning to the front line?

  The house expanded. It now seemed to have more rooms than before, even with three upstairs rooms closed off. I found that the silence I maintained also increased until it filled every space, pushed out the walls, invaded closets, drawers, and cupboards. Eventually it seeped out through the house’s seams and surrounded the whole property with a blessed, protective wall of quiet.

  The less one talks the more one thinks? Is thought internalized speech rising from and then directed back, soundlessly, into oneself?

  Talk uses up ideas, although others have told me that they find it profitable to talk out their ideas and plans for a story because it clarifies their intentions. Not I. Once I have spoken them aloud, they are lost to me, dissipated into the noisy air like smoke. Only if I bury them, like bulbs, in the rich soil of silence do they grow. Sometimes I am lucky. In the interment process, they often multiply and become more complex.

  INAUGURATION DAY, January 20, 1993. Sybil had gone to Washington to attend a private party with friends. She had waited twelve years for this change of administration. During that time we held three mourning wakes four years apart on inauguration days. Now it seemed to her only fitting to celebrate.

  I stayed at home and listened to some of the events on the radio. Afterward I took a nap. When I woke, still dazed from the force of late afternoon sleep, I fantasized about how Bill Clinton might more suitably have taken office:

  In this year of severe recession, unemployment, homelessness, and hunger, he might have announced that, because of great need in the country, there would be no fan
cy balls (there were thirteen), no limos, no grandstands and parades, no elaborate lunches and dinners. Instead, he would be sworn in on the steps of the Capitol at the usual moment, with his vice president, in the standing presence of everyone who wished to be there. “The Star-Spangled Banner” would be played by the Marine band and sung by the gathering, led by the fine voice of Marilyn Home. Then Mr. Clinton would return to the White House in a simple American car, perhaps a Ford, to begin the business of the nation “for which I was hired,” as he noted earlier in a speech.

  The money saved—for transportation, clothing, hair-dressing, hotels, overtime police and protection services, limousines, parties, and the extraordinary paraphernalia of parades—might be turned over to the many welfare services now in danger of being cut from the budget, or used to make a small dent in the national debt.

  In this way Bill Clinton would be known to history as the first president to put human need before pomp, the first to make significant contributions to the commonweal in place of self-gratifying, empty celebration.

  SILENCE and isolation are freeing agents. The chatter of company, the news of the imperiled and turgid world imprisons me.

  I wondered if the sure way into the self is to lose one’s senses, totally: to become deaf, blind, without voice, without tactile ability. Under those extreme conditions, perhaps, would the mind be freed to expand without stimulus from anything outside. Would it function on its own?

  I read the newspaper in the protection of my silent house. I learned that Senator Daniel Moynihan, a thirty-year expert on welfare, says American society has “normalized” all its worst social ills: teen-aged pregnancy and suicide, divorce, street violence and death, sexual disease, child and wife abuse, drugs, homelessness of the poor and the mad, the enormous black jail population, guns in the grade schools, crimes of every sort. We no longer are indignant about these things. We accept them as normal. They are commonplace, almost unnoticed by some of us.