“Many of the experiences of our youth seem to pass without leaving a trace. But they do not. It is just that, like plants put down for spring in the depths of winter, we don’t know which of them will flower or bear fruit. We have to wait to find out. In the middle years, the wait ends. What we planted earlier in life we harvest now. This is a great truth: that you have to keep living to find out which bits of living come right. You can never be sure of what you’re laying down for the future. You have to wait for the future to happen, to find out.
“The miracle is that even when the past seem to be lost ground, as long as you continue to live, it is not.
“And so middle age becomes the age of miracles. When, at last, you too can know how rare miracles are.” — Nuala O’faolin
THE GROWTH IMPERATIVE…
“There is that law of life, so cruel and so just — that one must grow, or else pay more for remaining the same.” — Norman Mailer
A PASSION FOR SOLITUDE…
“One of the pleasantest things in the world is going on a journey. But I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room. But out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.” — William Hazlitt
“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
WORLD WITHIN AND WITHOUT…
“One is resigned, too, to the world’s comedy. Idiots rising to the top, fanatics dressed up as idealists, boobs confidently in control. I wish that by now, at sixty, I could say that my own understanding of life is deep. It ain’t. I remember, at twenty, taking a Shakespeare course in the University of Cyhicago’s adult education program and being struck by how in the dark about life so many of my fellow students, many of them then in their forties and fifties, seemed.
“I don’t know that I myself am currently all that much more enlightened… I like to think I now at least understand how things don’t happen, which is not at all the same as understanding how they do happen… One resigns oneself to the hard facts of life — and yet one plays on through. Life may be a mug’s game — a game, that is, one cannot finally win — but it still seems well worth playing.
“In an unexpected way, these limitations can make things seem even richer. One loses passion and gains detachment. Give up ambitions and hopes for perspective. The comic element of life seems, in some ways, greater than ever. Perspective is the trick of life. I have not come anywhere near mastering it.
“I am, I fear, a sucker for the notion that character is destiny. I feel reassured when people of stong character win out and people of poor character go down the drink. Unfortunately, too often people of good character also go down the drink — for want of energy or because of bad breaks and crucially mistaken decisions — while the shoddy, the dreary, and the miscreant flourish.”– Joseph Epstein
THOSE WERE THE DAYS MY FRIEND, WE THOUGHT THEY’D NEVER END…
We were both turning forty. We had known each other for ten years. All our friends were married, or getting married. I really admired Danny and thought if I were a better person, I might work up to deserving him. We were like the last two tins on the shelf — a can of peas and a pan of corn — dusty and past our expiration dates.
Snogging on the subway late at night, the grey subway car speeding through the tunnels. “Would it be like this if we were married?” he asked. “Maybe we should get married.” I shrugged. “Maybe we should.” And so we did.
Being married to him was very different from being friends. I thought he was going to be like the soft old robe you want to wear every day but instead he was like a pair of pinchy shoes.
He gave me the keys to his Volvo. Told me to go ahead and do art school — it would keep me out of his hair while he went ahead with his hockey and his golf and his skiing.
I disconnected the doorbell. I don’t care for people dropping in, nor do I like having visitors at all.
We didn’t work out. We divorced. I paid for it. When you are an artist — not exactly starving, but operating in the margins at the edge of the abyss — and you pay for your own divorce, you want out pretty bad.
Danny died on Thursday. Now there is just one can left — me. I want to live to be a hundred. I will have to get used to this — friends and loved ones dying. Yikesies.
Think new thoughts. Make new karma. Love is all there is. Let us be love. Everybody needs love. And be love.
Out of the Armchair 