Home
blisspoint@yahoo.com
Re-reading Andre Dubus' collection of stories Dancing After Hours I come upon the following sentences, that hit me with the power of an affront: "Often she felt that her smiles, and her feigned interest in people's anecdotes about commuting and complaints about colds, were an implicit and draining part of her job. A decade later she would know that spending time with people and being unable either to speak from her heart or listen with it was an imperceptible bleeding of her spirit."
But at least I speak with my heart when I'm at home. Risk sounding sappy, make corny jokes, spill out inane proclamations for the amusement of my two-and-a-half year old daughter. Brush my pregnant wife's hair as we sit in front of the TV. Run around the room chasing Abby while "Lady Madonna" plays on the stereo. These are the dregs of my day, though. After the main part of my time and energy has been claimed by work, I come home and use these final sputtering hours to make myself human and tolerable to myself again.
The greediness of endeavor: the more you set out to do, the more you want to do. I'm Peter, I'm Paul: I steal from Peter but Paul never gets paid. I get up at four-thirty in the morning to write and that only serves to make me realize how little time I have to write. I make life more difficult for myself by wanting to see movies, read books, listen to music. I get a scanner for my birthday, something I've wanted for awhile now, and my first thought it, "Oh, this is fucking great, when am I going to have time to learn how to use this?" I rent a movie and suddenly that's one more item on my task list that needs to be checked off. I go to the library (itself another task to be checked off) and check out books that I fully know I won't have time to read before they're due back, but I check them out anyway. I could have been a lawyer, a journalist, a professor, a jazz trumpeter, and knowing this automatically makes me think I can somehow still do them. For a week I seriously consider law school: like I could afford it, like I have one tenth the amount of time it would take to do it. I listen to Miles Davis and think (self-deludedly), I could do that, given the discipline and time. I think: Maybe I could get by on just two or three hours' sleep a night. People do it. Edison did it, I remember reading once. I stay over at work because I could be that guy, the guy who stays over, the go-to guy on the upward track, then I come home and eat dinner with my family and think I could be that guy, the guy for whom family is all and career is nothing, and then I read and I think, I could be the guy who reads voraciously, until my eyes shut against my will. I love my life, there's a bounce in my step, don't get me wrong. I just want it all, I want it all, if only my capacity (my will) to get things done didn't far exceed my available resources.
Panicky. Can't shake the feeling that whatever I'm doing at any given moment it's the wrong thing. Whatever I'm doing, I could be doing something more worthwhile, more productive, more beneficial to me and my family.
I check out an illustrated edition of Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and read it to Abby while tucking her into bed one night. The narrator of the poem is presented as a gray-bearded man who makes snow-angels in the forest while his horse waits for him in the distance. The man plants trees, he communes with the animals. It goes a little against the grain of the actual poem, it seems to me. To me the poem is about momentarily acceding to an unspoken need for oblivion, for ultimate rest. For a benumbed reprieve from commitment. Has there ever been a more desperate or heroically resolved set of lines than "But I have promises to keep / And miles to go before I sleep / And miles to go before I sleep"?
A dear friend of mine died a few months ago. He was twenty-nine. Cancer. I hadn't seen him for a couple of years. We wrote-he was better at writing than I was-and sometimes we spoke on the phone. He and Amy were friends, too. He died. A dear friend of mine died of cancer at the age of twenty-nine: I mix and match these facts over and over, hoping to somehow change their end results, or at least minimize their painfulness. A dear friend, sweet and good and decent: I would have said this about him were he still alive today.
They say you should live your life as if though each day were your last. I don't agree. I woke up last Saturday and I had the whole day in front of me with no prior commitments, a rare thing, and I knew I was going to waste that day, I needed to waste that day. I wanted to sit around aimlessly for once. (Mark that on your task list!) I wanted to watch movies. Read. Watch how-to shows on PBS. And as I was showering, enjoying the prospect of the eventless day ahead of me, I suddenly realized how horrible it would be to know you were going to be dying soon. To know that you could never regard a new day the way I was regarding mine right now. To never feel like you could waste another moment of your time. And that's of course not even factoring in the physical pain. What could a dying person crave more than just one more of these painless slacker days?
And I realized: those people in the business meeting the other day, with all their deadlines and talk of inventory turns, were actually living each day as if though it were their last. Far from forgetting about death, they were ever mindful of their own urgencies, to the exclusion of everything else. True, they manufactured these urgencies, but that didn't make them less real. They didn't think in terms of death, but they lived in terms of death.
Well, today is not the last day of my life. Not even close. And I won't give into panic, to guilt, to feeling rushed and pushed. I will waste a day every now and then. I will sink into the mundane details of a day, and love it, and happily forget it, and rest gently at night.
Home