I wonder if there is a time in what is called time – the days, months, and years – that is not a time, not exactly. It would be a time, this not-time, that passes before we miss it, loses itself in becoming, and goes away only strangely to return, across the years. It would be a time that we do not recall, that we forget, but that recalls us, names us from afar and near, that comes back to us, as is said, years and decades later, that blends then and now until there is no difference in life between your age and mine, and we, on the strength of such moments (for that is what they are) feel we live our being – the always of ourselves – as if today had not gone and never will; live in strange wisdom and peace.
What are such moments? They are not “special.” They are not occasions such as this one; they are not triumphs or tragedies. All those have their special character, but this is not that.
I think instead of what is unsung, of no notice, that stays in the mind, patient as a shore of stones. One such: one night last summer, my wife and I went to a county fair. With a roll of tickets amid the lights, we chose a ride appropriate to our age: the Ferris wheel.
Standing in line, we neared the front and the carny man beckoned: we were two and a gondola awaited – the door swung open. Next, the carny man chose three others, high school boys, closer to freshmen than not, and they entered the car, these friends talking to one another on their side, we on ours, as we rose into the night.
The wheel spun round and when it stopped, the ride over, we hung in the air, 125 feet from the ground, the lights of the fair around us, the darkened countryside like the news of the day spread to sleep; and the boys, just then, spoke with regret and fondness of a friend who loved going to the fair but now sat alone in his basement, night after night, playing video games. Something had happened that kept him there, not where we were. We hung in the air, the cradle gently rocking; the sky drew closer; rang and stroked the steel; we returned to ground and went our ways.
Or this: from my own high school years. In my home city, I worked at the air and space museum every Saturday night one summer. One of those Saturday nights, a special speaker came: a famous television actor, the star of a long-running television show about outer space. He was to tell us how it was, inspire, outdoors, beneath the stars.
The appointed time came; thousands assembled, seated in folding chairs, sweating in the park outside the museum; the night was good and dark; but the speaker did not appear. Not for a long time. When he emerged from his trailer, he spoke for 10 minutes. With impressive oratory, sounding like his television character, he said the stars were far away, that it was good to dream, things of that nature.
I thought then – and it comes back to me – of another man, the director of the museum, about the same age as the television star, who, on closing the museum late each summer Saturday night (it closed at midnight), walked home across the darkened park. I thought of his passage up the little hills and down the valleys, along the scalded turf of the putting greens, of him looking at the stars that shone for him alone, in rhyme to his steps, stars as great and greater as the blades of grass beneath his feet.
When I went to a baseball game that same summer, I was surprised to hear him, this same man, introduced to sing the national anthem. Who was he, this soprano, this Renaissance man, so small against the astro-turf, who sung instead of spoke of the stars; and how did he and the actor relate, and why did I care, and what were these thoughts – these recollections of singing and speaking in the night, to the night, it seems to me now – in rhyme and tandem, delayed duet, across the near and far of who we are?
Each comes back as a constellation, a bevy of stars, signaling to one another across the night, lighting my way to no destination. Lullabies held aloft: the stars are soft.
And this – to mix college and high school. I was about to start my freshman year of college. It was late August. I was away from home, traveling with my dad who took part in a writer’s conference. The last day of the conference arrived and we shared a ride to the airport with two others, a man who sat in the front seat with my dad, then me in the back seat and over far on the other side of this back seat, a young woman – impossibly wise, so I thought, since she had just graduated from college that spring and I, as I said, was not even a freshman.
She paid me no mind. Said not a word. She was so off in her own world that I dared not even look at her. But one time on the 40-mile drive, I did glance her way. I saw her staring out the window, her face in profile, lost in thought, faraway, elsewhere, not looking at the countryside, not looking at anything at all, drawn into herself in some act of mind; and I thought it was so beautiful, so beautiful and strange, this first glimpse of someone lost in thought.
And when years later I happened to think that I should see if this young woman, who would go on to become an acclaimed novelist, had published a novel in those years . . . . I found that she had – her first – just the year after that ride to the airport. It makes sense that she was thinking about it that day in the car.
And what is the novel about? Three best friends in college, three girls who met in orientation during freshman year, their four-year closeness, the light visible at the bottom of the dorm-room door even in the latest hours of night as they talked and talked; a novel of what changed between them and how. There she was, next to me, but miles away, planning her people, and such was her gift to me, who saw what I did not recognize but somehow knew: the melodious drift of light, writ in summer green and blue sky, the cows and the clouds of New England floating by her window as she struck her mental notes; and I, chancing to look, feeling the car dip into a small valley, a silo to one side, across railroad tracks that made a gentle dent, a little bump, as we rode.
When I was in graduate school – another small moment – I used to look at a certain painting in the campus museum. It was abstract – paint in skeins of black, orange, silver, and white; not a big painting, paint not flung but poured delicately, in ribbed webs, from something like a motor-oil-sized can punctured at the top to let the tight lace in layers shape; a lace as fine as any spider spun; the artist on his knees, so I imagined, leaning over the field of light he made.
And in that painting there was one thing, one moment, if you like, that really made me look and still makes me think: a pebble, smooth and flat, affixed as one of several to the canvas across which the spirals of paint ran: a pebble that hung in galactic ropes and strings; streaked, this pebble, in tiger stripes of black and orange. The artist had taken special care enameling the rock, so I saw.
His had been a double humility, bending down not just to paint but before that kneeling at the stream, the salty creek, wherever it was, when seeing this pebble he took it from the water, the reedy bed, the wavy sand: a faithless genuflection, a ritual act saving the stone from the sea’s erosions, the storm’s toss, only to put it into his own storm futile and small and yet of such unaccountable loveliness.
With his art, with his life, he had made the pebble more polished than even the sea had done; more polished than the light of the moon that controlled the estuarial tides; had let loose the storm, now his own, the spreading of the spider’s rage, yet kept quiet, all in a moment, the life we hold dear as an egg in a nest.
And of lines – lines like these, the ones I am speaking – lines held in the mind, verses that come back to us, spoken by no one, as if by time itself: I recall that when I was young, back in high school, I stopped on one of Shakespeare’s: a line about the edge of a little river, a river called the Severn, a line that goes, in these words, “gentle Severn’s sedgy bank.”
What is it still now about that line? Sedgy as in growing with wet grass, sedge at the edge; gentle, making even the word Severn sound peaceful: Severn though it sounds of Severe, Severed, Severance, of goodbyes, all made even more severe, so I see now, re-reading the lines, by the violent death of a character in that very stream; yet “gentle Severn’s sedgy bank” held me as if it were the place of all holding, of all softness and swaying. Of all that is vernal, several, and seven; of ever and ever, this little Sever, a swishing of syllables, the saying of grace.
And of that line, this one: another, spoken by my brother, an unfortunate young man, far more brazen and confident than me, who true to form, strode forth in a high-school production of Shakespeare – strode forth, from the lobby door, down the long aisle to the stage, and on to the stage itself, beset as he strode by other young actors, hurrying to keep up with him, to all of whom he bellowed the following words that come back to me anew: “Gentlemen, importune me no further.”
Why these words now, why these words always, why then? Do not “importune” me – as in, do not bother me; leave me alone; cease with your demands; let me go, let me be at peace. How strange for a person whose own demands would become so unceasing, who could not let go until he did; who would speak with more than theatrical rage; yet in doing so kept safe the stars, the hurt of himself, the lost spiral of least resolve, in light remaining of the night, in little coves and splinters of fairness, soft as the severed bank, in kinship bound.
As we are, today, in who we are, in what we gain, what we lose; abiding in time that is not time; in no memory at all; but the starry pearls of little streams, the gentleness of ourselves.
