Crumbs, Tea, and Poetry

The long nights, the deep, dark days, the eerie, sublime chill, shadows hidden within shadows, naked limbs, moss in every crevice and seam — if I’m lucky enough to emerge come spring, how can I arrive unchanged?

In the street of an early morning, I’m amazed by the relentless human roar, the gasping of brakes, the grinding of gears, the howling of wheels, and I think, What means Sanity if every one of us is mad? In our mouths, Sanity is a tragic, laughable word, an inch on a ruler held up to the stars.

This sentence I find in my notes:

Give yourself to your books and to your reading, rather than thinking in terms of what they might give you.

I remember writing these words in a feeling of transport, of surrender and yield, upon looking up from Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by His Son, and being surprised to find myself here, and not in Victorian England, not in the countryside, not alone beside a raging sea. What would happen if I were to disappear for weeks, and trust my nights to the hospitality of simple, poor, strangers? Could I walk twenty miles a day and live on crumbs, tea, and poetry? Could I thrive on song, on conversation and pipe smoke?

You wonder how I am? This is how I am.

Another note, penned sixty pages into the introductory portion of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy:

Thus far, “Democritus to the Reader” is a joyous bible of common sense.

The fact is, I’ve never found the Bible anywhere near as rewarding, and much of it dull and preposterous. And Robert Burton was a seventeenth century divine.

On the twenty-second morning of the month, I awoke from a strange dream in which I was being followed home, down a vineyard row, by two stray cats. One was a healthy, large kitten; the other was a mangy white adult, nearly starved and very fearful.

Apparently this, too, is how I am, except to add that otherwise, my nights have been marked by very few dreams, which I attribute mostly to a grateful stomach. For instance, I ate no sweets in the days leading to Christmas, and none on Christmas Day — not that I was abstaining, for, other than honey, I haven’t eaten sweets in many years, and have felt much better for it. All this while being surrounded by the traditional Christmas baking of old family recipes, those I grew up with and can still smell in my dreams. I know how strongly we tend to identify with food. Tied to memory, this is easily understood. Yet here I am, not eating my memories, only to find that I’m still the same person. This, perhaps, is dessert for thought.

And so, as it has been of late, I am here and I am not here. I add this page to the 1,934 which precede it, and expect that it will as quickly melt into oblivion as the others, perhaps remaining just long enough for someone to say, This is a life, not wholly unlike mine.

As always, I hope you are well, and I send thanks and love to you and yours.

[ 1935 ]