As for the Cistercian abbey, which was the scene of these meditations, I did not think much about it at all. I had wandered through the ruins of the old buildings, and had stood in the parish church that had taken over the old refectory of the monks, and I had tasted a little of the silence and peacefulness of the greensward under the trees, where the cloister used to be. But it was all in the usual picnic spirit with which the average modern Englishman visits one of his old abbeys. If he does happen to wonder what kind of men once lived in such places, or why they ever did so, he does not ask himself if people still try to do the same thing today. That would seem to him a kind of impertinence. But by this time I had practically lost all interest in such speculations. What did I care about monks and monasteries? The world was going to open out before me, with all its entertainments, and everything would be mine and with my intelligence and my five sharp senses I would rob all its treasures and rifle its coffers and empty them all. And I would take what pleased me, and the rest I would throw away. And if I merely felt like spoiling the luxuries I did not want to use, I would spoil them and misuse them, to suit myself, because I was master of everything. It did not matter that I would not have much money: I would have enough, and my wits would do the rest. And I was aware that the best pleasures can be had without very much money—or with none at all.
I was at the house of one of my friends from school when the results of the higher certificate came out in September, and I could not decently indulge all my vanity at my success, because he had failed. However, he and I were to go up to Cambridge together for the scholarship examinations that December.
Andrew was the son of a country parson in the Isle of Wight and he had been cricket captain at Oakham. He wore horn-rimmed spectacles and had a great chin that he held up in the air, and a lock of black hair fell down over his forehead, and he was one of the school intellectuals. He and I used to work, or rather sit, in the library at Oakham, with many books open before us, but talking about impertinent matters and drinking a foul purple concoction called Vimto out of bottles which we concealed under the table or behind the volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography.
He had discovered a black book called, as I think, The Outline of Modern Knowledge, which was something that had just come to the library and was full of information about psychoanalysis. Indeed, it went into some details of psychoanalytical fortune-telling by the inspection of faeces which I never ran into anywhere else, and which I still preserved enough sense to laugh at, at that time. But later, at Cambridge, psychoanalysis was to provide me with a kind of philosophy of life and even a sort of pseudo-religion which was nearly the end of me altogether. By that time, Andrew himself had lost interest in it.
When we went up to the university, to sit for the scholarship exam, in the dank heavy-hanging mists of December, I spent most of the time between papers devouring D. H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious which, even as psychoanalysis, is completely irresponsible and, just as it says, a fantasia. Lawrence picked up a lot of terms like “lumbar ganglion” and threw them all together and stewed them up with his own worship of the sex-instinct to produce the weird mixture which I read as reverently as if it were some kind of sacred revelation, sitting in the rooms of an undergraduate who liked Picasso, but who had gone down for the Christmas vacation. Andrew, for his part, was at St. Catherine’s, terrified of a tutor who had a reputation for being a very ferocious person. All that week I sat under the high, silent rafters of the Hall, at Trinity College, and covered long sheets of foolscap with my opinions concerning Molière and Racine and Balzac and Victor Hugo and Goethe and Schiller and all the rest, and a few days after it was all over, we looked in the Times and this time both Andrew and I had succeeded. We were exhibitioners, he at St. Catherine’s and I at Clare, while his study-mate, Dickens, who was the only other person at Oakham besides myself who liked hot records, had another exhibition at St. John’s.
My satisfaction was very great. I was finished with Oakham—not that I disliked the school, but I was glad of my liberty. Now, at last, I imagined that I really was grown up and independent, and I could stretch out my hands and take all the things I wanted.
So during the Christmas holidays I ate and drank so much and went to so many parties that I made myself sick.
But I picked myself up, and dusted myself off, and on January 31st of the New Year, my eighteenth birthday, Tom took me to the Café Anglais and treated me to champagne and the next day I was off on the way to Italy.
I prefer living in a small town versus a big city. Large gatherings of people made me slightly uncomfortable before the pandemic, and now, having been social distancing for close to five months now, I'm not sure I would even know how to interact in a crowd. Small talk is not one of my talents. When I do attend a party, I seek out one familiar face and generally ignore the throngs.
Not many people know this about me. I am a highly functioning introvert. I can be engaged, talk in front of an audience, exchange pleasantries. However, it takes a lot out of me. After attending such an event, I need to recharge my batteries. Translation: I socially isolate. That's right. If ordered to stay-at-home for the rest of the year 2020, I could easily survive, even thrive.
Writer Willa Cather once wrote, "Most of the material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen." There's a great deal of wisdom in her observation. Writer's don't need trips to Italy. They don't even have to look further than their own backyards for subject matter.
On Sunday night, I had a one-on-one Zoom poetry workshop with a dear friend of mine. I've known her since she was a teenager who was into poetry and theater, and I was a just twenty-something writer and teacher. After we were done, I stepped into my backyard and wrote down what I saw. I titled it "The Peace of Starry Things" (with thanks to Wendell Berry):
I find myself weary of day, empty of caring whether beds are made, dishes done, bills paid. I have nothing left to give this greedy life, where everything has a mouth. So, I step outside, into night, am swallowed whole, feel myself rattle against the teeth of the universe. Above, around me, stars chew the darkness. I stand beneath them, know that some have already winked out, gone nova, big banged, black holed. They've evolved into something brighter or blacker, consumed everything around them in the gravity of their becoming or unbecoming. They pour into the husk of me now--soles, toes, calves, knees, thighs, pelvis, sex, belly, chest, shoulders, arms, palms, fingers, neck, jaw, cheeks, ears, skull--until I pulse and brim with the peace of starry things.
Saint Marty gives thanks for the miracle of his backyard.
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