Fifty Days of Solitude (6 page)

“I
CAN'T
hear myself think.” I must have said that many times in my lifetime. The cliché may have been preceded by: “The noise they (the children, the neighbors) make in the house (or apartment) next door is so great that, etc.” When I set the conditions for thought, in those blessed days and nights, I discovered it was sometimes very hard to hear what I was thinking, not because of any exterior noise, but, strangely enough, because of the overpowering silence. I had to listen hard (as I had learned the importance of looking hard) to hear what I was thinking, or even to discover whether I was thinking at all. I needed my ears to catch the gossamers of thought that I would have believed more substantial and more independent of those organs.

I have always known that without words placed in logical relation to each other I had no thoughts, am not, indeed, thinking, contrary to what students used to say to me: “I know what I mean but I can't say it.” It turned out that the words in which my thinking was necessarily couched were hard to catch, because the tone, the voice, was mine, and I had grown immune to that voice. Try as I might to listen, I found I had become bored with the
sound
of my own thoughts embedded in that old, omnipresent voice, and so I stopped listening. This, I discovered, was one of the unavoidable disadvantages of being alone.

In the silence I eagerly sought, I
could
hear myself think, and what I heard was, sadly, often not worth listening to.

O
NE
long, very dark night, I found myself fantasizing about the vague sounds I heard in the attic above my head. I told myself the reason so few old homes harbor the ghosts of those who have lived and died there is because those unsubstantial figures are dispelled, frightened off, by the multitudinous in-house noises of today: the furnace, the refrigerator, washing and drying machines, the dishwasher and Disposall, electric clocks, all of these things, and more.

Quiet houses are hospitable to ghosts. They flourish there. I know this because, one night when the power failed, so that all the appliances were silenced, no car moved along the road, and I lay upstairs in bed without the intrusive, tinny sound of the battery-radio, I thought I heard Ella Byard, who built this house before she married Captain Willis White, moving about in the hall downstairs.

Then my fantasy grew. I thought I heard her walking to the porch to sit in the sunlight of a cool August afternoon with her women friends and relatives, exactly as the ten of them appear on the back of a postcard given to me by Connie Darrach, one of her descendants in Sargentville. I saw that it was the porch of another house down the road from me, and I remembered Mrs. Darrach telling me the women gathered together every year to celebrate the birthday of her grandmother. Ella Byard is front left, birdlike and elegant. Addie France, smiling and apparently toothless and wrapped in a shawl, is behind her. Aunt Mae Millikan is bespectacled and very pleasant looking. Emma Gray is next to Faustina Dodge who is wearing a fine black hat and is looking away from the camera. Ella is near her relative Abby Byard, white-haired, handsome, and all in black satin, and Lydia Byard Sargent Gower whose ruffled collar frames a thin neck and a thoughtful, almost grim face. Sweet-faced Dora Currier is all in white, rather ghostly among the black-satined other ladies like solemn Lucia Means who sits between her and gloomy, straw-hatted, bespectacled Serena Turner. The occasion appears to be in the 1920s.

Their sloping shoulders, their drawn-back white hair, their hands folded comfortably in their laps, the ten old ladies respond to the camera's action as if they knew this was a signal moment in their elderly histories, that life might not catch them all together in this way again. In my fantasy they are thus unexpectedly reunited, but this time on my porch, populating my quiet, almost empty house with their ancient shadows, satisfying my sudden need for people.

K
ENNY GRINDLE
once owned our house, perhaps twenty years ago. Now he lives in a tiny shack down and across the road from us. He has few amenities, no telephone, no television, no car. He relies on neighbors for his occasional forays to the general store and on his radio for the news. He heats with a wood stove so his strip of yard on the state road is strewn with logs which he splits himself and with odd bottles and miscellaneous objects he offers to passersby in a perpetual yard sale. Now and again, in a fit of assertive desire for isolation, he tacks up on his trees four cardboard signs that warn motorists to
KEEP OUT
.

He is elderly, suffering from emphysema and the remnants of a hard life, yet his opinions about what is important in life remain firm. Sometimes he and his clothes smell musty. I wonder if he believes that cleanliness has very little connection to godliness and that constant washing, under the conditions he lives, is too much trouble. He is adamant in his conviction that people are not to be trusted and are not necessary to him, that the news of the outside world, from whatever source, is tainted and false, and that the times of his youth in Sargentville were in every way superior to the present. He is more interested in who will be elected to be his selectman and game warden than he is in his representatives in Washington or the president.

The other day I waved to Kenny when I drove to the post office, reluctant to break my silence by giving him a ride. I need not have worried. The next morning (it was the second day of a cold month) he gestured that he wanted a ride. I stopped for him, and he rode to the post office with me, saying nothing until he got out at his house, under one of the
KEEP
OUT signs. “Social Security day,” he said in his thick, almost incomprehensible Maine accent. Holding his letter of the month, he said good-bye and walked off, a great, slow bear of a man ambling into his cabin.

When I got back to my place, the Captain White House, as it was still called before we moved in, I thought about Kenny. To the summer people of Sargentville, he is a “character” who speaks a strange tongue and looks very much alone and odd. They do not associate themselves with him, because, of course, they lead their lives differently.

But the more I thought about him, the more I realized that he and I are more alike than we are like our other neighbors. I too prefer my own society, I too have become distrustful of what I hear on the
TV
, the radio, in the newspaper, and do not often listen to them, or read it. We are alike in our critical views of the contemporary world and its inhabitants; we both keep better track of the small animals we live among than the human beings around us. It may be that we part company in our views of personal sanitation. But then it is easy for me, possessed of unlimited hot water, a washing machine and dryer, a shower and a tub, to stay clean. Left to myself without these amenities, I think I would decide that, living alone without a companion or much company, I did not need to worry about clean clothes or baths. Who knows, I might even put up some
KEEP OUT
signs to replace the discreet
PRIVATE
one that now stands at the side of my driveway.

O
N
all the roads I traveled in this very cold, wet, and snowy winter there were warning signs. Some read
FROST HEAVE
, others simply
BUMP
. The roads freeze, melt a little, and then freeze again, leaving serious barriers to progress. Being an inattentive driver, I often failed to see the signs and then was jolted out of my driving reveries by hitting the heave, hard.
Then
I was alert, watching for the next
BUMP
sign. The lesson was: words are not as powerful as acts. Show, do not tell.

A
CATALOG
came in the mail at the end of an unproductive morning, from Daedalus, a company that supplies bookstores with remainders. It was addressed to Sybil, of course, for she does all the ordering of such books for our single remainder table at the front door. Nonetheless, I scanned its tightly printed pages to find out which of my friends' and acquaintances' works were being cavalierly disposed of for sale (cheaply) in new bookstores, and some old-book stores, like ours.

How self-centered we writers are. Anxiously I first looked to see if
my
book was remaindered, if Joe's or Bill's or Ellen's or Pete's.… The good thing about the catalog is that it does not tell which printing of the book is being emptied out of the publishers' warehouse. So charity allowed me to believe that John's book was in its fifth printing when it was placed on remainder tables in drug- and chain stores, not its first.

I realized how much more I was aware of my vices (envy, gloating, egotism) when I was alone. In the presence of others, it was possible to ignore them, or even deny that they existed. In solitude, they are there, omnipresent and bountiful, unable to be dispelled by the unknowing flattery of kindly others.

H
ARRY
, a kind neighbor and friend, came to the door at three in the afternoon yesterday. Was I
OK?
Did I need anything? He said he had not seen me about after the big snow storm and wondered how I was getting on. Did I need more wood from the pile across the driveway? Groceries? Company?

Nothing, thank you, I told him, disturbed by the interruption and yet I was tempted to ask him in for coffee and, yes, for his company. But I didn't. I thought of explaining my experiment to him but decided against it, thinking it would sound foolish, even somewhat mad. I thanked him again and closed the door, having preserved my solitude a while longer even as I was aware that I was not eager to.

Jessamyn West (
Hide and Seek
): “The prohibition against solitude is forever. A Carry Nation rises in every person when he thinks he sees someone sneaking off to be alone. It is not easy to be solitary unless you are also born ruthless. Every solitary repudiates someone.”

The rebel against solitude arose in me when Harry appeared at the door. I realized that I was not so sure about my desire to be alone. And I was surprised by my willingness (fought off reluctantly) to have company. Perhaps I was not so good at living this way as I believed.

P
RAYER:
Deciding to say Evening Prayer at the end of my days alone in addition to the Morning Prayers I had always read, I found a short prayer at the back of the
Book of Common Prayer
that I loved, and learned, and said aloud every night as I lay in bed looking across the whitened and featureless cove and the frozen reach: “O Lord, support me all the day long, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and my work is done. Then in thy mercy grant me a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.”

Those were wonderful phrases—shadows lengthen, the fever of life over, the world hushed, work done, holy rest. Unlike so many other prayers, not hallowed names, kingdoms to come, and grace, righteousness, the power and glory forever and ever, the resurrection and the life; but instead safe lodging and peace at the last.

For days I considered the secular and earthly contents of the prayer. I thought about Simone Weil who wrote a profound essay on the nature of the Lord's Prayer. Should I be granted the boon of knowing when my last day on earth comes, I hoped I would have the strength (and the memory) to say it to myself, over and over, until the last moment.

Thinking of Simone Weil, the saintly Jewish philosopher who hesitated on the threshold of Christianity, I took down my copy of
Gravity and Grace
which she wrote almost fifty years ago. With the kind of luck that had marked most of my reading during the fifty days, I opened to this: “Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your isolation. The day, if it ever comes when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse.”

This was reassuring to come upon. Not
any
affection but true affection (which I was parted from for the time being but hoped to return to when my walkabout was over) was not likely to disturb the interior solitude I cherished and feared, in a way, to abandon.

A
NOTE
from Molly Sholes who owns a blueberry farm in Rockport reminded me that when she was visiting us here she was the ideal early-morning guest. She came downstairs in her bathrobe, nodded to me as I sat reading at the kitchen table, took a cup of coffee from the Braun maker, and went silently upstairs to her bedroom to think and do paperwork for her second, elective job as selectman for her town, she told me later. There was something almost holy about the silence of early morning. It became even better when, without discussing it, it was shared by a house guest.

A
DAY
began with a fine winter sunrise, a long view of the distant horizon slowly taking on color, the sky growing brilliant with yellow streaks transmuted into red, even a royal purple. As I watched, the fully lighted blue-and-white day arrived and the pale yellow-from-sun snow shone like polished ivory. This was the way every good day began. Inevitably the coffee tasted better than it had on a morning full of fog and then snow, and words arrived on the page with some ease, even occasional grace.

The evening always managed to continue the benign sense that the sunrise had provided. There were still possibilities left over for the dark hours. I took my rather sparse dinner (vegetables, rice, and chunks of canned pineapple) into the television room to watch a wonderful Danish film,
Babette's Feast
, sent to me by a son-in-law, Bob Emerson, who was concerned for my sanity, I supposed, in this period of solitude. I loved the film. Even the elegance of the Parisian food that Babette provided for her country employers did not make my pedestrian supper seem insufficient.

In cities where I spent my young days, I was unaware of the power the sunrise could generate. Usually I slept through it, but had I not, I still would have been unable to see it, sunk down as I usually was in second- or fourth-floor apartments. But here I celebrated the whole process throughout the day and well into the evening, when often it would have been reinforced by the might of a blood-red sunset. The thought of their combined glory tinged the events of thirteen hours, lasted by coloring the invisible air in the house red and orange and yellow and purple, suffused it with the pleasure of feeling alive once again.