The Comforts of Home

An inviting armchair in a hotel room sometimes seems an anomaly, a prop in a stage set, a conscious extravagance. Experience tells you that the most you are likely to need to do in that chair is keep your balance as you put on your socks or tie your shoes in the morning. While someone else is taking a shower or getting dressed, you might sit in the chair and glance through a newspaper, a telephone directory or a guide book. The conventional wisdom is that you don’t spend enough time in a hotel room to be overly concerned about such furnishings. How comfortable does the seating really need to be if there is a lobby in which to wait for people or a bar in which to entertain them or a sizeable bed in which to prop oneself up against several pillows and watch TV?

I recently returned from two nights in a hotel in mid-state Pennsylvania. A work friend’s wedding had drawn a significant number of her colleagues to take advantage of a block of hotel rooms available at special rates for guests of the bride and groom and to participate in a long weekend of celebration and camaraderie.

The sole occupant of my hotel room, I had more space than I needed. A well-upholstered armchair took up some of that space; a coordinating ottoman and reading lamp completed that section of the room. Few things suggest the comforts of home as readily as a chair, an ottoman and a reading lamp, and this hotel was charging its prices to ensure that guests experience something more like the feel of home than they might regularly find even in their own home. This is the way you really want to live, isn’t it? the furnishings seemed to say to the overnight guest.

Who more than a reader would welcome the sight of a well-placed floor lamp next to a comfortable chair? Even an inveterate reader, though, may think that there is enough time to read back at home and that a stay in another part of the country is best spent getting better acquainted with a new environment – walks, drives, tours, visits, meals, at the very least drinks in a downstairs lounge.

Having arrived Friday afternoon and enjoyed an early dinner with friends at one of the local restaurants recommended by the bride and groom, I had a full Saturday morning to myself. I had not committed to meet anyone before the one o’clock ceremony at the church five minutes from the hotel. I eyed the armchair, looked at the biography of Emily Dickinson I had brought to read in the airport and on the plane, and toyed with the idea of spending an hour or two in that armchair and with that book.

Even as I settled deep into the upholstery, I felt some minor twinges of guilt. Was this in the spirit of the weekend? Was this coming close to being antisocial? Shouldn’t I get outside, drive to a mall, shop or do something? Shouldn’t I at least turn the television on?

I forgot those questions as I opened to my place midway in the six-hundred pages of the biography. From time to time in the next two hours I looked up from my book to the view through the window, a range of mountains and the green valley over which the hotel was perched. The peacefulness of the scene and the quiet sent me back into the chapters depicting Emily Dickinson in her twenties. Her awareness of a vocation as an artist was being born in her, and it would be accompanied by a heightened sense that home was her proper setting for responding to that call. What was before her was a spiritual adventure in self-expression that did not require or particularly thrive on the prospect of publication: “…the manuscript books were a private hoard, or a secret garden of work done, or a thing put through for its own inherent excellence.” (Habegger, p.353)



What was ahead of me? In a few hours I would watch a good friend walk down the aisle toward a man she loved; I would sip a gin and tonic amid other guests at the reception; I would initiate conversations with seven table-mates as I cut into the filet mignon; near the end of the evening I would laugh finding myself on the dance floor amid so many people I usually saw only at work.

But for a couple of hours on Saturday morning I chose this quiet time, this book, this armchair.

A year ago to the day I had been sitting at a table for my first breakfast in a new home, a home on my own. On Friday a good friend had written me: “I want you to enjoy yourself this weekend – be in the moment, relax, eat, drink, laugh.”

I can assure my friend – and myself – that I did all that.

Reading Biography

I am in admiration of the biographer. The resolute step with which someone begins to commit days and long summer weeks, steady months and eventually years to the understanding of another human life has to be an act of faith. It certainly takes interest and little short of fascination to motivate and simultaneously reward the choice that must be repeatedly made to be about the elusive heart of another’s life. There needs as well to be a sense that the biographer’s own life is being sustained and brought to light the more it directs its focus on the mystery of another’s choices.

At some stage in the meticulous process, I imagine, a biographer acknowledges that there is reliable insight emerging. What becomes available to him or her after immersion in the questions of another time, another family, another education, another geography will make possible something worth saying about how someone became just this person and not another. How far to trust logical analysis, how far to trust intuitive grasp, how far to put into words creative vision and plausible hypothesis: these are the challenges – and delights – facing the biographer.

Almost a third of the way into a six-hundred-page life of Emily Dickinson, I am aware of understanding better not just another’s life, not just the biographer’ s task, but my personal history of loving a writer. That Alfred Habegger was the scholar who could bring Emily Dickinson into particular focus for me should have been evident from the title he had selected for his work: My Wars Are Laid Away in Books (2001). That opening line of Emily Dickinson’s expresses what I expected or at least hoped growing up – that what mystified me about the circumstances of my own life could be illuminated by what poets and other writers had written about their own.

And let me admit: I am in admiration of the reader of biographies. The resolute step with which someone begins to commit days and long summer weeks to the understanding of another human life has to be an act of faith. It certainly takes interest and little short of fascination to motivate and simultaneously reward the choice that must be repeatedly made to be about the elusive heart of another’s life. There needs as well to be a sense that the reader’s own life is being sustained and brought to light the more it directs its focus on the mystery of another’s choices.

Oh.

Isn’t that fundamentally what love is about as well?



Daguerrotype of Emily Dickinson from Brooklyn Museum

Writing Cabin Mascot

Sometimes I settle myself in front of my laptop and begin moving through the steps that can lead to the kind of writing destined for a post on "Writing Cabin." A fellow cabin mate, though, likes the mood of those moments and can figure out a way to rest against me. Last night she became too comfortable too easily and fell asleep on my arm. No posting last night but a grand image of contentment, eh?

Another New England Mood

New England Mood

Summer Meals I'll Own Up To

Summer can give permission to eat out a little more often than we might otherwise do.

On the other hand, take a stab: which of these images of summer meals shows a homemade chili omelette? Taking its inspiration from a traditional offering at Camellia Grill in the Carrollton section of New Orleans, this version boasts green onions and Tiger Sauce at a friend's savvy suggestion.

Anything else I should be sure to try before September rolls along?

Making It Through

It was another summer visit to the Cape house that my niece assured me was mine to enjoy last week.

Paris this past March, New York two weekends back, and now the Cape – each time I have walked into familiar settings for the first time since being no longer part of a couple. Each of these three times I have been wary of the emotional toll the venture might exact.

A new John has been emerging, and the birth pangs are painful at times, energizing but scary. Could I really have expected otherwise?

What does keep happening, though, is a sense of making it through, of facing the fear, shedding the tears and talking to the person who is in the process of living with himself in these new circumstances.

Hard work. The outcome unclear. The surprises ready at different points. Like one afternoon of sudden ease this past week – the winds calmed and just a day lying before me.

There were moments at the start of my stay on the Cape, I admit, that I wanted these vacation days over. I wanted to run. I wanted not to have to be alone this way and in circumstances as ambiguous as these. What my therapist had just recently explained as two signs of growth in mental health, being willing to be alone and being ready to accept ambiguity, were goals, it seemed, not yet perfectly realized.

And then “Two Warm Trees.”

Walking into a particular gallery that memories had made difficult to imagine revisiting, I moved unexpectedly into the presence of the painting by Willoughby Elliott that had hovered over my last year, even appearing in postings on this blog not once but twice. The painting whose digital image I had used to represent the year 2008 in my Christmas card – the painting that had earlier hung in a gallery across the state in Williamstown – there it was in a gallery on the Cape.

It was a bit like my life hanging there and waiting for me to claim it. It was being offered, and it was only right that I make it mine. Stunned, startled, I did what I needed to do to walk out of a tricky setting more fully in possession of what I had determined I wanted my life to be like.

Something is now on the walls of my home that was always destined to be there.

Vacation Moods

Bildungsroman

A friend once wrote me about the lists by which he plots his intellectual journeys:

I have had the opportunity to review my list - the mandatory “To Do” I always carry with me and scribble on just in case I need to remember something. Funny thing is, I rarely carry a pen or pencil and try to burn an image, task, title or song lyric into my brain by repeating it silently over and over until I sit comfortably at my desk, open my wallet and breathe a sigh knowing the item has been added. If someone were to find my list, it would make little sense, but to me it shows the results of my inner workings...all the well-oiled gears grinding together.

Reading through a collection of his earlier lists, he offered this explanation of the experience:

It was the Bildungsroman of a former self, someone who desperately wanted to be a Renaissance Man of his own making, someone no one would quite understand, but that was okay. I could feel how I felt when I wrote them: there must be something better. I kept open a few items: get back to British Columbia, take a Joyce "Ulysses" course, violin and sax lessons, attend photo and video courses in Rockland. As I crossed out, a layer was added to myself…and some sadness and unattainability faded.

I admire the economy of the record of self in this record of dreams. Whether in the planning or in the recording, the landmarks of some of my own intellectual journeys claim space that I do not have in abundance these days. In the neat stacks of books and journals near my favorite reading chair, I get reminded each day of a variety of goals that I have set for myself in recent and not so recent years. Like my friend, I have before me a Bildungsroman of goals that at different times have called me to be a particular kind of John.

For example, there is the Washington Square Press paperback that I purchased after a lecture on the Roman poet Horace and the structure of his four books of odes. I was a sophomore in college at the time, and for ninety cents I added a volume to my personal library with the complete Latin text of the odes and an English translation of each poem by British poet James Michie. Not a classics major, I have yet to reach the point of picking up the book and opening to a random page and reading the Latin originals with speed and accuracy. On the other hand, I can from time to time use my high school Latin to work through a stanza or two. I may not be equipped to teach Horace, but I enjoy the awareness that my education has provided me a way to delve into his world.

Before I ever enrolled in high school classes in New Orleans, Latin was a language that I associated with beauty and authority and holiness. It was a language by which even my parents could be a bit daunted as they knelt with my brothers and me at a Roman Catholic Mass each Sunday morning. I watched how words looked on the pages of my parents’ missals and prayer books. I learned early on that not all languages looked or sounded like English. If my parents did not understand Latin, though, they occasionally used a French from their Louisiana childhood when they wanted to say something to one another that their children should not understand. I discovered in time that that mystifying language of family secrets was also the language of Paris and Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower.

Next to the paperback Horace near my reading chair are several purchases from this past March when I shopped at Paris kiosks and browsed through Paris bookstores. When the time had come that I could choose the language that I would learn in school, I began my study of French. My undergraduate major in French acquainted me with a France that was stark and misty and sophisticated. In travelling as an adult to Paris and other sections of France, I have kept expecting the sober and beautiful pages of the French novels and plays and poems that I had read in college to provide a key to a world that at one time seemed more likely to match who I was. My knowledge of French makes it a pleasure – albeit sometimes a slow one – to hear how the world sounds in the elegant syllables of my Gallic contemporaries. Watching French films, I enjoy the spoken rhythms of people with whom I claim a common heritage.

Among the intellectual journeys on which I have embarked over the years, the different languages by which people tell their stories have exerted a steady fascination. A goal that persists in luring me is more confidence in reading German and hearing it spoken. Its earliest emotional claim on me came in the rooms of one of the first men with whom I fell in love. I remember reading the titles of the scholarly books on his shelves as I sat and listened to him summarize a particular class that he had taught that day. I took delight paging through his lecture notes and finding the precise umlauts with which he had punctuated his quotations from scholars under whom he had studied. Admiration and love seemed to go hand in hand in those days, and I thought of him often when years later I took a reading course in theological German. A hardcover anthology of German poetry is stacked next to Horace and Max Jacob in my sitting room.

During my recent weekend in New York, I took a photograph of the NYU house for students of German. There was awakened in me that day a sense of how intellectual pursuits can promise a home for those parts of ourselves that not everyone in a social circle asks about or knows how to recognize in us. The dream, though, of becoming the kind of person we think we have a chance to be can lead us all to create lists and build stacks of books, keep journals and watch French movies and sit in lamplight at home on quiet reading nights in summer.

Welcome the people who get who we are and what we are trying to be.

How Broadway Makes Rain Fall on Mary Stuart

I wondered about the rain in the remarkable production of Mary Stuart that I saw this weekend. Click on the title of this post for an explanation.



Photo from NYTimes