Literature

Pandemic Diary: Just a Box of Rain

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry.
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
—T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets

* * * *
One day, he decided to read the pages that I’d left next to my typewriter. I was a literature major in graduate school, and I had just pounded out some pages about “The Waste Land” for a summer T. S. Eliot seminar. “I don’t understand anything you wrote, but it sounds like you know what you’re taking about,” my dad said with a chuckle.

My dad had a pretty good chuckle, just so you know. Chuckles are difficult to rank because they receive little attention in the universe of laughs, but they are worth a note. My dad’s chuckle was never one that claimed he knew more than the person with whom he was speaking, or more than anyone else, for that matter. It was an honest assessment of how amused he was at the moment, which I realize now was one way that told us his full-bodied laughter was true and truly felt.

I did not appreciate my dad’s chuckle that summer day so long ago, though. “The poetry of T. S. Eliot is more important than a laugh,” I am certain I thought. (I was insufferable, I assure you. My insufferable self, so convinced of his own importance, still is around here somewhere, but does not show up often.) Well, Eliot’s poems have plenty of laughs and chuckles available, as I now know, and I also know now that my dad’s message to me was a sort of baffled pride in a son so different from and yet so similar to him.

As I have grown older, I have come to appreciate Eliot’s volume Four Quartets and its deeply considered meditations on time, man’s role in the cosmos, eternity, and the permanent immanence of eternity in any possible moment, never at any individual’s bidding. With my father’s death from COVID-19 on Sunday, May 10, those themes become that much more important to me, and since he chuckled at my Eliot paper (“your report” he called it), perhaps a start with Eliot (“East Coker” opens with “In my beginning is my end”) today would have earned a chuckle from him.
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Pandemic Diary 22: Earth Day in Quarantine

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Season’s transition on Earth Day in upstate New York and Cape Cod.

* * * *
Out of the small details one can become reacquainted with the larger picture. We only notice the details when we give the details attention, and attention only comes if we allow time to not matter.

Time has opened up in quarantine, for almost everyone—except essential employees—at the same time and thus it has lost a bit of its potency. (I still feel in a rush; I do not know if I would feel this if I lived alone or not. Decades of personal experience of life in a rush cannot be undone in a month of quarantine. That said, I have twice misidentified the day of the week this month and even missed an online appointment.)

There is an echo of a sense of needing to be somewhere, a muscle memory of a life spent awaiting the next thing. There are at least two men in my town whom I only know as walkers, not pedestrians: I have not yet seen either one in the act of being someplace to which he had been en route. Each man is always en route, always on his way without ever arriving. (Pedestrians arrive.) Neither man strolls, each one walks with purpose, one man carries a backpack, a back and forth on our Main Street here that is rarely interrupted by the event of arrival or departure. There is no next thing in a life spent in a perpetual search for the next thing or a mindless avoidance of the current moment.
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3500 Days of Somehow

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I do not recall July 14, 2010, which was three-thousand five hundred and one days ago today. (Five hundred weeks! That number just jumped out at me.) What is more, I did not post or share anything on social media that day, so I do not even have a “Mark is feeling :-)” smileyness that I may have typed that morning on Facebook that could spark a memory.

Of course I looked. I looked just now with a grimace of anticipation on my face in the worry-slash-hope that I would find something I had written that day to someone about anything at all. Nope. No blue thumbs-up for any of my friends from me that day, either. (In fact, there is little that I typed before July 15, 2010, that I much enjoy any longer for reasons that I hope will become clear.) There is no journal entry, no blog post.
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