“In Herman Williams’ seminal work on the joys of being a model train hobbyist, he writes: ‘Many an hour have I spent blissfully lost in a world of my own creation. For the model train enthusiast, there exists a secret world of order and symmetry, nestled into the corners of our basements and attics, where we lord over a world where the hobbyist plays omnipotent creator. There, in one eight seven scale, the neighbors are always kind, the lovers always end up together, and the trains take you to the far-off places you always swore you’d go. In life of course, nothing is nearly as neat and tidy.’”
Nothing to be done, he thinks, nothing at all. Short-term memory loss is an inevitable part of growing old, and if it’s not forgetting to zip your zipper, it’s marching off to search the house for your reading glasses while you’re holding the glasses in your hand, or going downstairs to accomplish two small tasks, to retrieve a book from the living room and to pour yourself a glass of juice in the kitchen, and then returning to the second floor with the book but not the juice, or the juice but not the book, or else neither one because some third thing has distracted you on the ground floor and you’ve gone back upstairs empty-handed, having forgotten why you went down there in the first place. It’s not that he didn’t do those kinds of things when he was young, or forget the name of this actress or that writer or blank out the name of the secretary of commerce, but the older you become, the more often these things happen to you, and if they begin to happen so often that you barely know where you are anymore and can no longer keep track of yourself in the present, you’re gone, still alive but gone. They used to call it senility. Now the term is dementia, but one way or the other, Baumgartner knows that even if he winds up there in the end, he still has a long way to go. He can still think, and because he can think, he can still write, and while it takes a little longer for him to finish his sentences now, the results are more or less the same. Good.
NY Time Book Review by Fiona Maazel, November 6, 2023: “Paul Auster Walks the Long Valley of Grief in a New Novel. In ‘Baumgartner,’ a professor contends with mortality and the haunting memory of his wife.”
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
Finally day breaks over things that I can’t predict, as I cannot predict myself. Only a stone, a celestial body, a fool can, sometimes, be predictable. Finally day breaks over a circumstantial, differentiated, risky, improbable world, as concrete, multicolored, unexpected, and, yes, beautiful as the one I see, feel, touch, admire.
Photo: Daybreak. 29° F, feels like 21° F. 6:00 to 7:00 am. March 16, 2023. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. See more photos from yesterday’s daybreak walk here.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
I’ve written many, many poems out of the need to find a way to say yes to what I would, at first, rather say no to. Because our whole lives consist of such moments. Many things will happen to us that we would prefer not. We would prefer our loved ones don’t die. I would prefer the world were more sensible and kind and compassionate. I would prefer there not to be forest fires of such extraordinary devastation as we’ve been having, or fill in the blank.
But a human life requires all of these things. And so to every day begin the day with this simple affirmation of “I will make the unwanted wanted” has been a practice of decades for me now.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
“…that hopeless sense of loss which makes beauty what it is: a distant lone tree against golden heavens; ripples of light on the inner curve of a bridge; a thing quite impossible to capture.”
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”
