O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne’er hung there. I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. And I have asked to be Where no storms come.
In the earlier tradition from which Mrs. Post wrote, the act of dying had not yet been professionalized. It did not typically involve hospitals. Women died in childbirth. Children died of fevers. Cancer was untreatable. At the time she undertook her book of etiquette, there would have been few American households untouched by the influenza pandemic of 1918. Death was up close, at home.
By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.
They who came to California were not the self-satisfied, happy and content people, but the adventurous, the restless, and the daring. They were different even from those who settled in other western states. They didn’t come west for homes and security, but for adventure and money. They pushed in over the mountains and founded the biggest cities in the west.
Remember, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.
There were the youngest children, small girls with leis, barefoot. There were watercress sandwiches, champagne, lemonade, peach-colored napkins to match the sorbet that came with the cake, peacocks on the lawn. She kicked off the expensive shoes and unpinned the veil. ‘Wasn’t that just about perfect,’ she said when she called that evening.
It came to her that in the scenario of her life this would be what was called an obligatory scene, and she wondered with distant interest just how long the scene would play.
There was a way to know if you had made headway. You knew you had made headway, when a doctor to whom you had made one or another suggestions, presented, a day later, the plan as his own.
She could remember it all but none of it seemed to come to anything. She had a sense the dream had ended and she had slept on.
The heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is: the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.
Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one’s own words in print.
Superstition prevails, fear that the fragile unfinished something will shatter, vanish, revert to the nothing from which it was made.
When my mother was near death at age ninety she told me that she was ready to die but could not. “You and Jim need me,” she said. My brother and I were by then in our sixties.
They lost concentration. “After a year I could read headlines,” I was told by a friend whose husband had died three years before.
Why do you always have to be right, I remembered John saying. It was a complaint, a charge, part of a fight. He never understood that in my own mind I was never right.
This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning.
Why did I keep stressing what was and was not normal, when nothing about it was?
I can no longer tell you whether Milton put the sun or the earth at the center of his universe in Paradise Lost, the central question of at least one century and a topic about which I wrote ten thousand words that summer, but I can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the City of San Francisco’s dining car, and the way the tinted windows on the Greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait into a grayed and obscurely sinister light.
I know what ‘nothing’ means, and I keep on playing. Why, BZ would say. Why not, I say.