Death comes by installments but sometimes the first installments can be very steep, perhaps much more painful to those around them than to the person.
The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing. Every human instinct is to turn away. Not see. It is, I’m afraid, exemplified by Reagan who refuses to imagine the suffering of twelve million unemployed and the degradation of men and women who are deprived of work and treated in this country like pariahs.
For a Fur Person is a cat whom human beings love in the right way, allowing him to keep his dignity, his reserve and his freedom. And a Fur Person is a cat who has come to love one or, in very exceptional cases, two human beings and who has decided to stay with them as long as he lives. This can only happen if the human being has imagined part of himself into a cat just as the cat has imagined part of himself into a human being. It is a mutual exchange.
How cruel memory is, forgetful memory that drops whole lives out without a qualm!
Our two solitudes never quite merged, perhaps, but accepted each other gratefully.
Here in the United States we appear to be becoming more and more a country devoted to amenities for the rich, more and more neglectful of the poor.
Nothing gets easier as one gets older. Everything is harder, even buttoning one’s slipper!
Solitude itself is a way of waiting for the inaudible and the invisible to make itself felt. And that is why solitude is never static and never hopeless. On the other hand, every friend who comes to stay enriches the solitude forever; presence, if it has been real presence, does not ever leave.
The Fur Person learned then and there that it is better to be a philosopher than to be a king and that, all things considered, wisdom was to be preferred to power.
Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, toward those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.
It was a painful week, swung between doubt and hope. I knew that tension well. It is just the same before I begin to write a book or a poem. It is the tension of being on the brink of a major commitment, and not being quite sure whether one has it in one to carry it through – the stage where the impossible almost exactly balances the possible, and a thistledown may shift the scales one way or another.
Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time. The apparently measured time has immeasureable space within it, and in this it resembles music. The routine I established.
But as time goes on we not only remember specific things in relation to the people we have loved; their lives get built into our lives and finally the transference is complete. We are what we are because of them.
In the end I knew I would have to trust to instinct, not estimates.
I had found one of the places on earth where any sensitive being feels exposed to powerful invisible forces and himself suddenly naked and attacked on every side by air, light, space – all that brings the soul close to the surface. There the poems flowed out.
Not happiness, perhaps, but something like New England itself – struggle, occasional triumph over adversity, above all the power to endure and to be renewed. For here the roses grow beside the granite.
Every relation challenges; every relation asks me to be something, do something, respond. Close off response and what is left? Bearing... enduring... waiting.
Hilary has often asked herself why she felt the need for flowers... , but there it was. The house felt empty and desolate without them. They were silent guests who must be made happy, and who gave the atmosphere a kind of sou.
What “they” never understood about her solitary life was that it was a solitude so inhabited by the past, that she was never alone in it, except sometimes in the rich disorder of her work room upstairs.
A Fur Person must be adopted by catly humans, tactful, delicate, respectful, indulgent; these are fairly rare, though not as rare as might be supposed.