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Q:
In Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit shares the Etruscan word saeculum, which describes “the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years.�� This can be understood as living memory, the extent of contact we have with each passing era. “Every event has its saeculum,�� says Solnit, “and then its sunset.�� (c)
Q:
Do I see this in Bert now? Not quite. Not yet. But I can recognise the way the walk leads him deeper into quiet. I quieten, too. He is absorbed completely in the quality of his own attention, his peace like a cloud around him, tangible, contagious. As is so often the case, he got there before I did, more directly and with less angst. He has a route map to this place and never needed my assistance to get there.After a while, because I can’t resist it, I say, “Is it nice there, in your head?��
A pause. He turns to me slowly, his eyes blinking as he surfaces. “Sometimes I feel like my mind is growing branches,�� he says.
“Yes,�� I say, delighted at this point of contact. “Yes! I know that feeling exactly.��
“And every time you talk to me, you cut one of them off.�� (c)
Q:
I miss the sense of worship that comes when I get into the sea. I miss the feeling that I am entering a vast cathedral, and, rather than sitting in its dry pews, that I am merging with it. I miss how when I feel the pull of the tides, I am also feeling the pull of the whole world, of the moon and the sun; that I am part of a chain of interconnection that crosses galaxies. (c)
Q:
“So,�� she said, “how is everything going?��
It was a loaded question, and I didn’t want to answer it, so instead I blurted out the thought that was at the front of my mind. “Everywhere I’ve been this week has set on fire.��
It was true, or true enough to feel real. I had spent Saturday afternoon shopping, and seen later on the news that a fire had broken out in one of the stores. The next day, driving out of a village where we’d stopped for lunch, I saw a curl of smoke rising from one of the fields, and later heard that it was an act of vandalism that had stopped the traffic for hours. And, well, here I was, having nearly burned down everything I’d worked so hard to achieve. That was surely something worth mentioning.
I was used to being scolded for abrupt changes of subject or for flippant comments, but the professor didn’t do that. She thought for a moment and then said, “You should pay attention when things like that happen. It might mean something.��
And it did, then and now. (c)
Q:
Perhaps I shouldn’t fear this present-day burnout after all. It shows me only that I’m ready to be made again. How have I allowed this great pleasure in my life—the act of sitting quietly with a book and drinking in its words—to become so heavy, so freighted with obligation? Somewhere along the line, I lost the sense of playfulness that drew me towards it in the first place. (c)
Q:
I want to keep on going deep into the uncertain act of making, to see the unknown world stretch out before me and to devote myself to exploring it.
So I begin again, just as I have before. I have learned to be grateful for these losses, painful and disorienting as they are. They make me small again. The next world is so tantalising, lying across a million unread pages, and in which I am nothing, nobody, new. (c)
Q:
The boy is clever and keen to learn, but he has one flaw: he can’t resist drawing cats wherever he goes. After drawing cats all over the screens in the temple, he is cast out of the monastery and given some final words of advice by the abbot: “At night, avoid large places. Keep to small.�� (c)
Q:
Deep play is a labyrinth and not a maze, a twisting path with no destination. The walking is the thing. You are the walk. There is no end to it. (c)