for what else is there
but books, books and the sea,
verandahs and the pages of the sea
to write of the wind and the memory
of wind whipped hair
in the sun, the colour of fire.
-Derek Walcott
As I get older, the attractions of foreign travel and the lures of encountering new places and fresh faces are fading. I associate holiday less and less with adventure and more and more with peace and quiet. When I was young I looked forward to visiting different countries – I estimate I have visited about forty in my life – and keenly anticipated the possibility of exotic experiences and the enlivening acquaintance of strangers. Now I can much better understand my father who at the age of about 75 entirely ceased travelling and was content quietly with my mother to turn the pages of the sea in their wind-filled house on the north coast of Antigua. I think of my father and mother in their last years in their home in Antigua and a line from Homer comes to me: “There is nothing so good and lovely as when man and wife in their home dwell together in unity of mind and disposition.”
However, when I travel now one kind of adventuring still never palls. It is voyaging in the golden realm of books. I spend days browsing in bookstores and reading the books finally purchased in the wonderfully uncommitted hours which really is what a holiday quintessentially means. In places like London and Toronto these days some of the bookstores encourage you to sit and read and they have coffee shops where you can spend time between browsing. I like this civilized development – one can spend hours and hours happily this way, and I do.
There is so much to put down so that one remembers. The 16th century playwright, Ben Jonson, from quite young kept a book in which he copied down passages which especially pleased him and which he found particularly “apt, wise or rightly formed.” He called the book which he made out of such passages Discoveries. We should all keep such a record.
* I read with complete delight the autobiography of EO Wilson, the great naturalist. When he was elected a member of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, he, as with all fellows before him, was given the following charge: “You have been elected as a member of this Society for your personal prospect of achievement in your chosen field, and your promise of notable contributions to knowledge and thought. That promise you must redeem with your whole intellect and moral force… You will seek not a near, but a distant, objective, and you will not be satisfied with what you have done. All that you may achieve or discover you will regard as a fragment of a larger pattern, which from his separate approach every true scholar is striving to descry.”
Wilson’s great work was on ants. Environmentally, ants are a far more important species than man. “If we were to vanish today, the land environment would return to the fertile balance that existed before the human population explosion. Only a dozen or so species, among which are the crab louse and a mite that lives in the oil glands of our foreheads, depend on us entirely. But if ants were to disappear, tens of thousands of other plant and animal species would perish also, simplifying and weakening land eco-systems everywhere.”
* William Safire, one of my favourite columnists, though too conservative for my liking, died recently. He left a legacy of clear and cogent journalism. Remembering that he wrote “the most fun in breaking a rule is in knowing what rule you’re breaking,” here are some Safire rules for clear writing:
1. No sentence fragments.
2. It behooves us to avoid archaisms.
3. Also avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
4. Don’t use no double negatives.
5. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, “Resist hyperbole!”
6. Avoid commas, that are not necessary.
7. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
8. Kill all exclamation points!!
9. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
10. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
11. Take the bull by the hand and don’t mix metaphors.
12. Don’t verb nouns.
13. Last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague.
* In plays notice how the scenes get shorter and the action speeds up towards the end. In childhood, afternoons extend for seeming years but for the old, years flicker past like brief afternoons. After eighty, the playwright Christopher Fry, pointed out, you seem to be having breakfast every five minutes. And what is particularly mortifying is how much time is wasted; as Lord Byron entered in his journal, “When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleeping, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning – how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.”
* Getting old has its disadvantages and knowing that one is in the last act, if not quite the last scene, of the play is not pleasant to think about too closely. But the great Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in a prose poem ‘Growing Old,’ has a more appealing view:
“How much easier it is then, how much more receptive we are to death, when advancing years guide us softly to our end. Aging thus is in no sense a punishment from on high, but brings its own blessings and a warmth of colours all its own… there is even warmth to be drawn from the waning of your own strength compared with the past – just to think how sturdy I once used to be! You can no longer get through a whole day’s work at a stretch, but how good it is to slip into the brief oblivion of sleep, and what a gift to wake once more to the clarity of your second or third morning of the day. And your spirit can find delight in limiting your intake of food, in abandoning the pursuit of novel flavours. You are still of this life, yet you are rising above the material plane… growing old serenely is not a downhill path but an ascent.”
* And then there is some hope of immortality. For the deeply religious that is a certainty which it must be good to experience. For those with children there is the smaller but still triumphant satisfaction that one has found a way to outlive mortality. Thomas Hardy put it exactly in his poem ‘Heredity’:
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace,
Through time to time anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance – that is I;
The eternal thing in man
That heeds no call to die.