Slow Answers

James Hillman could be short-tempered at times.  In airports, on book tours, at conferences, the famed psychologist would be stopped by strangers, who seemed to him to be asking for simple answers to complicated questions:  “Wherever I go, people say,  ‘Can I ask you a quick question?’  It’s always ‘a quick question.’  Well, my answers are slow.”

That reminds me of another thinker who also meant, and means, a great deal to me:  John Holt, who wrote the book I wish I could get into everyone’s hands – especially parents and teachers – How Children Learn.  He took his time to answer any question that was asked of him.  Sometimes people thought he was slow, as in slow to understand, and if not that, then certainly eccentric.  He wasn’t.

Another thinker comes to mind now, one who also meant, and means, a great deal to me.  He was four when he said this; he’s older than that now.  When adults would ask him a question, he also took his time to think about his answer.  In the midst of the silence, the kind in which thought occurs, they’d often say, “Oh, he’s shy. That’s alright, he doesn’t have to talk.”  I once asked him how it felt when grown-ups did that.  “It’s alright,” he said. “I just figured they didn’t really care about the answer.”

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Then and Now

It was one of those “signs-of-the-times” moments — a group of girls side by side on a bench, bent over their phones, typing, scrolling, putting their heads together to share an image or a text every now and then. Behind them was a wide painting – larger than all of them and their phones and the leather bench put together – some old and massive landscape filling a wall in the art museum. They’d either seen enough, or had never even noted it, having gone straight to that long seat that some rooms have, so you can spend more time taking in the art.

It’s tempting to take those terms back to earlier times – and even to use that phrase my elders once did: “in my day.” I will yield: In my day, we bent over books, not phones. We typed on typewriters, not screens. Scrolls were ancient manuscripts we learned about, and scrolling wasn’t something you did with them. We “put our heads together” to come up with ideas, in meetings which weren’t arranged by an app. And images were paintings or photographs or drawings, not memes or gifs, and sites were places you went to or learned about in history class.

I think it is alright to celebrate change, and I think it is alright to mourn it, too – to ache at what can feel like lost ground. Like lost grounding, lost groundedness. It’s not that everything new, like phones pre-empting paintings, is ipso facto bad. It’s just that the full eclipse of the old sometimes makes me sad. Sometimes very sad.

And then I come across a story like this and the sadness eases up, like sitting on a quiet bench under a leafy tree can shade you for the moment from the too-much brightness of everything new and now. Yousuf Karsh, one of the greatest portrait photographers of the 20th century, was on assignment to cover Pablo Casals, one of the world’s greatest cellists. But he was so moved by listening to him play Bach that he couldn’t attend to the camera. For the first time in his career, he photographed his subject from the back – facing away from the camera as he played on.

Years later, that photograph was featured in a museum exhibition. Every day, an old man came and stood alone before the portrait, unmoving, for many minutes. Finally, one day, a curator approached and asked why he did this. The man turned, and with a withering look, said, “Hush, young man. Can’t you see I am listening to the music?”

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Sentences

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?”  “Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know . . . .Do you like sentences?”  The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences?  If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter.  He said, “I liked the smell of the paint.” – Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I first read those lines when that book stood on a shelf by my writing desk, urging me to pick up my pen again. I’d begun to write long before, when I was nine or ten, telling each page of my light green diary what had happened that day. But I’d never known that I loved sentences. It was like a friend saying you have a crush on someone: “What? I do not!” – “Of course you do, just look how you act around them.”  And sentences have always acted a certain way around me, too – sometimes sitting quietly by my side, sometimes carrying me off in delight, sometimes stumbling and letting me down. Yet I fall in love all over again whenever one arrives that astonishes, that beautifies, that simplifies, that sets in some new order my life, or this world.

I’ve always liked collecting things – rocks, for instance, starting with those little cardboard squares for sale at desert souvenir stores, each thumbnail mineral tacked above its name. Then there were the big shell-studded rocks I’d carry home from a wild beach. Collecting quotations came later. Summer after sophomore year, I worked as a “temp” secretary. The “office” – a hot, dusty trailer. The job – taking phone messages for the boss while he walked around the construction site. Few calls came in, leaving hours each day to type up quotes on index cards, copied from my favorite books.

Job ended, college began again, and my cardboard file box kept filling with passages from Rilke, from Woolf, from E.E. Cummings (who capitalized his name, just not his poetry). And from so many others, sorted into categories that say what mattered to me at nineteen: Age/Youth, Aliveness, Aloneness, Awareness, Beauty, Commitment, Communication, Death and Dying, Difficulty/Despair, Education, Emotion/Intellect, Friendship/Relationship, Here and Now, Humanity, Individuality, Learning, Love, Meaning of Life, Self-knowledge, Sex, Society, Social awareness, Violence/War, Time.

Collecting sentences came years later. I’d copy them onto the pages of a small cloth journal which I titled “Sentences I think are extraordinary” (which could also be read, with imagined commas, as a declaration of sentiment: “Sentences, I think, are extraordinary”). The journal was set aside some time ago. I meant to return to it. Today I do, and find this: In his journal, Dr. Larch was demonstratively conservative with paper. He wrote in a small, cramped hand, on both sides of the pages, which were absolutely filled. Dr. Larch was not a man for leaving margins. – John Irving, The Cider House Rules, p. 18.

I see now what I loved about those sentences. No, what I mean is: This is what I love about them now, and what I imagine I loved then. Each one does so much. Dr. Larch is not just conservative with paper, but demonstratively so. A demonstration follows – his small, cramped hand. Hand tells of his era, for that’s what handwriting was once called. Cramped says his script is tight and compressed, but perhaps also says he also is. And the pages were not just filled, but absolutely filled, which leads us to the last sentence, not the simple summary it seems to be – Dr. Larch was not a man for leaving margins.  He’s not just saving paper here. There may be other kind of margins he also does not leave – margins of safety, perhaps. We don’t know yet. If we keep on reading, the sentences will let us know.

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In No Time

Surrounding me, here, is her childhood,  her old age,  her years dancing in the U.S.O. for General Patton’s army,  her post-war life on Hollywood stages and soundstages  (“I was a dancer – not a show girl”),  her cherished work with A.A.,  her long marriage to the man who became my new dad when I was in high school.  My mother seems to have saved everything.  Receipts and recipes, old envelopes, ribbons and rubber bands, every card I made her as a child, every letter I sent her as an adult.

I have brought home another box from the storage unit, the one I haven’t yet managed to close out, though she died a few years ago, peacefully in her sleep, spared the long endgame her Alzheimer’s could have entailed, as it had for her mother, my grandmother. And once again I am stunned by the scope of what still remains to sort.  All these filled file folders, these clippings, these photos, these who-knows-whats.  I spread them out and the old illusion takes hold:  I can do this in no time, can easily decide what to give away, what to throw away, what to keep.  Having conceived the categories,  I imagine the task complete.  Time to open another box, now that I know what I’ll do with this one.

My son, my daughter, a friend – each send me an email this week saying some version of “I thought I’d already told you this, then realized I’d only meant to.”   That’s what I mean about the boxes – imagining the doing, without actually doing;  moving on to the next thing before the first is finished. Ah, but our reach should exceed our grasp, as the poet Robert Browning said, or what’s a heaven for?  I believe that.  But there comes, too, a time to ground.

Some of my grandmother’s things also sit unsorted in that storage unit, along with some of my grandfather’s and my dad’s, and there’s the same intriguing tumble each time I lift a lid.  Too late to ask them why they saved so much,  but I think I know.  They had come through the Great Depression and a Second World War, and my grandparents had lived through the war before that as well.  Their kitchen drawers were stocked with bent nails and nubby pencils and bits of string that might come in handy, you never know.  But they never did, so now can go.  Yet most of what they saved was neither clutter nor junk nor stuff, but things of value to them – certificates, programs, letters, high school yearbooks, small ceramic figurines.  This was saving, not hoarding.  A memento is something kept as a reminder or a souvenir, though it once meant not only a reminder but a warning, as in the Latin memento mori (remember you must die).  They knew they would die, but they wanted to remember that they had lived.  And what they had loved along the way.  As I also want to do.

I sort through my own boxes these days just as steadily as I sort through theirs, not only to spare my family from having to do it someday, but to look again at the life I’ve lived so far.  And to save only those things that still matter.  My mementos, like theirs, have multiplied beyond reason over the years. The moment can’t know for sure what will matter later on.  But now it’s later on, and I know more about what matters.

I’m sure they meant to get around to the sorting someday.  But they didn’t, so now I do. There’s a Swedish proverb I keep in mind these days: What may be done at any time will be done at no time.  I think I may have learned this in time.

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