{"id":124286,"date":"2018-04-16T09:00:19","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T13:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=124286"},"modified":"2018-04-16T12:07:49","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:07:49","slug":"i-have-wasted-my-life-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/16\/i-have-wasted-my-life-2\/","title":{"rendered":"I Have Wasted My Life"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Winslow Homer, Sunlight and Shadow<\/em>, 1872.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cI vant to be alone,\u201d my mother used to say distractedly, channeling Greta Garbo, when my brother and I were wrecking havoc at home. In fact, though Garbo\u2019s character said the line in the 1932 film Grand Hotel,<\/em> Garbo herself never said it. What she said, when faced with a scrum of journalists at a press conference a few years later, was \u201cI want to be let alone.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in our culture, the distinction between the two statements has been conflated. For us,\u00a0\u201cI vant to be alone\u201d means I want to be off the grid, no iPhone, no email, the 24-7 connectivity of our lot. I want to be let alone to be<\/em> alone. No wonder that, to a writer\u2014to readers, to all overwhelmed people now\u2014solitude suggests not loneliness but serenity, that kissing cousin of sanity. We speak of being alone to recharge our batteries\u2014even in our reach for solitude, we seem unable to unplug from the metaphor of our connectivity.<\/p>\n

Yet here\u2019s the greater paradox: writing, though performed alone, is also the only absolutely declarative, meaning-beset art form we have. Its purpose is to communicate. With others. More than a painter, much more than a composer, a writer can never \u201cbe alone.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

We are crowded on all sides with words\u2014in emails, text messages, news stories, late-night conversations. It is why people will blithely say to a writer who has spent six or eight years sweating out a work of fiction, You know, if I had the time, I\u2019d write a novel too. Not something a music lover is likely to tell a composer: If I had the time, I\u2019d write a symphony. We know we all own<\/em> language, this habit of naming, expressing, connecting the narrative dots.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d Samuel Beckett, Mr. Minimal, said of his work, \u201cin my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that\u2019s what I\u2019ve had to make the best of.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy life, since we must call it so.\u201d Beckett would really rather not have his three attributes gathered into anything as repellently autobiographical as \u201cmy life.\u201d Yet there it is\u2014a writer is composed, perhaps in equal parts, of silence, articulation, and isolation. That\u2019s the job. That\u2019s the life. Communicating with others from within the solitude of the mind.<\/p>\n

The longing for solitude is a deeply romantic passion. But then writing is a romantic thing to do, predicated on desire, urgency, and an ideal of human relation, rarely available in what we wistfully call real life. Maybe especially when we are not living alone, when our circumstances deny privacy, when we are swept up by the demands of family or a job\u2014whatever it is that outlaws solitude\u2014perhaps it is especially then<\/em> that we are most in love with what solitude seems to provide, what it promises. It promises freedom.<\/p>\n

I find myself back again with the first contemporary poem I loved, a poem whose simplicity overwhelmed me\u2014still overwhelms me. It\u2019s the first poem I taught to a group of students, when I was hardly older than they, in my hot little miniskirt and Frye boots, at the University of Iowa in 1968. I have never stopped loving this poem, but I may only have just begun to understand it. Maybe.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a simple poem. I have it by heart, as the phrase goes: James Wright\u2019s \u201cLying in a Hammock at William Duffy\u2019s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,\u201d which was originally published in\u00a0The Paris Review<\/em>\u2019s Summer-Fall 1961 issue<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Over my head I see the bronze butterfly
\nAsleep on the black trunk,
\nBlowing like a leaf in green shadow.
\nDown the ravine, behind the empty house,
\nThe cowbells follow one another
\nInto the distances of the afternoon.
\nTo my right,
\nIn a field of sunlight between two pines,
\nThe droppings of last year\u2019s horses
\nBlaze up like golden stones.
\nI lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
\nA chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
\nI have wasted my life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s it. That\u2019s all. That\u2019s the poem that has beguiled and vexed me all these years. It was only many years after my first reading that I discovered Wright\u2019s startling final line\u2014\u201cI have wasted my life\u201d\u2014was an homage to Rilke\u2019s poem \u201cArchaic Torso of Apollo.\u201d Rilke\u2019s poem is also built as a description\u2014in his case of a fragment of a Greek statue. It ends, similarly, with a final line that seems to have no logical or even associative connection with the preceding description. Rilke\u2019s is the stern \u201cYou must change your life.\u201d Wright knew Rilke\u2019s poem in the original German. He must have been dazzled by it.<\/p>\n

When, much later, I discovered the Rilke poem, it seemed to me that it had been influenced by Wright, not the other way around. Wright\u2019s poem had riveted me, describing a landscape I knew intimately, the landscape of my flyover state, a town barely an hour from my hometown. Just to see its name in a book of poetry thrilled me. Pine Island! In a poem! And then, years later, driving my husband, who was then in his final illness, going past Pine Island time and again on the freeway to the Mayo Clinic, that Lourdes we visited so faithfully, for a while a place of miracles.<\/p>\n

In my early readings, I thought the final line was a statement of defeat. Brave, if sad. I imagined the defeat was that he was just describing a butterfly, a wizened horse turd, a this, a that. I thought he was ashamed of his aimlessness and that he was valiantly articulating his failure.<\/p>\n

Some years later, when I read it again in the ambition of my own first poems, I decided that it wasn\u2019t a poem of failure. \u201cI have wasted my life\u201d is a cry of triumph\u2014I\u2019m lying here in this hammock doing nothing, and ha ha on you out there working your lives away. I thought he was thumbing his arty nose at all the worker bees out there, that he was proudly claiming to be a free spirit who doesn\u2019t labor. He was a vainglorious lily of the field. I have the nerve to waste my life.<\/p>\n

Much later still, very much later, with various betrayals and deaths and my own failures behind me and yet also, as ever, before me, I realized that Wright was<\/em> attesting to failure, but a very different failure than I had understood as a young poet.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how I\u2019ve come to understand this apparently simple poem (as if I can trust this to be my final take on it): Lying in the hammock, the poet is alone, empty-minded. That is, he is living in solitude, the solitude of his mind. The world in its homely detail\u2014sleeping butterfly, horse droppings\u2014enters this solitude that is his consciousness. He realizes this has never happened to him before\u2014he has never truly seen the world, its reality and detail. He is stunned to realize this. He has wasted his life precisely because he sees he has not wasted his life enough<\/em>. Or really at all until this moment. That was his mistake. He has not failed.<\/p>\n

He was acknowledging the waste of his life\u2014that is, of his mind. But not for the reason I had thought. Rather, that final line\u2014\u201cI have wasted my life\u201d\u2014is suffused with wonder, the wonder of revelation that his experience in the hammock has given him. He is finally <\/em>wasting his life. It\u2019s a conversion moment, I suppose. Not a smug ha ha but an exultant aha!<\/p>\n

He sees that this emptiness of self\u2014this alone\u2014is what makes a life worth living, a life worth writing. He has been rinsed of ambition, of pride in himself, rinsed of shame over his failures, emptied of his grudges. He has even let go of time, of history\u2014the sources of regret. When that sweet pain does leave you, when you are free, then only the realization remains. It happened, and it, not your ego, is your true self. Alone, outside time but paradoxically within the moment.<\/p>\n

There he is, the poet suspended in that most ephemeral piece of furniture, the hammock, swinging there in the eternity of the moment, and he is empty of himself at last. That\u2019s when the whole world surges in.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s wildly ordinary, this moment of horse dung and cowbells. And yet it\u2019s beautiful. My husband offered me this thought, in his last intelligence on the subject of the life of the mind, the two of us in the kitchen his final week, he frail but still fierce, watching me in dismay as I went about my manic multitasking to-do list life. He was holding the warm coffee mug I had handed him and said oddly, apropos of nothing (I thought),\u00a0\u201cYou must always keep a part of your mind separate.\u201d Said this to the back of my head as I rushed around the room, taken up with tasks. Something essential had been said\u2014that I understood. And later I reclaimed it like a lost jewel, held now to consider as I sat alone in that same kitchen: the poet\u2019s mind must be separate. It\u2019s a mind that achieves my mother\u2019s desire\u2014\u201cI vant to be alone.\u201d\u00a0<\/em>But to be alone in this way is not to be insular but to open finally, fully to the in-rushing reality of the world.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Patricia Hampl is the author, most recently, of <\/em>The Art of the Wasted Day<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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