Living Life, Whole, Where You Find It

Note: Apologies for the day-late appearance of this post.

[Image: places in New Jersey I visited — or wish I could have — over the last week. The gold stars indicate places where I worked at one time or another; the regular place markers, green and blue, are those spots where I (green) and/or others critically important to me (blue) live(d). I can’t promise I didn’t miss somebody!]

From whiskey river:

“Carpe diem” doesn’t mean seize the day—it means something gentler and more sensible. “Carpe diem” means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be “cape diem,” if my school Latin serves. No R. Very different piece of advice.

What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day’s stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things… Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant—pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don’t freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it.

(Nicholson Baker [source])

…and:

34.
(excerpt)

Sometimes you are privileged with a glimpse of the other world,
when the light shines up from the west as the sun sets and dazzles
something wet. The world is just water and light, a slide show
through which your spirit glides.

(Fanny Howe [source])

…and:

You’ll notice that I haven’t talked about love. Or about happiness. I’ve talked about becoming—or remaining—the person who can be happy, a lot of the time, without thinking that being happy is what it’s all about. It’s not. It’s about becoming the largest, most inclusive, most responsive person you can be.

(Susan Sontag [source])

Not from whiskey river:

#90: Everyone’s experience of “home” may not be different, but surely everyone’s experience of first living there and much later returning must be. After all, “home” doesn’t connote only a place, that is, a single place. People grow and move away, carrying with them baggage full of experience from which they will eventually discard stuff and to which they will eventually add different stuff. The baggage itself eventually needs replacement.

The reality of a place in which we once lived itself ceases to exist, because what we call its “there”-ness is a moment-to-moment freight train, click-clacking past us as we sit on a bench on the platform. (Waiting, perhaps, for the caboose.) So returning home, in the sense of physically going back and experiencing it again, does not constitute re-experiencing the “it” we had and remember from years ago. There’s no re- prefixing this kind of turning. We experience the thing anew, wearing differently lensed glasses with each visit, each drive-by or flyover: trees once bursting with sap now lean on one another, bent and gnarled; unfamiliar voices echo within the walls, speaking of experiences we’ve never shared–sometimes in languages or accents unfamiliar to any previous tenants, including (especially including) ourselves; some fences, real and/or metaphorical, have been erected between neighbors and some have come down.

The there-ness of a place we’ve been–even a place where we’ve lived for years–is never actually there, a particular dot on a particular map, blown up or shrunken to a particular scale. Its there-ness is just an ever-changing wrapper of memory. Some of the wrapper may be transparent, but the transparency is that of a rainbow cellophane, seldom the same from moment to moment (let alone year to year); some, translucent, so we can catch glimpses only of blurry forms moving about behind the windows; and some, finally, opaque—only its outline vaguely conforming to the one we carry in our heads. “Going home,” finally, both comforts and unsettles, sometimes at the same moment. Maybe you’ll follow a familiar roadway (although that, too, has been repaved several times); maybe you’ll kid yourself that you recognize Intersection A (only to check a map later and realize that, nope, Intersection A was miles distant); the cute little infant next door has grown up in the shape of a resentful, somewhat dangerous adolescent. If you fall too easily into the pretty quicksand of nostalgia for a place — vs. your (real or imagined) experience of it — don’t count on someone to throw you a rope.

But in looking back on the experience of “going home,” you can choose. Focus on the unsettling differences. Marvel at them. Be rattled by them, if that’s where you find your comfort. Pretend the differences don’t exist, even. But don’t make the category mistake: in the end, home is not a good place or a bad place, anymore than Dorothy Gale from Kansas was a good or bad witch: she wasn’t a witch at all. In the end, there’s no place like home.

On the other hand, don’t kid yourself that home is no place at all, either.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)