The Journal Keeper

by Phyllis Theroux

  In my midforties, I went through a very painful love affair. Toward the end, when the phone never rang and the silence was like a sharp knife carving out the interior walls of my heart, I was sitting quietly in my own despair when I heard a voice. It wasn’t my voice. It wasn’t anybody else’s voice either. But it came from such a deep and Delphic place within my being that I did not question its authority: What is true cannot be taken from you. What is false will not remain. I reached for a scrap of paper and wrote it down.

  There have been very few times in my life when a voice this clear has spoken to me. Most mornings when I sit down with my journal, listening for a worthwhile thought to set down, I am the only source of the material. But every once in a while a deeper wisdom, trying to speak beneath the din, breaks through. Some days I am quiet enough to hear it. Other days, all I can hear is the soft scrape of my felt-tip pen as it makes its way across the page. But I have acquired the habit of listening—the way a servant listens for the sound of the bell—as if my life depended upon it.

  Ashland, Virginia

  2009

  * * *

  Living in a small town is like being in a play. I think of the people in Ashland as characters who wake up every morning in an ongoing story and position themselves onstage for another sixteen hours of walking, talking, and doing. Our scripts are mostly in our heads, although underlying the action is the question, “How will we make our mark upon the world today?” For the most part this is an illusion. It is the world that makes its mark upon us.

  * * *

  2000

  In my experience you can have ability without leisure, but ability only, and not creativeness. Real ideas come to me while relaxed and brooding, meditative, passive. Then the unexpected happens. An illumination, a combination of words, a revelation for which I had made no conscious preparation.

  —Bernard Berenson,Sunset and Twilight

  A MONDAY MORNING

  All the neighborhood children are back in school. I am surrounded by teachers, too—everything from a book I’m reading by art critic Bernard Berenson (who writes of lost leisure) to a new pair of secondhand lace curtains that redefine the light coming through my living room window.

  The difference between knowledge and illumination is the difference between electric light and sun. It is not only the range but the quality of the light upon a subject. Sitting in the living room this morning, I needed my lamp before the sun rose above the tree line. But now the living room is radiant with natural light, every surface polished and picked out, and my lamp is unnecessary. I reach up and turn it off.

  I am aware that these are the refined thoughts of a refined life, but I am also conscious of being deliberately apart from the homeless man holding up a sign for food on the Cary Street overpass as I stop for the light. He looks at me to see if I am looking at him to give him money. But I do not linger on his face, only brush over it. He sees a white woman in a white car, clean hands on a leather-wrapped steering wheel, sealed off by classical music playing on the radio. Who am I to say that holding up a sign asking for help isn’t real work?

  Today I spent almost a hundred dollars on books and music and am ashamed of the way I brushed past another beggar on the street, showing him empty hands as I made my way into a bookstore with Mozart and horn concertos on my mind. I needed them, I thought, to become deeper spiritually. Recently, I have “needed” a lot more: a new tape deck, air conditioning, a kitchen floor.

  Last night I took Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby off the shelf to reconnect with great writing. The amazing phrases that seem so simply made, like burning gardens, were there to remind me of what is possible. I have reread a lot of my own earlier writing, and I seem to be writing more simply now. That being said, I do not have the easy access to the fires of creativity I once had.

  This morning I took a walk around the streets of Ashland and collected trash. This is great training for the eye and mind. Dislodging a plastic bag from a bramble or emptying a beer can full of mud before putting it in my sack is like cleaning up an essay. The better it looks, the more motivated I am to continue the process.

  My house is like an essay. As I sit here in this wing chair, I notice the pillow that lies at the wrong angle, a lamp that should be a little closer to the edge of the table, a curtain not quite in alignment with the window frame. I am restless until I have made the adjustments, moved, turned, or pulled everything to where, from where I sit, they ought to be.

  Opening Gary Zukav’s The Seat of the Soul this morning, my eye fell upon these lines:

  As you face your deepest struggles, you reach for your highest goal…. This is the work of evolution. It is the work that you were born to do.

  IN CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA, FOR THE VIRGINIA FESTIVAL OF THE BOOK, WHERE I TOOK PART IN AN AUTHORS’ READING

  I am sitting in the Omni Hotel, a few tables away from Reynolds Price, who is in his wheelchair, eating breakfast with a companion. He gazes my way as I am spooning some yogurt into my mouth, and I wonder if he is mentally putting words to the sight of a woman eating yogurt, as I am doing the equivalent to him.

  Price spoke last night to a large crowd. “A writer tends to be hard-wired for language,” he said, recalling a boyhood spent sopping up the color and cadence of his family’s way of talking. He recounted the story of his aunt, who had run out of money and was being consoled by her sister. “They can’t get blood from a turnip,” she was told. “No, but they can put the turnip in jail,” she replied.

  In another part of his talk, he said, “We come down to a personal reality…. We’re born as people who love life or people who don’t…. You can die pretty fast if you put your mind to it.”

  My thoughts are interrupted by a waiter who finds out I’m a writer and wants to know how it works. “What’s involved?” he asks. “Do you write it yourself or get somebody to write it for you?” He tells me he has a friend, a golfing buddy, who wants to write a book, he’s not sure about what. As for himself, he’s not a reader except for the newspapers, but that’s not very satisfying. “Everything’s in the same style.” Recently he bought a book on sale at the local bookstore.

  “It’s called Nausea. I got it for a dollar.”

  “By Sartre?”

  “Yes. You know it?”

  “He’s pretty profound.”

  “That’s what I like. I want to feel like I’m getting something out of it.”

  During the afternoon, I had a cup of coffee with a young friend who worries about how to keep her marriage strong, saying that whenever she hears about a friend getting engaged she thinks, Oh, no—“even though we’re all right.”

  I reminisced about my own failed marriage and conceded that getting married again wasn’t on my agenda. Uppermost on my mind was how to be fruitful. “I’m sixty-one,” I told her, “and wondering how many more buds there are on the branch.”

  This morning I encountered this theme in a poem by George Herbert:

  And now in age I bud again,

  After so many deaths I live and write;

  I once more smell the dew and rain,

  And relish versing….

  What I realized from being with all those writers in Charlottesville was that I was with people who use their imaginations as easily and unself-consciously as other people use a towel. That was the thrill: to go to different authors’ readings and listen as men became women and women became men and writers got inside the hundred-year-old heads of Alamo survivors. This is no different from acting, and I wonder if I can take some new steps on a new stage. In many ways, I have taken no risks and made no changes for a long time, if ever. This is no way to live.

  The life of most writers without an independent income is full of risk and re-invention. I have supported myself, some years much better than others, in the usual way: writing books, magazine articles, and newspaper columns; teaching; editing; and working on a series of oral histories. Once, particularly short of funds, I took on a woman whose big dream was to have a st
ory accepted for the Little Golden Books series. She came to my house with a double-spaced manuscript about Tommy Turtle running away from home. I felt I’d sunk pretty low when I heard myself say, “Well, if you had Tommy Turtle get into a scrap with Bucky Beaver before he joins up with Dilly Duck, it might make the plot more interesting.” But when I wrote the journal entry about the Charlottesville festival, I wasn’t thinking about money but about how I had always stayed within a certain genre of writing, one in which I already knew I could excel: the personal essay. Perhaps it was possible to move in another direction. This was the first time I had seriously posed the question to myself on paper. Posing the question was the first step.

  Last night I went to Duncan Memorial Church to hear Pastor John Kinney preach. It was riveting, hilarious, challenging, and showy. The part that moved me most was the story he told about himself when he was a little boy and thought he was lost, only to feel his father’s hand fall upon his shoulder. “‘I was lost!’ said the boy. ‘No, you weren’t,’ said his father. ‘I had my eye on you the whole time. I knew where you were.’” Tears sprang to my eyes. Maybe the truth is that I feel lost more often than I want to admit.

  Sitting in a church full of white people listening to a black preacher, I was full of judgment. When it came time to sing a gospel hymn, several of the white women in the choir couldn’t clap in time. Their hands were like dead fish, flapping any old way to the music. It made me scornful. Not to be able to clap was pathetic. But then I realized that the urge to find fault was rooted in my own insecurity. I tried to see them with more loving eyes and realized that these were women wanting to be part of the music, trying to get it together. They had terrible timing but their faces were lit up, delighted to be part of something that had some life.

  There is something very wrong with my use of time. To walk into the house after being away twenty-four hours and immediately get pulled into the mail on the table, messages on my phone, and e-mail on my computer, while barely having time to say hello to Mother, who has been waiting all day for me to return, is out of kilter. I cannot be in real time without wondering what other people have done or said in virtual time. Before voice mail and the Internet, there was a decent interval between cause and effect; one was forced to wait patiently on the other side of the door until someone opened it. But now, with time and distance being reduced to a nanosecond, my ability to delay gratification is weakened.

  This morning, clearing away bamboo from the back part of the garden, I mused over the way you have to reverse the processes of mind and body as you get older. It is natural when young to want to be physically on the move all the time. The struggle is to sit still long enough to get the mind’s attention. When you get older, the process is reversed. The body must be kicked into motion against a growing inclination to rest awhile longer while the mind continues to move at breakneck speed.

  I sometimes pretend to be someone else of superior abilities in order to get something done. While cleaning my room, for example, I pretend to be my neighbor Mary Lou Brown, who is extremely meticulous and organized. It is a way of manipulating reality, of tricking myself into a higher level of performance. On the tennis court, I’ll sometimes pretend to be a recently recovered polio victim, which makes every stroke miraculous.

  But when I’m not pretending, I know there is a strictness about life that lurks just beneath the surface. When we do not obey life’s laws—in everything from love to digestion—that strictness surfaces. For months my stomach has bothered me with heartburn (what does it say about the developed world that the most popular over-the-counter pills are for heartburn and acid indigestion?), but until now I would not give up coffee. Today, having done so for less than a night, my stomach has responded with restored health.

  This morning my thoughts center upon what I perceive to be the rough justice of God working within each one of us. We are driven to deliver the truth inside us, no matter what we do to avoid or bury it. How to deliver it is the challenge. It is not just about using our reason although, like a diving board, we must use it to its limit, running to its very end. But then we must leap—like a spark—into the air. It is that spark that illuminates the understanding, makes the heat and the difference.

  Last night, meditating on the sentence Be still, and know that I am God, I thought that if I was still, truly still, for even a moment, I could probably step through the wall that divides the human from the divine consciousness.

  In April, I held a writing seminar at an inn on the north-coast town of Mendocino, California. The drive through the Anderson Valley to the ocean never fails to cleanse my eye.

  To get to Mendocino, you take 101 to Cloverdale and cut across the Anderson Valley, which is like driving through Steinbeck’s “pastures of heaven”: with bright green hills tender with new grass, sheep, and ribbons of water flowing down the banks that head toward the Navarro River. Then, finally, out to the open sea and our inn, full of cut flowers and decanters of sherry. Sitting on the inn’s porch, framed by two posts, I see the essence of Mendocino between them: pines on one side, eucalyptus trees on the other, and, floating like ivory trumpets in the meadow, the wild calla lilies, mixed with brambles and blackberry bushes that tumble down the cliff to the sea. In the background one hears the scrubbing noise of surf, a distant grinding of lumber trucks rounding the curve, cowbells clanging. I rejoice, I rejoice.

  After the seminar, I drive south to San Rafael to visit the Dominican convent campus where I went to high school. Whole rooms of the past open up as I drive down Grand Avenue. My nose remembers more than my eyes. The sharp oily smell of eucalyptus combines with afternoon dust from the hockey field in Forest Meadows. But my heart feels the difference between then and now. Where is my former French instructor, who was just married when she came to teach? My Latin teacher, Sister Gregory, is now senile in the convent infirmary. We are all slowly moving off the stage.

  At the new campus in San Anselmo, where I am a guest of the school for one night, I peek into classrooms that are full of little children, soft as the hills in springtime, with new skin, hair, and questions. I wish my grandchildren could go to school here.

  At mass in the school chapel this morning, a priest spoke about feeling lost, which again brought tears to my eyes. In the gospel, Jesus is chiding his disciples who want him to show them the Father. He says, “After all this time, you do not know that to be with me is to be with the Father?” One of the women in the chapel asked for prayers for a forgotten playmate of mine who used to live near me in San Francisco. She was a pale, pretty girl with large eyes, who grew up to have four children and four husbands, plus several bouts with cancer.

  After dinner I walked back to the campus room where I was spending the night. The fog had rolled over the top of the mountain and hung, like a thick white quilt, halfway down the side. If I ever live here I will never get used to that kind of beauty.

  Mother’s view of most people’s lives is that they are caught in an eternal round of rituals that keep them from facing the truth or experiencing life at first hand. We are pulled along by an endless progression of holidays, showers, birthdays, funerals, and special prepackaged days like Mother’s Day, from one year to the next. “They can’t get separate from”—she crooks her two index fingers in the shape of a set of quotation marks—“the tribe.”

  I woke this morning with two words in my head, “Go deeper.” Reading aloud to Mother from George Crane’s book Bones of the Master, helps me know how. Crane is like me, too tied to words, too dependent upon thought. “Here I am,” he writes, as he follows behind the old monk, Tsung Tsai, in a walking meditation, “fooling myself with the search for words that would explain everything.”

  He says to Tsung Tsai, “The world is so difficult to give up.”

  Tsung Tsai nods. “Attachment very strong. Don’t worry. When you go away, just come back.”

  Attachment is so easily confused in my mind with love, which gives attachment legitimacy. Yet I can see the difference in o
ther, more developed persons, who project a kind of compassionate awareness and appreciation of those they love but don’t leave fingerprints all over them.

  A few days ago, at Cross Brothers Market, I was at the checkout counter when an elderly large-bellied white man in overalls and suspenders, a farmer type, came into the store with a five-year-old child who looked as if she was the product of black and white parents. She had golden skin and kinky brown hair. They seemed easy with each other, the way grandchildren and grandparents should be, and as they rounded the corner I heard him say to her softly, “Now, let’s see about that ice cream.” One should always expect the unexpected.

  Living in a small town is like being in a play. I think of the people in Ashland as characters who wake up every morning in an ongoing story and position themselves onstage for another sixteen hours of walking, talking, and doing. Our scripts are mostly in our heads, although underlying the action is the question, “How will we make our mark upon the world today?” For the most part this is an illusion. It is the world that makes its mark upon us.

  Tonight, walking through the dark streets after visiting with Susan and Woody Tucker (Woody’s mother had just died), I was aware of being a small strand in the fabric that makes the town hold together better. It is not exciting work but it is something to be grateful for—knowing that sitting with someone at their kitchen table, talking about their mother, makes a difference,