OH I miss the Hudson, not far from where my consciousness was born, the great Hudson of my childhood, the Hudson my Mississippi, when I was a stripling lad on a Sea Scout canoe trip in the fall of that year, with the yellow-red leaves falling on the coursing water, the great trees hanging over the water by Saugerties and Coxsackie, and my stripling mind far away, so that unthinking I lost my balance and tumbled into the rushing cold water, to be rescued by Sea Scout hands, and then sat shivering on a riverbank, but I was Tom Sawyer and I was Huck Finn, and I was Injun Joe, the falling leaves blown about us in Indian autumn, and I now one of them, falling, fallen into loam of dark
BUT there are crystal moments in time, crystal moments in all our lives, fleeting past, whether it’s sunlight on a face or fog in a fir tree, a flash, a moment in time, yes, such as when I was three or four and playing hide-and-seek with my Aunt Emilie somewhere in France, and I crouched down behind a wicker sofa on a porch in sunlight, and Tante Emilie calling over and over Lu-Lu-Lulu où est-tu? or such as that moment in Paris yesterday or long ago when I met my Nadja, my new illusion to live by, looking like a normal person, a normal woman, but as soon as she opens her mouth you know she is special, and she has a laugh sometimes as if she were perpetually surprised by life and the absurdity of it. Imagine, good looking, speaking what she calls her Hollywood French. I imagine all the things I don’t know about her, and I know practically nothing, except that she reminded me of my dear aunt Emilie when I was a child in France with her in her cloche hat and her hair cut like Louise Brooks, and I do remember how often when I was with her alone or in company she would burst forth “Oh, je t’adore, je t’adore” and me only three or four years old and not realizing “I adore you” is what most everyone longs to hear all his or her life, yes, “Je t’adore” is enough for a lifetime of living and dying. And now we are separately staying in the Hotel Esmerelda on the Left Bank around a corner from Shakespeare & Co. bookstore and Nadja has gone off somewhere, who knows where, while I sit in the window of this little old hotel which seems to be listing a little like an old wooden ship at anchor, which of course it is, with no elevator and a narrow winding staircase and rooms not much wider than the French windows, and so here I am indulging in the real fantasy that I am still a young student in Paris, yes, and why not, won’t I come back another year and find Nadja still here, crying or laughing or talking brightly, and is she not a little like having a gentle wild animal in the house, and she could go off in wild laughter most any time, or talk crazily on any curious subject, and whoever was with her might say “Can’t you just make regular conversation?” She is like the flight of a bird on the wing, aware of the air about her, when I’m with her my time seems to stand still, time is on the wing with her, and I sometimes think we would never die as long as we were in sight of each other, or die together sometime tomorrow, and perhaps Proust has a name for this strange effect when les temps perdus are never lost, and those lost times just stay in a memory bank and accumulate interest or lose interest, like a bank account, and so it is with Nadja and me. She is an enfant du Paradis, a bird of paradise in the topmost balcony of the world, while I remain here on earth, and I am still a student at the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill, 1947, a little long in the whiskers for a student, though I remember a student with a long white beard at an advanced age coming into the Salle Richelieu to defend his thesis on Flaubert’s wife who wrote a woman friend complaining about her husband’s penis being too small, and our scholar claiming he had the documentation to prove it, and also stating that he knew for a fact that Madame Flaubert was “a hot tomato.” But this all a long way from the Hotel Esmerelda where it’s been raining lightly, but now the sun bursts through over the Ile de France in which Paris nestles like a grey dove, and Nadja has been doing laundry and now appears in a long white dress perhaps of calico, and floats out front to the little parc of Saint Julien-le-Pauvre in midafternoon, and there is a stillness in the air, as if the turning earth stood still, a breathlessness, as sun floods down upon the park benches where I now sit with Nadja, a stillness in the world enclosing us, with no need for words, for what is there to say anyway except that we are all here under the dreaming trees, faced only with ourselves.
AN ant crawls across a table, falls off of it, onto the cobblestones. A gardener in baggy pants shows up with a garden hose and attaches it, and magically water spouts up onto a wilted flower bed, and the hushed silence continues in this little enclave of life, as I imagine it is the silence of happiness, Nadja too engulfed in it. No shadows here, no chiaroscuro, just us in sunlight. Paris may explode, the world may explode, but not here, not here. Life goes on, and us with it, and there is no end of it, eternal creation, birthing and dying, dust into dust, as my fantasy dies, as this present fantasy fades, in this eternal moment, realizing that Nadja is in her own world, in her own illusion of the moment, and does not share my fantasy of here and now, and she was never my lover nor would ever be, and perhaps her consciousness was all chiaroscuro, all shadow, though with her you could never tell where shadows began or ended—a fleeting darkness sometime flashing across her face, as a shadow from a passing bird or a driven cloud, to vanish in an instant from her face Yet at other times she would be totally with you, as that late afternoon strolling through the Luxembourg Gardens, the late sun slanting through the high trees by the Fountain of the Medicis, as then we are sitting by the long pool in front of the classic statues that spout water into the still pool, and we sit still on the wrought-iron chairs by the still water, as small birds dip by, half in sun, half in shade, under the tall trees, and the water dappled with shadows of leaves, in the late afternoon of that year, and she exclaiming “Oh, I’m never going to leave here ever, I’m going to write everyone we’re staying forever!”
YES, forever, and Little Boy grown up dissident romantic or romantic dissident has his youthful vision of living forever, immortal as every youth is, believing his own special identity would never, could never, perish, yes, believing all that, in the face of the unrushing fate of the whole human race which scientists predict will very soon totally perish, in the Sixth Extinction of life on this earth.
AND that is why the cries of birds now are not cries of ecstasy but cries of despair.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Sterling Lord and Mauro Aprile Zanetti.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919. Founder of the famed City Lights Booksellers and Publishers, he is an activist, painter, and author of numerous works of poetry, prose, and drama. His A Coney Island of the Mind is one of the bestselling poetry books of all time. Among his many honors are the Los Angeles Times’s Robert Kirsch Award, the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Award, and the ACLU’s Chief Justice Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award. He is also a Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters. He lives in San Francisco, right above his bookstore.
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Little Boy Page 14
