The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  There it is again at the heart of life—the imagination, that old occasion of sin under the beechnut tree, leaves swishing above, body flat on planet earth, the mind aloft, refusing to behave, even if I was (and I was) a good girl, and also now, all these years later, as I was told in Llangollen, a nice lady.

  The imagination as the crucible of freedom. We are made to contend with life along that ragged seam of being. Consciousness, Montaigne is saying, will accommodate just about anything. It is our rightful business to think, to muse, to wonder—to describe—using this image-beset faculty of mind for the job. One vignette after another.

  Montaigne was perfectly positioned to display the power of the imagination, perched at the pivot of medieval magic, angling toward modern rationalism. “To me, magicians are poor authorities,” he says. “Nevertheless . . .” And on he goes to list charms and weirdnesses he’s heard of or witnessed himself that attest to the sovereignty of the imagination—flying monks, various “fabulous testimonies,” and a homely vignette of his own, his observation as exact as a lab researcher taking notes:

  Recently at my house a cat was seen watching a bird on a treetop, and, after they had locked gazes for some time, the bird let itself fall as if dead between the cat’s paws, either intoxicated by its own imagination or drawn by some attracting power of the cat.

  Montaigne is a great believer in thinking-makes-it-so, and tells of a woman who was informed, as a prank, that she was eating a pie made of cat meat. She believed—or too completely imagined—what she was told, seeing in horrified detail the kitty she had just scarfed down. She “fell into a violent stomach disorder and fever.” The result of this overactive imagination? “It was impossible to save her.” There’s the imagination for you.

  It was raining the night I first saw the Montaigne statue, and though it may seem I was seeking another of my literary shrines, in fact we—yes, you were on this trip too—we just happened upon it. We were running late, trying to locate a fish restaurant recommended by a friend who knows Paris. Dripping in his leafy bower by the university, gleaming from the wet—or maybe because I’d been reading him, living with his sinuous sentences in my head, and had no idea such a statue existed—this bronze Montaigne had something of the apparition about him. Like Whitman, another eccentric of the first-person voice, he was just loafing by the side of the road.

  Out with the iPhone. Snap snap. Got the shoe. Didn’t, couldn’t quite, get the face.

  You were patient, standing there in the dripping cold, holding the black umbrella over me as I got the shoe, tried for the face. Only now I see you were glad to pause in the rain, glad not to keep up the pace. It was the beginning of slowing down, the beginning of your bum ticker deciding things, the beat slowing, slower. Stopped, finally. But we didn’t think that then—or I didn’t. I thought you were being patient, something I could never be accused of—rushing, always rushing.

  Take as long as you need, you said. The beginning of slowness. Or the beginning of patience. These things creep up on a life, in the dark, in the rain. In our case, with the genial bronze man smiling indulgently from the hedgerow.

  * * *

  —

  For Montaigne it starts with death, his “meddling with writing.” Death occasions his decision to retire from his life as a courtier, a public life, to his cold tower, in order to see how he sees things (which is to say how he describes things).

  In swift remove, he lost his admired father, Pierre, five infant daughters, and a brother, absurdly, from a tennis ball to the head (sixteenth-century tennis balls were made of wood, which does take the bounce out of the game). All of these relations were gone before or soon after he retired to his château in Périgord. He was thirty-eight.

  But the searing, permanent heartbreak was the early death of his beloved friend Étienne de La Boétie, the great love of his life. He would have understood the Ladies: his great love was a friendship, not a liaison, though our age of course suggests he was “really” gay—probably, potentially, maybe, surely . . . Maybe he was, maybe he would have been. But he saw the relationship—and mourned it—as the perfect friendship, and he saw friendship as the perfect relation. Marriage he treats with a kind of measured contempt, a wearisome necessity (Marriage can be compared to a cage: birds outside it despair to enter, and birds within, to escape), his own wife (with whom he had six daughters) an afterthought. And his mother, barely mentioned, while his father was adored.

  It was the loss of the perfect friend he mourned, a loss that never would, never could be comforted. Such a friend could never be replaced—except perhaps by continuing the magical intercourse of shared thought by writing what amounted to letters, the Essais. “It was a melancholy humor, and consequently a humor very hostile to my natural disposition, produced by the gloom of solitude into which I had cast myself some years ago, that first put into my head this daydream of meddling with writing,” he says. Donald M. Frame, Montaigne’s great biographer and translator, believes that if La Boétie had lived—no essays. Even Montaigne believed that if he had “a strong friend to address,” he would have been “more successful” as a letter writer. In effect, we’re reading in the Essais something between a diary and a collection of letters—in any case, personal documents.

  At the Paris fish restaurant, which we finally located, you were making a pitch for a different trip—to Sweden—for Linnaeus, that eighteenth-century figure you kept encouraging me to pursue, the Swedish botanist whose system of binomial nomenclature (like the Ladies, he was a System person) earned him the title “father of modern taxonomy.” Surely a botanist was another daydreamer, a leisure man? A lot of peacefulness in botany. Think about it.

  I did. I liked this idea partly because my father, a romantic florist who rolled off the Latin binomial names of plants in the greenhouse, always tried to get the rest of us to do the same. Daisy? Why not have the pleasure of saying Bellis perennis? A rose is a rose is a rose, of course. But the daffodil? Let it luxuriate in its full Linnaean title—Narcissus sylvestris.

  Rousseau, who had no time for Montaigne, asked a friend to send a message to Linnaeus on his behalf: “Tell him I know no greater man on earth.”

  Goethe piled on about his brilliance as well: “With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza,” he wrote breathlessly, “I know no one among the no longer living who has influenced me more strongly!”

  It was an opinion Linnaeus shared: “No one,” he wrote of himself, “has been a greater Botanicus or Zoologist. No one has written more books, more correctly, more methodically, from his own experience. No one has more completely changed a whole science and initiated a new epoch. No one has become more of a household name throughout the world.” He also modeled for the new epoch the essential modern quality—a gift for public relations based on self-regard.

  Still, the idealization of the new epoch was perhaps the key to the praise others lavished on him. The idea of finding a system—or not finding one but constructing one—for all of creation was at the beating heart of the Enlightenment’s dawning romance with science. How thrilling not to be lost forever in wonder, that ancient veil cast over life’s mysteries. How amazing to discern a relation for it all, the connective tissue of creation.

  Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae and Species Plantarum formed a classification system, housekeeping for observed forms (zoological and botanical). That the system was not a key to internal structures and didn’t anticipate evolution (Linnaeus saw creation as static—his goal was to describe “what God had created” without the notion that this creation was an ongoing project—no “portraying passing” for him) did not stop his contemporaries from seeing his system as the work of genius.

  Biology has augmented and complicated the understanding of living organisms since his time, but Linnaeus’s naming system is still used today, slotting life in hierarchical order: domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species, the last two categories,
genus and species, giving us the name and family relation of a particular plant.

  Perhaps the great appeal—almost a sigh of relief from admirers like Goethe and Rousseau—came from the sense that Linnaeus was promoting science as a humane system, creating a universal language, and therefore making peace between science and philosophy (what we call “the humanities”). His taxonomy was not held tightfisted by gatekeeper specialists. The sexual identification system Linnaeus devised (based on number, size, and method of insertion of plant stamens and the female pistils) was open to anyone to use. Nor was it regional and limited. It was wondrously global in its reach.

  But the more I read about Linnaeus himself—the grandiosity, the marshaling of his ranks of students (whom he preferred to call “apostles”) in quasi-military uniforms, marching through Uppsala like a private militia, his mock Laplander costumes—the more I was drawn back to my modest monk and his pea plants in the Brno monastery garden. The garden was still my idea of Eden, the demilitarized zone of science where poetry—singing the Psalms—punctuated the lab work. I’m sorry—though you thought I should go there, and I said I would, I never went, after all, to Sweden. One of the things you never knew.

  * * *

  After all the shilly-shallying, the notetaking and reading, going here, going there, Montaigne plugged into my ear from the iPhone, before I was ready (or deserved?) to visit his . . . world, as I’d come to think of his tower, here it finally is, late April, and I’m driving with my English friend Annette in the passenger seat of the little rental car out of Charles de Gaulle, off at last to the château near Bordeaux.

  If two people are still friends after negotiating the Périphérique out of Paris during rush hour, one hunched over the wheel, the other bent to the autoroute map to get the direction—Left, left . . . no, straight!—this is a friendship for the ages. And no, we did not have Google Maps or cell phone apps to lead the way. We were cast upon the torrential waves of the superhighway until finally we were funneled out of the traffic tsunami, from one slightly saner road to another and still another one yet more untraveled until at last, already at dusk, we were on something marked with the mild brown signs indicating a scenic or cultural heritage road, narrow, tree-lined, becalmed.

  More than that—French. French as Sister Peronne Marie had taught us, the France of order and sane plaisir, three-hour lunches, the promise of wine and lavender and figs even if all that was a season in the future. It was blossom time, the landscape radiating youthful relish for the day, the meal, the moment.

  The road was not called the route de Montaigne, but was named for the greater personage of Périgord: the goose. The Route du Foie Gras—in some English-language guides the Route of the Fatty Liver, suggesting a disgruntled vegetarian in charge of translation.

  We didn’t make a beeline for Montaigne’s château. We seemed to be following his own meandering habits, content to get there a day later, make that two or three days later. What-ever. Or maybe we were fattening up on the spring glory of the region, like geese at their feed hoses, stopping our first night at an old château. Do I even know what, exactly, makes a building a château? It may have been just a rangy country house, not exactly tatty, but pleasantly worn around the edges. Nothing grand, but pleasantly ample. The place, we discovered, was often rented by local families for weddings, but this was a weekday and we had it to ourselves. The owners or perhaps the employees, almost off duty, cheerful and unrushed, hung around our table to talk—Annette really speaking French to them, I the patois I carried forward from high school.

  We sat in the shadowy dining room overlooking a field where horses occasionally passed by, heads down as if taken up with private considerations. A sideboard with dull silver plate, candelabras, a large chipped faience bowl mounded with green grapes, a few scissored leaves attached. Wine—of course, faded gold in cloudy goblets. Not Vlasta’s severe Moser cut glass, her mother’s fine crystal that had made its way through wars and the breakup of empire to sit in unlikely splendor on her panalak table. These were homey, frank vin ordinaire glasses, the rims rounded, the stems stout. Country glasses. We were offered more wine. Annette, using the delectable French idiom, nodded, smiled—Une larme, s’il vous plaît. Just a teardrop, please. But of course the glasses were filled to the top, the gold winking, night now covering the view.

  A slightly mad quality attended the place, where the old was still alive, still dying right in front of you—the banged-up candlesticks dating from who knows when, cheek by jowl with a plastic-sheeted portrait of Marilyn Monroe fixed to a back wall, right against the good bones of the stone. Candles, the rest of the wine, chicken unctuous in a bronzed sauce, pale shallots pillowed under the soft lacquer of the sauce, and sweet. Then some kind of nut liqueur in tiny shot glasses. Sipping, sighing. The first night.

  We stayed at other inns, some quite proud of themselves, one outfitted with an infinity pool, another with a stiffly tended garden, koi moving with exquisite idleness in the central lily pond. I still get email offers from one place, promising un bon séjour, urging Christmas, New Year’s, perhaps my birthday? But that first night in the drafty old country house we found almost by mistake, and we the only guests, the shadowy rooms waiting, like backstage sets, to be brought forward for next weekend’s wedding party, the off-duty horses unbridled till later in the week when they would be latched to the rickety bridal carriage—this was the sweetest place we stayed, the one that hasn’t faded away. Strange that the name is nowhere to be found in my notebook. As if it never really existed, concocted sheerly of desire and the frenzied exhaustion of getting off the Périphérique and onto a roadway dedicated to the silken livers of snowy geese. (They are happy—happy, madam—to be fed. Do not call it forced! They line up for the hose, they cannot wait!)

  This rather frazzled place is the one lodged in memory, though I have iPhone photos of the others, their color-coordinated lavender bedchambers, tender walls painted a rainy green, rouged-up interiors, fey settees with toile upholstery, and giant beribboned bundles of dried lavender in purple glass vases, design reminders that we were settled into a gentrified France profonde. But the pictures that persist are not on the iPhone but in the mind—that first night, the benign scruffiness of that nameless farmstead.

  This preference was not simply occasioned by the hominess of the whole enterprise. Or if it was just that, I took the hominess as an assurance that we weren’t being invited to congratulate ourselves on having located the upscale nostalgia of the restored and improved French country houses in the Luberon, farther south, of Peter Mayles and those who followed his well-polished dream in the 1990s real estate fever for le sud, a possessive love that changed forever the ancient habits of farm and pasture to gastrotourism. (Or saved it from the decay it had already entered? Depends on your source. As someone said, a developer is someone who wants to ruin a beloved landscape with a house; a preservationist is someone who already has a house there.)

  We could feel that first night—a different kind of vanity—that we had dropped off the pleasure trail of the Route du Foie Gras and tumbled into the France beloved of the writers who had “discovered” it before it was massively discovered and deeply touristed—Ford Madox Ford and Sybille Bedford, and later, after the war, the American poets. W. S. Merwin, who owned a little ruined patch of Provence as a young man who fell in love with the Troubadour poets. And my first favorite—James Wright with his poems about Minnesota and then the ones about Nîmes, the world of snowfields (my world) leading him to the improbable fields of lavender and thyme. And here I was in it too. Finally and for real. Well, not for real. But for a time. Maybe an ardent note-taker, but still, I was a tourist.

  I’d always imagined living in France. You teased me—no matter where we went, I was always checking real estate listings online, especially places in France. We could sell the house, we could move to France! Yes, I suppose, you would say, not rising to the bait. Sometimes when I got too annoying, you allowed
yourself to say, I thought you liked it here. I do, I’d say, I do, but . . .

  Once there was Google and Zillow, I was a lost cause. Find any châteaus for us? you’d ask, passing by my desk, the computer leaping from the Bouches-du-Rhône to Brittany, farmhouse to sea cottage. My expat life became a pure act of the imagination.

  I wasn’t thinking of Montaigne that first night on the way to his tower so much as of the life not lived—maybe only a midwesterner can sustain this geographic passion over a lifetime, the desire to be Elsewhere, even in the midst of a happy life. Our life. Tommy came to mind, the undergrad tromping through a Minnesota blizzard to confess forlornly that he had no life—he came from Fridley. That deepest midwestern sense of place, the yearning to escape. The homeboy Scott Fitzgerald got himself gone—and glad of it. Another of my literary heroes, Mavis Gallant. She abandoned the North American middle for the lonely loveliness of France. Think of her great expat stories. But she belonged to an earlier generation. The sorry hotels of her strays were out of a France W. S. Merwin and James Wright might have glimpsed, but that aura was more foreign to me even than the Provençal landscape.