The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  You do see stars. Or bits of white, spinning, that you could take for stars.

  Then, in my bell-ringing, star-shooting brain, I remembered—how had I forgotten?—that Montaigne had whacked his head too, colliding with another rider, momentarily knocked unconscious, slammed off his horse as he rode this wooded property. He was taken for dead as his men carried him, insensible, back to the château. It is one of the few recognizably memoiristic vignettes in the Essais, a scrupulous reconstruction of a pivotal episode, a bit of story in the midst of all his pages of musing, pondering, reflecting, wondering—what used to be called philosophizing.

  He started his project in this room in imitation of the ancients, his beloved (and much memorized) classical writers, especially the Stoics. His belief—the title of an early essay—was nothing less than that “To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,” life’s essential lesson. The early essays, after his “retirement” to the tower, after Étienne de La Boétie’s death, after his own little death when he was knocked off his horse, the death from which he returned—all these early essays are about how to die. Dying with honor. Remember that? The airless airplane, the delivery room nurse stroking my hand, you holding the other: You aren’t dying, you’re having a panic attack. That’s how Montaigne started—with death and its approach.

  Why did he honor this crashing moment, so uncharacteristically, with narrative? Well, it was a near-death experience. But even more, it was that most literary of experiences—unbiddable, decisive—the turn that allowed him to pierce to the core of the imagination, perhaps for the first time. In being knocked off his horse, he experienced the doubleness necessary to empower personally voiced writing. He experienced the fall—but he also observed the fall. Both. In separate but related strands of consciousness he experienced and he saw the experience.

  The shock of this double register galvanized him to note the parallels of experience and observation. It was a kind of conversion moment. (No wonder that most notorious conversion—Saint Paul’s—is represented as a fall from his horse. Neither the fall nor the horse is mentioned in the Bible, but this is the standard image of his change of heart, as if the violence of being knocked down from a height were the only way to express it adequately. In a sense, Paul’s fall inaugurates the Christian era, a tumble from a smooth power ride, a thump out of the tribal self into a vision of a united world.)

  You get knocked off balance, off your assumptions. You see stars. Or what you take for stars—because anything this overwhelming catapults you into poetry, into metaphor. Your life changes, is changed. Even in our homely cliché we speak of being struck by this or that. The point is you see—a fresh kind of seeing that feels accurate because the self is not, for once, a subject, not a weight you’re lugging around, a slave to experience it must either endure or enjoy. This self is revealed as an instrument that can render, if not “reality,” then the experience of reality. The poetry of experience fastens to the reportage of the world.

  To express experience accurately you must, paradoxically, be knocked out of yourself—knocked out of the inevitable narcissism and egotism that is our narrative lot. The smallness of the self. This quicksilver experience has been given, by literature and psychology, the lackluster label detachment. Or as Keats called it, also fastening on an unwieldy phrase, Negative Capability. By which he meant in a letter to his brother that one must be “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” And how is that done? By acquiescing to the leisure that apparently is so elusive, but is the key to “the life of the mind.” It is impossible to corral this experience in a name, a term, but once felt, there is nothing—not even love—to compare.

  Montaigne’s younger brother had been hit on the head too—that tennis ball to the temple. He didn’t experience (so far as we know) detachment. He died of the blow. So perhaps Montaigne had an astonished, even slightly grateful/guilty sense of dumb luck in surviving his fall because, unlike his brother, he “came to.” But surely he registered as well—his description of the experience proves this—the significance of his head wound: it gave him a new, enlarged consciousness. In his Essais he found the purpose of this self: to see and then to say.

  The personal essay was born of a smack upside the head.

  It is a cruel irony (is there any other kind?) that Montaigne’s purposely evasive word for his writings—essais—has become the dread-dreary term associated with freshman English, the term paper, the school “theme.” Is cigarette smoking harmful to your health? Discuss. Welcome back to school, children—describe your summer vacation. And until quite recently try to tell an editor who has professed to admire your novel that you have “a book of essays” in the drawer. It was long the genre that dared not speak its name in the literary marketplace.

  Not Montaigne’s fault. His book was an immediate best seller. He thought he had liberated writing (or at least himself) from literary formality, to be wild, untamed, eccentric, the last thing we think of now when we hear the word “essay,” that domesticated homework pet. He could just as easily have called his pieces his What-evers. His use of the word essais was meant to be just that offhand and undefined. What he had in mind in his attempt (that word again—attempt, try, essai) was to renew the springs of the first-person voice bounding across the field of what we keep calling, against our uncertainty, reality. But “reality” and individual experience are exactly what smack together (in the head, then on the page) in the essay. The personal and the public find perfect register—for the length of the thing, the length of the try.

  Americans in particular love the first-person voice. It’s no coincidence that our greatest poem is “Song of Myself.” We also seem to favor first-person narrators for our classic novels—Call me Ishmael . . . You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter . . . And Fitzgerald, of course—After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home . . .

  Or maybe we don’t “love” the personal voice—we just can’t help trusting it. It feels authentic to us, a people given the charge in our founding document to pursue happiness, that individual enterprise. It may be our greatest fiction—to believe the personal voice is more “authentic” than other narrative modes. We’ll take it, most of the time, over “omniscience.” Not only because we are a notoriously self-regarding people, but because the first-person voice opens the narrative door to speculation and reflection. Not to knowing, but to wondering. Perhaps we don’t just want a story. We want to know how it feels, how it seems. We want the story of thinking. How much of Moby Dick is “story,” and how much a vast tract, an ocean of essay, waves and swells of speculation attached to the adventure tale of the great white whale?

  This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me—another poetic parent of the personal voice, speaking in her sidelong way (Tell the truth, but tell it slant).

  Famously, rather coquettishly, Dickinson also said, I’m nobody—who are you? That apparent self-revelation (really a self-screening) and its waggish question display the economy shared by the personal voice in lyric poetry and the personal essay (two forms up to the same business). Of course you’re nobody (so am I). But that fragile voice reveals more than a self. It holds the mirror up—not to itself but to the world.

  The essay is a solo dance, a private pirouette, its glowing footstep emerging onto the public street, as we saw it that rainy night across from the Sorbonne, you holding the black umbrella over me as I snapped the iPhone, while you took shallow breaths, telling me to take all the time I needed.

  * * *

  To Stay

  If I neglect to take my flashlight up to the monastery chapel for Vespers, I will regret it later when, sloshing blindly throu
gh puddles left in the rutted dirt road by the recent downpours, I stumble back in the dark to my—hermitage. Hard not to stumble over the word rising like a medieval hiccup in the middle of my smoothly ticking postmodern life.

  A note I’ve just found in an old journal from a weeklong retreat I took several years ago.

  Unlike Montaigne’s tower, there’s no private chapel in my study at home. Home. The weeklong retreat interrupted my own life “down there,” as I thought of home. Or thought of you—you were still here. Or there, waving from the porch as I streaked off, the dog by your side.

  I was on a mountain in California, thinking my thoughts—or rather, trying not to think them for once. I was living not simply “away,” in a geographic sense, but out of time, out of modernity, in a monastery over the great western coast. Though I’d come halfway across the country from Minnesota, I wasn’t really traveling. I’d come here to stay put.

  Meanwhile, the world revved along down there, and inside me too—so many choices all jumbled together. We have chosen a problematical name for ourselves: we are no longer souls as we once were, not even citizens; we’re all consumers now, grasping all the stuff every which way. Only connect, E. M. Forster (who was a modernist) instructed. A few generations of only connecting, and here we are, grabbing and stuffing. Order isn’t our thing. We aren’t the Ladies, adhering to a careful System. We aren’t Mendel, cycling through the Holy Hours, tending generations of edible peas, season to season. We definitely aren’t Montaigne, retreating to his château. But still, that was the idea of the week. Retreat.

  What a strange fin de siècle we were passing through when I went there, fearful, terrorized, badly shaken the second year of the new millennium. Montaigne retreated to his tower in his perilous times. But for us the word tower has an ominous meaning. The Towers came down.

  Strangely, after all this time of being a country—a “great” country—Americans still prefer the idea of a future to the idea of history. We resist the limitations of history, its overwhelming weight, the denial of self-determination. We’re in charge, aren’t we? “The only superpower left,” we said for that brief entre deux guerres period from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the Twin Towers. The vanity of imperial glitter rubs off on us, a gold dust the world longs for and resents. We’ve even elected a leader with a fixation on gold and gilt. We can’t help preening: we’ve created ourselves. We’re nobody’s memory.

  In a way, the idea of the future is our history. The filmy future is a can-do place, our natural habitat. Whereas the past is distressingly complete, full of our absence. We seem to know that if you take history too seriously, you’ll never escape it. In place of national memory we have substituted the only other possible story form, the dream. And the essential thing required of the American dream has always been that it must remain a dream, vivid, tantalizingly beyond reach. Just the dreaming of it—which costs nothing, absolutely nothing except every cent of our imaginative attention—inflates the soul. Fills it, rather than fulfills it.

  We wish to be free—whatever that means—and we know that memory, personal or civic, does not promote freedom. Gustaf Sobin felt he had to leave America to hold a bit of Neolithic bone, to find human memory—that is, history. Memory tethers.

  * * *

  —

  I was living—a week, almost two, tourist time again—in a niche of memory. Cultural, not personal, memory. It was Lent, and I had come to California on retreat. Was given a hermitage, a small trailer. Prefab, wood paneled, tidy. A cell, as the monks call their own hexagonal hermitages that surround the chapel farther up the steep hill. The idea is not prison cell, but honeybee cell. A hive busy with the opus Dei, the life of prayer.

  For those days I was following a way of life, balanced on a pattern of worship trailing back to Saint Benedict and his sixth-century Rule for monasteries. And still further back, into the Syrian desert where the solitary weirdos starved and prayed themselves out of history their own mystic way. Benedict’s Rule drew all that eccentric urgency into the social embrace. Into civic life, and finally into history. He took the savage hermitage of the Levant and trained it into the European monastery. Made a center out of the raw margin of the early desert recluses. The convent, after all, says frankly what it is: a convention, part of the social compact that claims order as a minion of tradition.

  The monastic day in California in the early twenty-first century, like the monastic day at Monte Cassino early in the sixth century, is poised on a formal cycle of prayers that revolves with the seasons, the same Office of Hours Gregor Mendel shaped his life around. A system still rolling along. It divides (or connects) the day (and night) by a series of communal prayer liturgies. This day, like all days, is a memory of the day that preceded. The day is a habit, the hours reinscribed as ritual. The days softly folded into seasons, each with meaning, feast and fast, sorrow, jubilation.

  Memory, habit, ritual: those qualities that do not perhaps sustain “life” (which is elemental, fiercely chaotic), but a way of life, bound to time with the silken ties of—what else?—words. The West murmurs, trying to locate itself; the East breathes, trying to lose itself. (The Buddhists are down the coast highway at Tassajara, meditating silently, eating intelligently.)

  A simplistic distinction, not entirely accurate. After all, the heart of Western contemplative life is silence, and the East, in at least one central practice, chews the word, the mantra. Still, Christianity is undeniably a wordy religion. Lectio divina, sacred reading, the ancient practice laid down by the early patristic writers, is alive still today; it is part of the daily routine here.

  Augustine, whose Confessions I’ve brought along, is the most passionate exemplar of this practice, not simply one of the West’s great writers, but its greatest reader. The year is 397, and he is composing the West’s first autobiography in North Africa, creating the genre that lies at the core of Western consciousness, substituting in place of the ancient idea of the story, the modern literary idea of a life. The omniscient authority of the tale told around the campfire turns to ash in the burning cry of the first-person voice.

  Augustine is, like every memoirist who follows him, hot with his subject. He’s inflamed with the account of his fascinatingly bad life turned mysteriously good. But he only gives this story the first nine of the thirteen books of his Confessions. Then, without explanation or apology, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the work glides smoothly into an extended meditation—call it a long essay—on the book of Genesis, as if this too were “his life.”

  In fact, the movement from his life to his reading isn’t smooth—it’s ablaze too. The narrative becomes more, not less, urgent. His story, for Augustine, is only part of the story. There is a clear logic dictating the form of the Confessions that unites the account of his life with his reading of Genesis, though this is not a logic we moderns see as readily as his late-fourth-century readers would have.

  Having constructed himself in the first nine books of the Confessions, Augustine rushes on to investigate how God created the universe—how God, that is, created him. And all of us, all of this. Reading, therefore, is concentrated life, not a pastiche of life or an alternative to life. The soul, pondering, is experience. Augustine, great-grandfather of Montaigne, his autobiography striving toward the essay, poses his questions, wonders—meddles with writing.

  Lectio is not “reading” as we might think of it. It is for Augustine, as it was for Ambrose his teacher, and for these California monks in their twenty-first-century cells, an acute form of listening. The method is reading—words on paper. But the endeavor is undertaken as a relationship, one filled with the pathos of the West: the individual, alone in a room, puts finger to page, following the Word, and attempts to touch the elusive Lord last seen scurrying down the rabbit hole of creation. In the beginning God created . . .

  Augustine, grappling with Genesis in his study, is more heated than Augustine stru
ggling famously with “the flesh.” He invents autobiography not to reveal his memory of his life, but to plumb the memory of God’s creative act.

  “My mind burns to solve this complicated enigma,” he says with an essayist’s anguish more intense than anything in his revelations about his own history. He understands his life as a model of the very creation that is beyond him—and in him. He writes and writes, reads and reads his way through this double conundrum, the mystery of his own biography and the mystery of creation.

  He makes the central, paradoxical discovery of autobiography: memory is not in the service of nostalgia. It is the future that commands its presence. It is not a reminiscence, but a quest.

  How bizarrely truncated the modern notion of “seeking a self” would seem to Augustine. Autobiography, for him, does not seek a self, not even for its own “salvation.” For him, the memory work of autobiography uses the self as the right instrument to seek meaning. That is, to seek God, a.k.a. Ultimate Mystery, the One who, when asked to give his name, says, I Am That I Am.

  Augustine takes this a step further. On the first page of the Confessions he poses a problem that has a familiar modern ring: “It would seem clear that no one can call upon Thee without knowing Thee.” There is, in other words, the problem of God’s notorious absence. Augustine takes the next step west; he seeks his faith with his doubt: “May it be that a man must implore Thee before he can know Thee?” The assumption here is that faith is not to be confused with certainty; the only thing people can really count on is longing and the occult directives of desire. So, Augustine wonders, does that mean prayer must come before faith? Illogical as it is, perhaps not-knowing is the first condition of prayer, rather than its negation. Can that be? He finds his working answer in scripture: “How shall they call on Him in Whom they have not believed? . . . they shall praise the Lord that seek Him.”