The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  Praise, he decides, antedates certainty—as well as faith. Longing, not “belief,” is the core of self that unfurls its song, the instinct to cry out. Poetry.

  This is where the Psalms come in. They are praise. More: they are relation, full of the intensity of intimacy, rage, petulance, and joy, the sheer delight and exasperation of close encounter. This is the spectrum of all emotion, all life. The Psalmist reaches with his lyric claw to fetch it all in words.

  Words, words, words. They circle and spin around Western spiritual practice. They abide. They even sustain a way of life—this monastic one—careening down the centuries, creating families (the Benedictines, the Franciscans, the Carmelites, and others) with unbroken lineages longer than any royal house in Europe. The pattern of prayer, handed down generation to generation, has sustained this extraordinary lifeline. Words have proven to be more protean than blood.

  The monastic life of the West cleaves to the Psalms, claiming the ancient Jewish poetry as its real heart, more central to its day than the New Testament or the sacraments. The Psalms keep this life going—the verbal engine running into the deepest recess of Christian social life, and beyond that back into the source of silence, the desert of the early hermits. The idea here in this American monastery, based on a tenth-century reformation of the earlier Benedictine model, is to wed both traditions—the social monastery and the solitary hermitage, city and desert, public and private. It is a way of life based on a historical pattern.

  Therefore, this life might be understood as a living memory. It is also a life lived, literally, within poetry. And as it happens, the name of this prefab hermitage where I have been lodged is Logos. The Word. The word made home. A week in the word.

  * * *

  —

  Against one wall, the single bed. I make it quickly like a good novice first thing every morning, pulling the dorm-room spread square. Suitcase stowed beneath—I’m here long enough to want to obscure the truth: I’m a visitor, passing through. I’ve never liked being a traveler: I take up residence. Found us a château yet? you’d say as I scrolled through real estate listings for the south of France. “I’m going home,” I say instinctively, returning to my hotel the first day in a foreign city. So, here: Logos is home.

  Also a round table (eat, read, write, prop elbows on). Shelves niched in next to the tiny open closet space where I’ve installed my books, what I could lug on the plane: Montaigne of course. Also a new novel by someone that someone else said was good (not opened); poems I have long loved—James Wright, W. S. Merwin; Augustine with his bookmark; Dawson’s Religion and the Rise of Western Culture; a dictionary that didn’t have the only word I’ve looked up so far. And Thich Nhat Hanh with yet another volume attempting to calm us westerners down, out of ourselves: breathe, feel, exhale—there. And like everybody on a desert island, the Bible (the New Jerusalem version), whether I’ll read it or not.

  A rudimentary kitchen runs along another wall, tiny bathroom beyond that, the only other room. And two windows, one to nowhere, hugged by two crowded eucalyptus trees and the vinca-covered curve of the steep eroded dirt road I climb to the chapel. The other window, the window that counts, gives onto . . . paradise. The western rind of America peels off far below into the extravagant white curl of Big Sur. The slant of the Santa Lucia range, where we are perched, cuts off the view of the coast highway, but the Pacific, blue as steel (it is overcast) or ultramarine (on sunny days), appears to be cantilevered below us, a blue platform leading to the end of the world. Sometimes, roughed up by wind and whitecaps, the ocean loses this quality of being architecture; it becomes expensive fabric, shimmering, silvered. Then, simply, what it is: the vast pool, brimming to the horizon.

  This is where I came. There was no crisis. No, at the moment, heartache or career impasse. You were still there, still in place, “holding the fort,” you said, waving me off on yet another trip. No dark night except the usual ones. Doesn’t everyone wake up maybe two nights a week, mind gunning, palms sweating? In the eyes-open misery of night, sensation gets mashed to a paste of meaninglessness—life’s or one’s own. No anguish beyond that to report. Every so often I just do this: go on retreat.

  This is not uncommon in our supposedly secular age. Meditation, massage, monasteries, spas—the postmodern stomach, if not its soul, knows it needs purging. Such places are popular, booked months in advance. Down the coast the Buddhists were meditating, stemming herbs thoughtfully. Esalen was nearby too, and the place where Henry Miller discovered the hot tub. I could have gone to the Buddhists, cleansed in the silence, approached the big Empty that is the great source. That, after all, is my God.

  But I came here, to follow the Christian monastic day laid out like a garden plot by Benedict at the close of the Roman era. I’m Western, I like my silence sung.

  The days were silent. The only words were the chanted ones in the chapel, unless I called home. My thin voice sounded odd, insubstantial. When I called, you recited all the messages from my office answering machine. I asked if you were okay. You were. You? Me too, I’m okay. I love you. Me too—I love you. Touching base. The telephone receiver clicked back into its cradle, and the mirage of news and endearments melted. It didn’t disappear exactly—I left the telephone room, a little booth by the monastery bookstore, smiling, your voice in my ear.

  It’s just that conversation, in that place (that vacuum) became a bare tissue of meaning, a funny human foible. The midday bell was ringing, and there was something I was trying to remember.

  * * *

  —

  That’s wrong. I wasn’t trying “to remember” something. More like this: I was being remembered. Being remembered into a memory—beyond history to the inchoate, still intense trace of feeling that first laid down this pattern.

  The memory that puts all personal memory in the shade. Praying or chanting the Psalms draws me out of whatever I might be thinking or remembering (for so much thinking is remembering, revisiting, rehearsing).

  The first morning bell rings at 5:30. I walked up to the chapel in the dead-of-night dark for Vigils, the first round of daily prayers. The chapel is stark, perhaps to some eyes severe. To me, though, the calm of invitation. I bow, as each of the monks does when he enters, toward the dark sanctuary where a candle burns. The honey-colored wood chairs and benches, ranked on two sides, face each other. They form two barely curved lines, two choirs deftly passing the ball of chant back and forth across the arched room as, somewhere beyond us, the sun rises and the world begins to exist again.

  * * *

  —

  How it was those days: my mind wanders. There are the monks, uniformed into similarity by their cream-colored robes, and yet I manage to wonder about them. Is that one in the back gay? The one with the clipped accent next to me—maybe from Boston? The one on his left looks like a banker, could have been a CEO, why not? The guy across looks like a truck driver. On and on it goes, my skittery mind. Meanwhile, the Psalms keep rolling. A line snags—More than the watchman for daybreak, my whole being hopes in the Lord—and I am pulled along.

  It’s also boring. What happens in the chapel partakes of tedium. It must. The patterns repeat and return. Every four weeks the entire book of Psalms, all 150 poems, is chanted. And then begun again, and again, and again. Sing to the Lord a new song, we have been saying since David was king. This new song rolls from the rise of monotheism, unbroken, across the first millennium, through the second, now the third, the lapidary waves of chant polishing the shore of history. There are men here—there are men and women in monasteries all over the world—repeating this pattern in antiphonal choirs, softly lobbing this same language back and forth to each other. What is this invisible globe they are passing across the space?

  Worship. But what is worship? It is the practice of the fiercest possible attention. And here, new millennium, the ancient globe of polished words, rubbed by a million voices down the centuries, is the filmy glas
s of memory. Memory understood not as individual story, not as private fragment clutched to the heart, trusted only to the secret page. Even in the midst of high emotion, the rants and effusions that characterize the Psalmist’s wild compass, there is a curious nonpsychological quality to the voice. This is the voice of inner experience. It has no mother, no father. Or it borrows the human family as its one true relation. These words express the memory of the world’s longing. Desire so elemental that its shape can only be glimpsed in the incorruptible storehouse of poetic image—he sends ice crystals like bread crumbs, and who can withstand that cold? Our days pass by like grass, our prime like a flower in bloom. A wind comes, the flower goes . . .

  * * *

  —

  Paging through a picture book of Christian and Buddhist monasteries in the bookstore, stopped by this cutline accompanying a photograph of a beautiful Buddhist monastery, a remark by a dogen: “The only truth is we are here now.” The physical beauty of the Buddhist place is eloquent, revealing the formal attentiveness of a supreme aesthetic: mindfulness. The human at its best. The food is famous there.

  They are living their profound injunction, honoring the fleet moment, and the smallest life: Buddhist retreatants are asked not to kill the black flies that torment them. Here, when I told the monk at the bookstore that ants were streaming all over the kitchen counter of Logos, he handed me an aerosol canister of Raid, and I was glad. I sprayed, mopped, discarded the little poppyseed carcasses. Sat back satisfied, turning again to Montaigne and the mind of the West, figuring, figuring. The sweetish spume of bug spray hung in the air for a day.

  The bug spray has to stop, we know that. Contemplative nuns have told me that without the introduction of Buddhist meditation practice into their own lives, they wouldn’t be in the monastery anymore. “It’s thanks to Buddhism that I’m a Catholic,” one of them said. I have never visited an American Christian monastery that did not have Buddhist meditation mats and pillows somewhere in the chapel. The light touch of the missionary work of the East, the absence of cultural imperialism, the poetry of its gestures: the bell is never “struck,” never “hit.” In the Buddhist monastery, it is invited to sound.

  But still this handing down of words, this Western practice I would not wish myself out of. The only truth is we are here now. I don’t believe we are only here now. How could I, transfixed by memory as I am, believing in the surge of these particular words down the channel of the centuries?

  Montaigne in his cold tower: I don’t portray being, I portray passing. Or the Psalmist’s way of saying that: I will ponder the story of your wonders.

  * * *

  —

  We enter the dark sanctuary, bow to the flame, assemble in the honey-colored chairs again, two halves of the human choir. Some mornings at Vigils, before first light, it feels strangely as if our little band—fifteen monks, a handful of retreatants—are legion. The two facing choir lines curve slightly, two horizon lines, the bare sketch of a sphere, the world coming into being.

  We greet first light, we enter dark night. It is all very old, a memory of a memory. And it is new as only the day can be new, over and over. The day is a paradox, and we enter it possessed by time’s tricky spirit, history and the present instant sublimely transposed.

  We are here now, the East is chanting from its side of the monastery.

  And so for now, the West chants in response, the antiphon rising as it has all these centuries, out of the ancient memory we inhabit together, Sing a new song, sing a new song. . . .

  * * *

  Alone in a room with words—that’s how I’ve thought of Montaigne in his tower. How I’ve always thought of writing—anyone writing. Solitude is not only “at the heart” of writing. It is the heart. These days, months, staring at the screen, notebooks with their crabbed lines—this meddling with writing. A person needs to be alone to do this thing—even if Grace Paley infuriatingly said that she wrote just fine on the train, going home to the Village after teaching a full load at Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville.

  But then there may be no more solitary location in America than a New York subway—take a look at the faces of those commuters, their heads bent to their open books like monks at their breviaries, little glowing screens casting an otherworldly aura onto their intent faces. They are elsewhere. They are alone. Alone with words as much as any writer at a notebook or screen.

  A writer even needs to pine for solitude, court it, steal it away from the rest of so-called real life. It’s very lover-like, this romance with solitude. It may be the prerequisite that sustains a writing life, more important than talent or discipline, this passion for solitude, the ground upon which the life of the mind roots and blossoms. Solitude is the beguiling illicit love luring us away from the proper marriage of domestic demands and delights or the civic responsibilities of citizenship.

  In a moment of great tenderness I once confessed—I wonder if you remembered this—that I loved living with you. It’s like being alone, I said happily. You cocked your beautiful brow and said mildly, I gather that’s a compliment?

  Being alone with another—it’s the greatest love transaction. Being alone is, we know, the best chance you have to be yourself, which is in turn the seed of integrity and of any possible originality.

  I fell hard and early for Rilke’s line from his 1904 Letters to a Young Poet, the standard poetic operating manual for me in my twenties. Rilke describes the ideal relationship as a love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. Not until much later did I cock my own brow at this soulful maxim from a man who abandoned his wife and child and spent years mooching around the castles and palaces of admiring countesses and grand dames of the Hapsburg Empire only too happy to give him a room with a view and three squares a day as he contemplated his writing block, alone in his well-appointed room, taking in the magnificent view of the Adriatic.

  But never mind that feminist smirk—it came later. Besides poetry, I was studying typography and the handmade book as a grad student. I chose Rilke’s line about those two loving solitudes as the first sentence I set, letter by metal letter, from the California job case, the big divided box filled with its “sorts,” as typographers call the tiny sculptural letters used to make up words. Composing stick in one hand, picking up tiny bits of molten lead with the other, I was learning to do pretty much what Gutenberg did when he set the first movable type.

  This method was how words made their way to press and paper for centuries until very recently when the scribing of digital bits descended upon us and changed the speed of everything in our you’ve-got-mail culture. The earlier composing method was slow and created an aura of isolation. Just the words and me, one metal letter at a time, laid in the flat of my hand, line by meticulous line, as if even prose were poetry, lineated. You had to consider the spaces as well, as if silence were an essential aspect of language, which of course it is.

  I may have taken up my fascination with typography after I read that part of Virginia Woolf’s mental health regime—devised by the uxorious Leonard Woolf after one of her ruinous breakdowns—was to learn to set type. Talk about two solitudes protecting each other. Or at least one protecting the other. Leonard was right—setting type by hand is calming. It’s sanity-promoting detail work.

  This therapeutic hobby led to the founding of the Hogarth Press. Its first volume, printed in 1917 on a little hand press set up on the Woolf dining room table, was composed of a story by Virginia and one by Leonard. The second book, which I long to own or at least hold in my hand, was published in an edition of three hundred in 1918, the beautiful New Zealand short story “Prelude” by Katherine Mansfield, whose work, Virginia admitted in her diary, was the only writing she had ever envied. This typesetting, a solo, silent endeavor (rather like the obsessive knitting that was also a passion among that crowd of modernist writers that included D. H. Lawrence, a demon knitter), turned into the Hogarth Pre
ss, a major literary presence in the first half of the twentieth century, and still a literary imprint.

  It started with a woman in danger of losing her mind, sequestered in the quiet of a suburban London house, holding a composing stick, as if palming sanity, silently stacking up metal letters to make a line of sense. This is where we get that psycholiterary term—when we speak of someone being “out of sorts.” It’s a typesetting term: being out of sorts, for a typesetter, means not having enough letters—“sorts” in your job case, perhaps having used up all the p’s or q’s—so you cannot compose the word you need. Watching your p’s and q’s—another typesetting metaphor, the two metal bits easy to mistake in the job case. Virginia Woolf was sorting herself out. It worked for a while, quite a while, really. She was alone not only with words, but with their steely components, individual letters. Literary sanity was there, she held it in her thin hand.

  * * *

  —

  I vant to be alone, my mother used to say distractedly, invoking Greta Garbo, when we were making too much havoc at home. In fact, Garbo had not said she wanted to be alone. She said, I want to be let alone. But in our own speedy culture, the distinction between the two statements, even for someone not savaged by celebrity, has been conflated. Hurry, hurry, we have all turned into the White Rabbit, and we’re very late for a very important date—though most of the time we can’t say what it is. For us, I vant to be alone means I want to be off the grid, no iPhone, no email, the 24/7 connectivity of our lot. I want to be let alone to be alone. No wonder that, to a writer—to readers, to so many beset people now—solitude suggests not loneliness, but serenity, that kissing cousin of sanity. We speak of being alone to recharge our batteries—even in our reach for solitude we seem unable to unplug from the metaphor of our connectivity.