A Season on Earth

by Gerald Murnane

  It was the same with advertisements for furniture and floor coverings and bathroom fittings. As a married man, Adrian would be entitled to stand silently weighing up the merits of different floral patterns or plastics while his wife and a respectful salesman waited patiently for his decision.

  The world would hold no mysteries for a married man. With his wife on his arm, Adrian could stride boldly past the cosmetics counters in department stores and into the mysterious feminine areas he had always detoured around as a single man. Even the most baffling questions of all would be answered at last. His wife would explain the whole story behind the pictures of bejewelled women in evening gowns who gazed haughtily at the camera and said only the cryptic words, ‘Modess because…’ And one day he would solve the mystery that had bothered him since he had first read the Women’s Weekly as a boy. He would put the question frankly to his wife: ‘Those tall slender women looking gravely into the distance with their lower bodies encased in taut skin-coloured girdles—do they wear some further garment beneath their girdles, or is there nothing but air between their most private parts and the outside world, so that only the angle at which they hold their legs distinguishes the Women’s Weekly from the most shameless of pornographic magazines?’

  After a day with the Women’s Weekly, Adrian was eager to do something a little more practical.

  As far as he knew, the post-war housing shortage was over. But many young couples around Accrington still spent their first years after marriage in backyard bungalows or converted garages. Adrian had thought before of having his shed lined and floored and fitted with plumbing. Now he would definitely arrange for his father’s carpenter friend to begin work on it. Afterwards Adrian himself would paint and furnish it. He would make it a cosy little nest fit to bring a bride into. They could live there while they paid off their own block of land in one of the newer parts of Springvale or Noble Park. On winter nights they would sit together over plans for houses and want for nothing. He would see a plumber about fitting a little sink and a shower recess, perhaps even a toilet bowl concealed in a cupboard. On Sunday Adrian measured the shed carefully and drew a floor plan to scale on a large sheet of paper. He sat in his room until midnight deciding where the pieces of furniture would go.

  Next morning when he looked into the shed before leaving for work he was shocked to see how much rubbish his parents and young brothers had stored there. If he started to remove it openly they would ask embarrassing questions. He could bury a small amount each night in the long grass near the fowl yard. Or he could ride his bike to the Accrington tip at weekends with a sugar bag of rubbish on his back. Better still, he could carry a small amount to the Teachers’ Branch each day and empty it into his wastepaper basket.

  He opened his leather satchel and popped in one of his father’s worn-out shoes. There was room for more in the satchel. He took an old torn woollen elephant from the box that his brothers used to call their treasure chest. He could still fit something into the hollow of the shoe. The bottom of the treasure chest was littered with broken seashells. He put a handful into the shoe and packed them in securely with some of the stuffing from the toy elephant.

  On the train to the city he sat opposite a row of girls about his own age. Two of them were quite pretty. He almost smiled when he remembered how agitated he used to be in such situations. In his lustful period he had tried to look at girls’ breasts or knees or bare shoulders without the girls catching him at it. As a recluse he had sternly refused to glance at even the most beautiful girl. But he had often worried whether the girls he never looked at had thought there was something wrong with him. Sometimes he had been concerned that the girls might think they were losing their charm when they saw him ignoring them.

  Now his worries were over. With his picture of Jenny Windebank in his shirt pocket he could relax. He gave each girl in the carriage one glance to reassure her that she was still attractive to men, and to let her see that he himself was socially as well developed as she was. But by limiting them to one glance each he made it clear that he was not a candidate for their affections. They would then realise that he already enjoyed a special relationship with another.

  He had never felt so comfortable in the presence of the opposite sex. He saw how all his anxieties in the past had been caused by his shame at having no girlfriend to show off to the world. He felt such goodwill towards the girls in the train that he wished he could have handed them Jenny Windebank’s photo to admire.

  He remembered pictures in the Women’s Weekly of young people of both sexes enjoying themselves together. Dressed in expensive casual clothes and with clear unblemished skins, they smiled into each other’s eyes or gestured exuberantly or leaned on the shoulders of their steady boyfriends or girlfriends. He had sometimes wanted to belong to such a group and experience that boisterous happiness, but he could never have joined in without a girlfriend of his own. As his train approached the city he felt he belonged at last in the world he had admired in Women’s Weekly pictures.

  He sprawled back in his seat and revelled in his innocent companionship with the girls opposite. He wanted to make one of those extravagant gestures that young people used to express their happiness. He stood up to get his satchel from the luggage rack. He lifted it down with a flourish. An odd rattling noise came from inside it. The satchel was upside down and the seashells were tumbling out of his father’s old shoe. The noise was hardly loud enough for the girls to hear, but a thin stream of dust and fragments of shell had spilled out through the crack at the end of the zip fastener. Some of it settled on the skirt of the nearest girl. She shuddered and drew back her knees and tried to brush it off. She muttered something to the girl beside her and the two of them glared at Adrian. He kept his eyes down and was thankful that Jenny Windebank would never know how he had made a fool of himself in a suburban train.

  Each day he emptied more rubbish out of the shed and made it a little more like a home for a married couple. He gave a lot of thought to the position of his desk and bookshelf. He wanted to look up from his writing of an evening and exchange smiles with his wife while she worked contentedly in the kitchen area. When he had settled on a place for the desk he considered the problem of what he would write.

  He was not surprised to find that he could no longer write like Martens or Artsybashev or Andreyev. But he was concerned at his lack of enthusiasm for Coventry Patmore’s themes. The Unknown Eros was the story of a man’s ascent to a mystical experience through his intense devotion to his wife. Whenever Adrian tried to think of the most elevated spiritual joys of marriage he only saw himself sitting beside the kerosene heater in his cosy shed on winter nights holding hands with Jenny Windebank. He knew that the joys of human love were only a pale reflection of the bliss that came from union with God. But his perverse human nature seemed to want nothing higher than the contentment of sharing a home (or even a shed—properly lined and furnished) with a pretty, uncomplicated marriage partner.

  When he remembered all his troubles of the past year, he thought of writing his autobiography. He made several pages of notes for the story of a man who tried to find happiness first in unbridled sensuality, then in a strict religious order, and then as a poet-recluse who experimented with nihilism and pessimism.

  The story should have ended with the man’s discovery that the most lasting contentment came from the simple domestic pleasures of a happy marriage. But the book seemed to deserve a grander climax. Adrian kept remembering Elected Silence, with its magnificent last chapters describing Thomas Merton’s flight from the chaos of modern life to the peace of a Cistercian monastery. Adrian himself had been moved to tears when Merton recounted his arrival at the monastery late at night after a journey across hundreds of miles of America. But how many readers would weep when Adrian Sherd described his discovery of a picture in a Women’s Weekly or his first months of marriage in a shed behind his parents’ house?

  Adrian paced the floor of his shed. He knew that marriage was good in itself
and a worthy goal for ordinary people. But it was hardly a suitable ending for his autobiography.

  What he needed was an act of renunciation. He had to turn away from the highest form of earthly happiness just when it was within his grasp. But what could he turn to? He had already tried to live in a religious order and failed. He had not made a fair trial of the Cistercians, though. It would make a superb scene—the former poet of the emotions, the ex-nihilist, the man who had turned his back on all the Jenny Windebanks of Melbourne, knocking on the monastery door at Yarra Glen and creeping into his true home at last.

  But the reader would have known already about his interest in the Cistercians. The perfect ending would be for him to turn suddenly to something totally unexpected—to dedicate himself to an ideal that was utterly heroic and extraordinary.

  Thomas Merton had written with awe of an order called the Carthusians who were even stricter than the Cistercians. They had a house in England where the monks lived as hermits. A life as a hermit in an English landscape would recall some of Adrian’s earlier quests as well as being a fitting end to his story.

  Adrian took his picture of Jenny Windebank from his pocket. He slipped it somewhere into his stack of magazines and carried them outside to the incinerator. He started a fire. One after another the pages curled at their edges and were scorched to a uniform dark brown before he eased them into the heart of the flames, where they shrivelled to wisps of ash. Even with their rich colours scorched, he could still recognise many of the illustrations. Rooms thickly carpeted with Feltex, beautiful women sheathed in Hickory foundation garments, tempting desserts prepared with Foster Clark’s custard powder, gardens where zinnias made a colourful showing—all the creature comforts of modern life appeared to him one last time, trembling at the edge of the fire. But he remained unmoved and went on stoking the flames.

  Adrian did not know the address of the Carthusians in England. He intended to write to them in care of the Catholic Archbishop of London. As the strictest of all monastic orders, they probably received letters every week from unhappy young men wanting to escape from the frantic secular world to the peace of a monastery. Adrian’s letter was carefully composed to convince the Carthusian abbot that the writer was a genuine case. He wrote the simple truth: that he had several promising careers to choose from and took a normal, healthy interest in the opposite sex but had always felt that something was missing from his life and had lately realised what it was: his life in the busy world did not allow him enough time to meditate and reflect on what truly mattered. The letter ended with a request for detailed information about the monastery and an application form for admission as a novice to the Carthusian Order.

  Before he posted the letter, Adrian decided to test his suitability by living a modified version of the Carthusian rule.

  As far as he knew, each monk spent the day alone in his cell, reading and meditating, except for intervals when he cultivated the vegetables and herbs in his own walled garden. The cells and their adjoining gardens were scattered around the monastery grounds. The monks saw each other only in the chapel each morning for mass and once each week when they strolled and chatted together for recreation. During the rest of the time, they lived as hermits.

  Adrian marked out an unused corner of the backyard for his plot of herbs and vegetables. When his first crops matured he would ask his mother to serve them to him for meals. Later, when his brothers would have stopped jeering at him and his parents would have come to understand that his new life was more than a passing fad, he would wash his salads outside at the gully trap and eat them alone in his cell with a devotional book propped open in front of him.

  He inspected the inside of his shed. He could hardly believe he had once hoped to convert it into a home for a married couple. He had got rid of a few handfuls of rubbish every day without anyone noticing him, but it would have taken him years to empty the place at that rate. Now he could simply clear a space at one end for his cell. Most of the furniture he needed was already in the shed. He already had an old kitchen chair. A few planks resting together made a table. His few books could rest in a pile on a corner of the table. A disused ice chest could store his toiletries. He looked around for a bed. He wanted something crude and uncomfortable that he could lie on for his six hours of sleep between the offices of compline in the evening and matins in the early morning.

  A year before, when he was leaving for Blenheim, he had given his model railway to his young brothers. The old door that had once been the base for the railway was lying against a wall. He recalled that his brothers had traded the railway for the model aeroplanes that he sometimes saw them with. The door was marked with the holes where the railway tracks had been fixed, but the thing would make an ideal bed. He fetched four logs from the woodheap and rested his timber bed on top. He lay down. It was just as uncomfortable as he had hoped for. He would have to lie on his back all night, but it would be good for his spine.

  He remembered the map of the USA that had been faintly sketched on the timber beneath him. He sat up and looked for traces of the map. Only a few marks remained. Perhaps his brothers had erased the map for some reason, or perhaps the outline had simply faded. He could still recall how the whole map had looked.

  He lay down again. His head was where New England had once been. Where his heart thumped softly, the great blue folds of Appalachia had once lain. His feet rested on the last traces of Texas, and his groin was in one of the Great Plains states. But America would never trouble him again. As a Carthusian monk, he would stretch himself peacefully on his simple bed with no thought of the landscapes that had tempted him long before. He would sleep with his arms folded on his chest in the shape of a cross, and the tall wind-blown grasses of some remote prairie would wave above his slack genitals.

  Adrian had fitted out his cell within a few hours. (He called it his study so as not to alarm his parents.) He felt so cosy sitting at his planks, with his spiritual reading within reach and his vegetable plot a few yards from his door, that he wondered why he had to go to the trouble of writing to England and humbly asking the Carthusians to accept him when he could lead a strict monastic life in the comfort and privacy of his own home.

  He decided to write his own religious rule. It would be even stricter than that of the Carthusians but adapted to suit the special circumstances of a hermit who had to live in a backyard in Accrington, Victoria, and had to earn his living in the state public service.

  He read parts of The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis, looking for ideas, and got much encouragement from much that he read.

  Thou must be contented for Christ’s sake to be esteemed as a fool in this world, if thou desire to lead a religious life.

  If thou desirest true contrition of heart, enter into thy secret chamber, and shut out the tumults of the world.

  It is meet that thou remove thyself far away from acquaintance and dear friends and keep thy mind void of all temporal comfort.

  Adrian wanted his rule to be simple and easily remembered. He would rise at 4.00 a.m. and spend an hour reading from Sacred Scripture. At 5.00 a.m. he would begin an hour’s meditation. At 6.00 a.m. he would be ready for mass.

  It seemed inappropriate for a monk of an enclosed order to have to ride a bike more than a mile to attend mass at a humble parish church. A true eremite offered his own mass each morning at his own private altar. All the great saints of old who withdrew to the desert had been ordained priests beforehand.

  Adrian devised two alternative plans for obtaining the power to celebrate mass. He could, perhaps, travel to Europe and seek ordination from one of the so-called Wandering Bishops—men who were not in communion with the Holy See but possessed valid episcopal powers that they could trace back through a long line of unofficial bishops, some of them excommunicated generations earlier.

  Or he could attend the next ordination ceremony in Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral and sit as close to the altar as possible. Before the ceremony, he could offer up a si
lent prayer, presenting himself as an ordinand along with the young men in the sanctuary, who would have studied in the diocesan seminary or in some or another religious order for seven years past. He would whisper the same prayers that the candidates uttered aloud and would copy as many of their gestures as he could manage without alarming the congregation around him. Then, at the moment when the Archbishop laid his hands on the head of the first of the official ordinands, Adrian would pray that his own head might attract a few stray beams of the enormous spiritual force radiating through the sanctuary.

  If only he were brave enough, he could leap the sanctuary rails at the right moment and butt his own head against the Archbishop’s outstretched hands and then flee for his life down the main aisle and out across the Cathedral grounds and into the Fitzroy Gardens with the powers of the priesthood safe inside him. The men who passed around the collection plates and perhaps even some of the young priests might give chase, but what could they do to him? Could a team of bishops exorcise his priestly faculties? Could he be tried in some sort of ecclesiastical court? But he need not go to these lengths. The mass was a spiritual event. The visible ceremony was only an outward sign of the inner process. There was nothing to stop him from celebrating a spiritual mass alone in his cell. He would train his imagination thoroughly. Then, each morning at six, he would enact an entire mass in his mind. He would thereby gain all the spiritual benefits of a conventual mass.

  If he could celebrate a mass in his mind, he could use the same method to perform the more difficult items in his rule. Instead of scourging himself with an actual leather thong, he could inflict on himself a spiritual pain at least as keen as anything that his fleshly buttocks might otherwise have endured.

  But every single deed in the life of a monk was performed for its spiritual effect. He could enjoy all the spiritual benefits of the monastic life without lifting a finger. Instead of actually cultivating a garden, he could meditate for the appropriate length of time on tasks such as digging and weeding and could enjoy the spiritual fruits of his invisible vegetable garden.