At Seventy: A Last Day Journal [by Jeffrey Levine]

How much of what we tell ourselves, let alone what we write, is collaged from bits and pieces of so-called real life? Richard Hugo says, In a poem you make something up, say for example a town, but an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn’t, you may be in the wrong business. Our triggering subjects, like our words, come from obsessions we must submit to, whatever the social cost. It can be hard. It can be worse 40 years from now if you feel you could have done it and didn’t.

This is my final day of blogging for Best American, and I’m deeply grateful for having been granted the opportunity to enter this space every workday for a week. To think about things, and to feel about things--to take that time and space--is such a pleasure. And it’s a good day to finish up, as tomorrow, there will be a joint 70^th birthday party for me and for my friend David, a retired South African actor, director, and educator. If it doesn’t rain, we’ll have assembled 120 friends out on the lawn and copses and underneath the stands of pines and birches, here at the house I share with my wife and two shepherds, at the southern edge of the Vermont National Forest. If we’re lucky, we might even have a couple of foxes and possibly even a brown bear in attendance, along with several families of grosbeaks, cardinals, red-bellied woodpeckers, chipmunks, and all manner of finches.

Having entered my 70s, I’ve been thinking about May Sarton’s journals. Many years ago, I read At Seventy: A Journal, which Sarton published in 1982 (she died in 1995), and I found it both comforting and deeply mysterious (70 years old, good Lord!). I was all of 46, which seemed, you know, young. By 1982, May Sarton had published 42 novels, journals, memoirs and books of poetry. Her novels and poetry didn’t do much for me, but I felt that my day-to-day was pretty much out of control, and so I took to Sarton’s journals. About being in her seventies she said, “Partly, you are more in control of your life . . . There is much less anguish and self-doubt. You are . . . able to function freely and spontaneously, as yourself." Free and spontaneous functioning seemed a worthy ambition, if only one didn’t have to be 70 to achieve it.

It was my mom who collected everything Sarton wrote, and where I found Sarton’s books on side tables in the living room, in the bookcases, on the kitchen counter, beside the bed I slept in when, later, I visited. I even found Journal of a Solitude on my dad’s bedside table, underneath the Zane Greys (The Trail Driver; West of the Pecos; Riders of the Purple Sage) although, whether he put it there or, more likely, she, I’d have no way of knowing, having failed to ask him while he was alive. The journals struck me as unguarded, available in ways neither my mother or my father were, even though I recognized that Sarton wrote them for publication, and so there was always that public/private stance.

Why do many readers respond so strongly to her writing? "In the end," Sarton suggests, "what a writer communicates is a vision of life. With so much that is depressing and agonizing around us these days, I feel sorry for the young. It's a terrible world to be in. Therefore, somebody who can make them feel that life is worth living—just life in the sense of looking at the flowers or going out for a walk with your dog—this is to be treasured. There aren't many writers who do this, there really aren't." Virginia Woolf, whom she first met in 1937, was one. ("A pale pretty Shelley imitation American girl," Woolf wrote of Sarton, "who sat on the floor at my feet . . . ") "Now there you have a vision of life! . . . When one goes back to read her, it is pleasing to be in that vision of life again. I think it is rather rare.

Recently, a gothic fog, prolific rain, more rain, sheets of water washing down our mountain road, then his morning, almost quiet, and as usual, there are a few obscurities where clarity of plot might be. Somewhere up there they get excited about the possibility of contradictory beliefs, and we think, is there another kind?

Another summer solstice. Tonight, when it clears (as predicted) there we’ll have that showboat moon, enormous, vaporous, and beyond, three faint points of light. Mars? Venus? Neptune? Magi? Icy comets, alone and palely loitering? The death of outer planets is what happens to other planets, right?

Still, run for your lives isn’t bad advice to give some folk, Mark Twain might have said. Escape—release by havoc, ruin, liquidation, devastation, annihilation—we pause to draw a breath. Because our profound human aspiration is to avoid you know what, to believe that every extinction is only a prelude to resurgence and revival.

Self-fascinated, we are loathe to concede that we are not central to the cosmic scheme of things. Apocalypse, once tragic, suddenly reassures. Time and space are about our relation with the Big Guy. God, it turns out, doesn’t want to be lonely either. That’s why he lets us see the evanescent sparks of the Big Bang every time we turn on the TV, those faint lights tracing across the black screen just before it’s inner world bursts into color.

Where we've lived in the world gravitates toward the comfort of home, of being home, but it's always the slow ox-cart and the deep woods and the routine and the inadvertent sounds of everyday machinery, of birdcalls and of breathing and the soft pacing of a far-off wolf that mark our habits and habitats. It's what you hear above the immediate and magnified sloshing of the bath water and the drip of the faucets and incessant sparking of the stovetop igniters that matters. Like Frankie says, That golden sand, two sweethearts, and the summer wind.

Comments

[Patricia Fargnoli]

happy birthday, Jeffrey. May it be a sweet one. I loved this!

Pat Fargnoli

[Jeffrey Levine]

Thanks so much, Pat!

[The Best American Poetry]

Thank you for your week on our site. And happy birthday, fellow septuagenarian (recent). -- DL

[Jeffrey Levine]

Thanks so much, David. A real pleasure!

JL

[Janet Burroway]

It's four in the morning, a new day is dawning...and this is to a word what I wanted to read just now At eighty-two, which is not as it turns out all that different from seventy, it is good and necessary to be reminded that we can be comforted, and in a terrible place, and expendable, all three. That even if the summer wind is cold in Chicago this year, still birdcall, home, and a few words are all we need.

[Jeffrey Levine]

So beautifully said, and so pleased to have been able to provide some needed words. JL

[Greg Bell]

Another turn on the Wheel, Jeffrey. Have a lovely ride.