Two From Craig Arnold (Or: Sweetbitter Leaves)

Possibly many of you who read this blog know of Craig Arnold's disappearance in Japan by now. About an hour ago, there was his unmistakable voice, from a recording, reading from Made Flesh on NPR's All Things Considered. I've known Craig since 1996, and since then there have been many Craigs--and I mean that in the best sense. Wouldn't we want our friends to keep changing over time? But the thing that's stayed constant is the depth of his artistry, the rigor and audacity of his poems. Sometimes it can be hard to see just how gifted certain people are, especially when you take their ongoingness as a given. But I've been reading him for the past 24 hours, and I can't stop going back to the work. I've been amazed by it, all over again. I'm hoping he can hang in there.

I. A Hermit Crab
from Shells

A drifter, or a permanent house-guest,
he scrabbles through the stones, and can even scale
the flaked palm-bark, towing along his latest
lodging, a cast-off periwinkle shell.
Isn't he weighed down? Does his house not pinch?
The sea urchin, a distant relative,
must haul his spiny armor each slow inch
by tooth only--sometimes, it's best to live
nowhere, and yet be anywhere at home.

That's the riddle of his weird housekeeping
--does he remember how he wears each welcome
out in its turn, and turns himself out creeping
unbodied through the sand, grinding and rude,
and does he feel a kind a gratitude?

II. From Volcano Pilgrim: Five Months in Japan as a Wandering Poet
April 26, 2009

In the parking lot of the restaurant, the island’s only restaurant, a crow is perched on the hatchback of a pickup truck. A cat leaps out from under the truck, makes a grab for it, but the crow is too quick, launches itself into the branches with two flaps of its enormous wings. As the crow is almost as big as the cat, with a wicked sharp beak, it is not clear which has been luckier to escape.

Your lunch arrives. You have no idea what you ordered, as you cannot read the menu, and neither of women working speaks any English, so you pointed and grunted and hope that you haven’t ordered entrails or sea cucumber.

      Afloat in my soup

          sweetbitter leaves – a flavor

                I’ve never tasted

The same leaves have also made their way into the tempura. You have eaten deep-fried flowers before, but never a deep-fried leaf. What is this? you ask. The server smiles, pleased at last to have been asked a recognizable question. Ashitaba. Your phrasebook is entirely useless for conversation, but it does have a good glossary of food terms, and there you find it – ashitaba, angelica. It seems like a fine thing to eat in spring.

                                                *****

To read Volcano Pilgrim, Craig's blog of his months in Japan, click here.

To read "Dear Steve," Craig's poem for the Starting Today website, click here.

[Some of you might already know that Craig's been missing for the last three days in Japan. To read about the search--and to see how you could help--click here or join the Facebook group "Find Craig Arnold."]

Some from Unbuilt Projects

I get asked often enough about new work, so I thought I'd pass along this video of a reading I did last year at Cornell, which the university just posted on YouTube. I've only looked at it out of the corner of my eye, with the sound way down, but I remember enjoying the night itself. I went first, followed by Mark then Denis Johnson. The videos of their readings were also just posted on YouTube.

Here's the list of what I read:

1) The Night in Question (this eventually became the opening passage of THE BURNING HOUSE, my next novel.)
2) Junta from FAMOUS BUILDER
3) How's Florida? from UNBUILT PROJECTS, a collection of short prose pieces
4) Paul All Gone from UNBUILT PROJECTS
5) A Phone Call with My Father from UNBUILT PROJECTS
6) The Boy and His Mother are Stuck! from U.P.
7) The Didache from U.P.

Around the Pond

Injured duck. Plucked banjo string. Rubber band on steroids. Yesterday, Mark and I sat around the pond in our backyard, amusing ourselves with descriptions of our resident bullfrog’s voice. Up until lately he’d been secretive, leaping beneath the surface if we were anywhere close by, but the heat seems to be bringing out a boldness in him. Over several increments he kept moving closer and closer to us to the point where he was within arm’s reach. He looked directly up at us while we looked directly at him. This went on for a half hour. He spoke, peaceably. I know it is mating season, but I know better than to flatter myself: he knew very well that I wasn’t about to haul myself down into that pond. As for Mark? That’s not for me to say.

Believe it or not, I can hear the frog right now, all the way into the house, through the open window, into the living room. I did some research and found out that a bullfrog’s voice can be heard up to a mile away.

We stood outside on the driveway at around ten. The heat seemed to make everything quieter, the night darker, almost pure. No frog or car sounds but there was the crashing ocean, three miles away, across highway and woods.

Then dead to the world on the living room couch. I’d gotten up at four in Fort Lauderdale to make the 7 AM flight back to JFK. I had a perfectly good time at the GALLA Festival, where I was on two panels: Memoir and Fiction (with Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and Philip Smith) and Editing Your Work (with Don Weise and Linda Villarosa). I met lots of great people associated with the Stonewall Library and Archives. Then woke up to the sounds of Judee Sill on the stereo, and where was I? Florida? Long Island? My eyesight blurred, though my glasses were still on my face. The clock said 12:30.

And Mark? Already snoring away in the bedroom.

Scraps, Orts, and Fragments

Somehow it made sense that I was reading Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts on the plane Thursday. The novel, though sweet tempered and often comic, is often about its own dissolution. As the characters wonder whether the play at the center of the story is coming undone, we can’t help but wonder whether the novel itself is coming undone. The writer knows what she’s doing, of course, and she seems more willing her than ever before to resist wholeness. She lets the fragments hang. As the book was being written, German planes were flying over the downs behind her house in Rodmell. Those planes make more than one appearance in the novel itself.

I mentioned yesterday’s plane because I had the experience
of sitting across the aisle from an older woman, in paisley skirt and royal blue jacket, who yelled to herself—sometimes in English, sometimes in Greek—during the three-hour flight. She was inconsolable. And couldn’t be appeased, even when the flight attendants gathered around to say, not unkindly, “Would you like to get off the plane?” This didn’t stop her, minutes later, from unbuckling her seat belt, standing in the aisle as the plane was lifting off the ground, and yelling some more.

It turned out that she’d had a bad experience upon landing from her flight from Athens. I couldn’t tell whether it was with a customs person, or someone with the TSA. About a half hour into the flight she started sobbing, much more quietly, “This is America. This does not happen in America.” It was awful. And even though I could tell she was probably someone who was used to taking up space, and drawing others into her trouble, I couldn’t just dismiss her, as disorienting as the spectacle was. She was mourning. I think Between the Acts is, in part, a kind of mourning for England itself, through a fragmented pageant of its literary history. The bombs were already falling in London, damaging Woolf's houses, laying waste to books and correspondence. What else was left but to honor the fragment, through music, and this fleeting image of wholeness.

from Between the Acts
Virginia Woolf

A hitch occurred here. The records had been mixed. Fox-trot, Sweet Lavender, Home Sweet Home, Rule Britannia--sweating profusely, Jimmy, who had charge of the music, threw them aside and fitted the right one--was it Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart or nobody famous, but merely a traditional tune? Anyhow, thank heaven, it was somebody speaking after the anonymous bray of the infernal megaphone.

Like quicksilver sliding, filings magnetized, the distracted united. The tune began; the first note meant a second; the second a third. Then down beneath a force was born in opposition; then another. On different levels they diverged. On different levels ourselves went forward; flower gathering some on the surface; others descending to wrestle with the meaning; but all comprehending; all enlisted. The whole population of the mind's immeasurable profundity came flocking; from the unprotected, the unskinned; and dawn rose; and azure; from chaos and cacophony measure; but not the melody of surface sound alone controlled it; but also the warring battle-plumed warriors straining asunder: To part? No. Compelled from the ends of the horizon; recalled from the edge of apalling crevasses; they crashed; solved; united. And some relaxed their fingers; and other uncrossed their legs.

Was that voice ourselves? Scraps, orts and fragments, are we, also, that? The voice died away.

Dusk (Or: From My Hotel Room)

Transitory

Much traveling in the last nine days: a reading with Mark at Allegheny College in Western Pennsylvania; another reading with Mark at Georgia State in Atlanta. Both of these events turned out to be happy and satisfying--sweet hosts (thanks, Christopher and Kerry; thanks, Jim and Chelsea), sweet, attentive students. Now I’m here by my lonesome for a conference in Fort Lauderdale. It’s only beginning to dawn on me that after just one more trip, I won’t have to get on a plane till mid-July.

The hotel here has one of those 12-story high atriums at its center, a junior version of Manhattan’s Marriott Marquis. All the rooms are accessed by open walkways fronting the atrium, so that every noise from the lobby is pushed up and amplified to otherworldly effect. Plate against plate; a child’s wail; artificial waterfall—there’s a huge artificial rock from which water gushes day and night. I think my room must be across from the glassed-in elevator; the rubbing of the car up and down makes a sound like a plane about to land—or a low, faroff thunder.

The weird thing about the atrium is its glass roof. I usually associate these structures with inhospitable climates. But we’re in South Florida, less than a mile west of the beach, within walking distance of the Intercoastal. (I believe it's officially known as Lake Mabel here (!) but no one calls it that.) I can’t help but wonder whether the palms and plants in the lobby would be happier without that roof. The idea of warm rain falling down that 12-story opening, pelting those open walkways!

Last night I took a walk to the Publix behind the hotel. The air had that incredible softness of nowhere else. Also, strange scents: heated pool, laundry detergent, foliage, sewage treatment facility? A couple of cars passed me, bass beat rattling their chassis. I get the feeling this is the part of town where they put up cruise ship passengers, the transitory zone between airport and open water. Thus, it doesn’t feel as if everyday life transpires here, hence the sense of anesthesia and vague menace. But beauty too: royal palms against the night, fronds clattering; highrises gleaming: sodium vapor. And no wonder I must be trying to ground myself in space and time by writing where I am.

Photon to Electron to Motion (Or: For Earth Day)

Endangerment Finding
Robin Beth Schaer

Admit our sun is common, a Milky Way twin
to a hundred million more. Even its end
ordinary, no stellar explosion, it will snap
hydrogen to helium then cool to a dense core.

In the mapped and measured sky, you squint,
still wanting the corona of a bright god,
the unconquered sun that chose us to spin
around. But there are no more tributes of maize

and falcon wings when we can burn the light
left epochs ago. You may ratify the droughts
and downpours, assign blame for melting ice
and rising seas, but I can count more kinds

of hammers than turtles; we need instinct,
not law. The dogs of Pompeii howled for days,
snakes slithered from Helice. In the Gallatin Range,
I watched bears leave the forest. That night,

a fault tore a slice of the mountain down,
sleepers drowned in their beds, soaked
in waves off the lake. Hush. Listen
to the rumble of our internal combustion.

There is more elegance in turning photon
to electron to motion. Let us trade the old sun
for the new one, sustain ourselves, green and wet,
within this delicate spindle of axis and orbit.

No Jack

What a Friend
Robert Polito
from Hollywood & God

This is the story your mother told, a bit
Skeptically, as if to show how someone changed.
Your Aunt Barbara says she was driving home from the hospital.
It was raining. It was late. And when she crossed over the bridge,
She got a flat. She pulled the car onto the shoulder, and
Worked the directionals, but no one would stop in the rain.
When she finally got out herself and opened the trunk,
Guess what, there was no jack. A perfectly good spare, but
No jack. Your Uncle Johnny left it in the garage, or something.
That's when it happened. That's when Jesus showed up.
He lifted up the back of the car, and she changed the tire.
That anyway is what your Aunt Barbara's saying now.
I didn't know Catholics could be Pentecostal. Imagine
Jesus Christ traipsing around like that, helping people get home.

You Just Like the Chase

Longing, Longing

Theater Evening
Peter Altenberg
from Telegrams of the Soul

She couldn’t take the poodle with her into the theater. So the poodle stayed with me in the café and we awaited the mistress.
      He stationed himself so as to keep an eye on the entrance, and I found this very expedient, if a bit excessive, since, honestly, it was only half past seven in the evening and we had to wait till a quarter past eleven.
      We sat there and waited.
      Every carriage that rattled by awakened hope in him, and every time I said to him, “It’s not possible, it can’t be her yet, be reasonable, it’s just not possible!”
      Sometimes I said to him: “Our beautiful, kind-hearted mistress--!”
      He was positively sick with longing, twisted his head in my direction: “Is she coming or isn’t she?!”
      At one point he abandoned his guard post, came close to me, lay his paw on my knee and I kissed him.
      As if he’d said to me: “Go ahead, tell me the truth, I can take anything!”
      So I said to him: “Listen pal, don’t you think I’m antsy? You’ve got to control yourself!”
      But he didn’t put much stock in control and whined.
      Then he started softly weeping.
      “Is she coming or isn’t she?!”
      “She’s coming, she’s coming--.”
      Then he lay himself perfectly flat on the floor and I sat there rather stooped over in my chair.
      He wasn’t whining any more, just stared at the entrance while I stared ahead of me.
      It was a quarter to twelve.
      She came at last. With her sweet, soft, sliding steps, she came quietly and collected, greeted us in her mild manner.
      The poodle whined, sang out and leapt.
      But I helped her off with her silken coat and hung it on a hook.
      Then we sat down.
      “Were you antsy?!” she asked.
      As if one said: “How’s life, my friend?” or: “Yours truly, N.N.!”
      Then she said, “Oh, it was just wonderful in the theater--!”
      But I felt: Longing, longing that flows and flows and flows from the hearts of man and beast, where do you go?! Do you perhaps evaporate in the heavens like water in the clouds?! Just as the atmosphere is full of water vapor so must the world be full and heavy with longings that came and found no soul to take them in! What happens to you, dear emotion, the best and most delicate thing in life, if you don’t find willing souls greedy to soak you up and derive their own strength from yours?
      Longing, longing, that flows from the hearts of man and beast, flooding, flooding the world, where do you go?

Deborah Digges, In Memory

The Little Book of Hand Shadows
Deborah Digges
from Rough Music

You who began inside me,
see a tortoise, a stork, a wolf come out of my hand.

Stand behind me, your shadow eclipsing
my shadow.

Make the cock crow by opening and closing two fingers.
We can be anyone now.

We can be spirit, ships homing, ten brothers in heaven.
Can you feel the sweet wind of their wing beats?

Can you smell the damp forest
as the walls fill up?

The breathe with things.
Crook your right forefinger which forms a paw.

Remember a crab moves a little sideways.
Pick me up like you used to and whirl me around.

Mother Hubbard's dog's begging.
Your Dapple Grey appears to be running.

Our shadows spill shadows.
They pool, they molt.

They grow out of the dark, they grow
out of themselves.

They crowd the ark, they crowd the world with their finger-ears
and thorny toes and their broken beaks

and knuckled hearts,
their broken beaks and knuckled hearts.

Happy Easter! Happy Passover!

Become Funky and Split

This clip has come and gone on the internet for years, so maybe you've already seen it. But I'm putting it here just because there's so little footage of the camera-shy Laura. It comes from D.A. Pennebaker's documentary of the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. Actually, this is an outtake. By the time the film was complete, these performances of "Wedding Bell Blues" and "Poverty Train" had ended up on the cutting room floor, as they say.

By the time I was in high school, people my age had never listened to Laura Nyro, much less heard of her. My high school friends listened to Fleetwood Mac, Linda Ronstadt, Queen, E.L.O. (E.L.O.?) Both Joni and Laura already felt like the music of the older brothers and sisters I never had. Still, I listened to them constantly as if they'd written those songs especially for me. I don't think I even wanted anyone else to know about them. A few years later, though, in college, I met someone who'd said that she'd seen Laura in concert, for the Christmas and the Sweat tour, back in 1971 or so. She sat beside me in my Milton class, and said, good-naturedly, "she's a big sloppy dyke!" Indignantly, I replied, "she is not! " Our class began. Our professor began to read a passage from Paradise Lost in her usual tremulous, painfully reverent voice, so I couldn't get to the bottom of things. Only later did I figure out that my indignation was based on ignorance. Her Laura didn't match the Laura inside my head. And my Laura was simply based on the images I'd built of her from album cover photos. And, back then, the implications of a love song like "Emmie" went right over my head.

In any case, this clip also interests me because this is the performance in which Laura was allegedly booed off the stage. She thought of this concert as her disaster; it's part of her myth, and it took her years before she could gather enough nerve to perform on the stage again. But you can see that at least a good part of the audience is there. And if you didn't know any better, you'd certainly think that she was in command, enjoying her moment, moving about--until the end of "Poverty Train" when a complex range of emotions plays out on her face. There's something poignant and painful about the complex relationship between any performer and her audience documented here.

Deadline? What Deadline?

Calm wind, bright sun, the last bite of cold on the air. Too many things to take care of this morning (deadlines! due dates! more deadlines!), but I knew it was good seal watching weather, and I knew they'd be heading north to Canada in a few weeks. I'd work all afternoon instead.

So there they were, sunning themselves on the rocks like slick black bananas--or maybe yams? I couldn't take my eyes off them. They weren't so much like the sea lions of Santa Cruz or Monterey, in "perfect response," as Mark says in one of his new poems. While some of these guys were blissed out and calm, others were not, vying for space on the three or four available rocks as the tide rose and the waves rolled in. I actually saw two of them fighting, or attempting to, their growls filling up the air. And of course I got it that they'd evolved from land mammals like bears. They were acting like bears. And the stirring up of the water! It made me think about the difference between West Coast and East: rest vs. bluster. And, of course, in the East it's always about real estate, even during a downturn.

Actually the walk to and from the seal haulout was an adventure in itself: a mile-long trail in Montauk Point State Park through a holly forest: sometimes boggy, sometimes high and dry, up the hill, down the hill, always rocks and roots beneath the feet. On the way back home I stopped the car for an enormous black turkey who crossed just in front of me.

A Life Outside the Law

One of the pleasures of the reading at the Village Zendo last night was getting to hear Fanny Howe, Mark's co-reader, whose work I've admired for a long time. She read from her collection The Lyrics, a series of long poems based on her time in a Benedictine monastery. Here, though, I'm passing along the opening of The Winter Sun: Notes on A Vocation, her essay collection just out from Graywolf, a book I can't seem to put down regardless of taxes, midterm evaluations, and any number of things that keep pulling at my consciousness. It's a brilliant thing.

[Above: The fish in our pond out back.]

Since early adolescence I have wanted to live the life of a poet. What this meant to me was a life outside the law; it would include disobedience and uprootedness. I would be at liberty to observe, drift, read, travel, take notes, converse with friends, and struggle with form.

Struggling with form meant creating problems of self-expression that only I could solve. This required boundless time, no obligations, lots of conversation and love, little money, little stability but always freedom to play with sound and meaning. I was surrounded by poetry at home so this should have been easy, but another atmosphere undermined its powers.

Like the rest of my generation, I was catapulted into a double bind. On the one hand each of us was valued, treated to an education in humanist values, and nourished for a long life; on the other hand we were told to hide under our desks during nuclear bomb alerts, and to wait there in the knowledge that we were as disposable as pieces of tissue paper that could blow away like ashes.

While we learned languages, poetry, science, and athletics, the prevailing social attitude was nihilist. Not officially so, not with reference to Nietzsche, but in the stirring cavities of decision making and imagination. Mass murder, global destruction, and genocide were idle topics. We grew up at the tail end of the Victorian period and at the beginning of the postmodern. In the year 1968 the contradictory forces behind the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement came to a head and my generation embodied the conflict and attempted to find synthesis and progress.

Now the millennium has come and gone and I am in a hermitage facing of field of snow and bristling grain where there is a line of trees at the end. The sky has the wintry golden blush that makes it seem to swell like water. I hear cars and trucks in the distance. Over the years I have written during days just like these, when there was now, or cold, and some sense of safety and enclosure. More often I have written on the road in the middle of children, crowds at train stations, airports, motels, bus depots, in offices and schoolyards.

I have put this collection on the table in order to discover what I was doing during those times, because it was not just a matter of writing poems. That activity was inseparable from the dialectical questions of my generation, from the paradoxes of a life spent in a cynical social terrain.

Why was I chained to these language problems that I myself had created? Why all this scratching and erasing? It was more like drawing an invisible figure than painting what was in front of me. I wanted something to recognize: a disembodied presence.

Slick on the Road, Slick in Our Thoughts

Salmagundi Algorithm
Dara Wier
From the website Starting Today: Poems for the First 100 Days

Rain is falling all over us.
Sky-high rain, rain with a purpose.
Our petals are iffy.
Everything's iffy.
Thunder knocks hard on my head. Yours?
I worship a thoughtless weather's insistence.
Slick on the road, slick in our thoughts.
Time splintered, time buffeted.
We have drifted back into our typical orbits.
For a while we were brighter, better, drawn &
Famously happy. We forgot ourselves, surprise
Took us by surprise, we were newly minted, un-smudged,
We were scratchproof, our expiration dates so far in the future
We couldn't see them. We bounded along from hilltop to
River, from satellite to starry nights, you lent me your coat,
You gave me your shoes, you made your bed for me, you threw
Open your windows. There's always been a picture of a man dipping
His hand through the sky's liquid places. He's feeling around for
      escape
Portals. I see there are one or two in your eyes. I will escape through
      your
Eyes. If you'll let me. If you'll leave me.

A Walk in Montauk

These are from a walk we took this afternoon in Shadmoor State Park, which is just east of the village of Montauk before you get to Ditch Plains.

This Newness of Blood

from Oh What A Paradise It Seems
John Cheever

This is a story to be read in bed in an old house on a rainy night. The dogs are asleep and the saddle horses--Dombey and Trey--can be heard in their stalls across the dirt road beyond the orchard. The rain is gentle and needed but not needed with any desperation. The water tables are equitable, the nearby river is plentiful, the gardens and orchards--it is at the turning of the season--are irrigated ideally. Almost all the lights are out in the little village by the waterfall where the mill, so many years ago, used to produce gingham.

The granite walls of the mill still stand on the banks of the broad river and the mill owner's house with its four Corinthian columns still crowns the only hill in town. You might think of it as a sleepy village, out of touch with a changing world, but in the weekly newspaper Unidentified Flying Objects are reported with great frequency. They are reported not only by housewives hanging out their clothes and by sportsmen hunting squirrels, but they have been seen by substantial members of the population, such as the vice-president of the bank and the wife of the chief of police.

Walking through the village, from north to south, you were bound to notice the number of dogs and that they were all high-spirited and that they were without exception mongrels but mongrels with the marked characteristics of their mixed parentage and breeding. You might see a smooth-haired poodle, an Airedale with very short legs, or a dog that seemed to begin as a collie and ended as a Great Dane. These mixtures of blood--this newness of blood, you might say--had made them a highly spirited pack, and they hurried through the empty streets, late it seemed for some important meal, assignation or meeting, quite unfamiliar with the loneliness from which some of the population seemed to suffer.

"The Most Bizarre Human Creation on All Long Island"

Our trip to the city this past week took us on a different route than usual. Just to the east of the Speonk train station we came across the Casa Basso Restaurant off the Montauk Highway in Westhampton. I don't quite know what to say about these towering musketeers at the entrance, but they practically insisted I take a picture of them, even though the day was foggy. Here's a pertinent bit from a restaurant review I came across on The Hamptons Web. And after that, a postcard image from the 50s, if you're in a now and then frame of mind.

Italian; Seafood. My grandparents loved it, my parents loved it, and I love it, as much for the grounds as for the restaurant. To quote from William Stevens' Discovering Long Island (1939), "...the most bizarre human creation on all Long Island." Referred to therein are the sculptures and edifices dotting the front and side lawns of this fine very upscale traditional Italian restaurant. Be sure to leave plenty of time for this dining experience, as you are visiting an art museum as well. Once you enter, walking under the swords of two twelve-foot-tall concrete fencing musketeers, you will find a miniature castle, prancing horses, nests of horse's heads, lions, mythological characters, etc. The sculptures were created by Theophilus Brower over fifty years ago, and will long designate this little "park" as a local landmark. Oh yes... the restaurant serves a fine array of well-prepared Italian specialty dishes. Don't miss this one, and bring the kids, if you can afford it. Entree price range: $18.95 to $26.00. Closed Mondays

(UPDATE: click here for Casa Basso's Wikipedia entry.)

Into the Windows

I've been reading Louise DeSalvo's engrossing new book which, among a number of things, thinks about moving--and dream houses--through the experiences of various writers. I knew Mark was one of those writers discussed in its pages, but I didn't expect to read about the two of us, and our years on Fire Island. I think I can detach myself enough from our appearance in the book to say it is lovely and funny and unexpectedly moving. Here's a passage from the first chapter.

from On Moving: A Writer's Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again
Louise DeSalvo

In the moves I imagine myself making, I'm always living in a perfect place. A house that doesn't leak during heavy rains. One with no musty smells in the basement. One without walls that crack and need repair. A home without a filthy oven that needs cleaning. A place where there will be no health problems, no marital problems, no financial woes, no income tax, no work that feels banal and boring.

Throughout my life, as I've walked down one street or another, either in my hometown or in the places I've traveled, I've looked into the windows of houses and imagined myself living there. I imagine the sun shining through these windows in a way that it doesn't in the house I inhabit. I think about how, in these new places, I will become the self I have not yet managed to be. Thinking like this helps me stop thinking about the problems I face in my work and in my life. If only I could live in this brick house with the lovely side garden, in this clapboard house with the solarium, in this apartment overlooking Central Park, in this whitewashed cottage overlooking the Adriatic, then I could do what I haven't yet done: write a historical novel, knit a modular coat combining all the colors of the rainbow, bake a perfect artisinal bread, listen to all Beethoven's late quartets, and finally, finally read all the writings of Proust. I never think about the people who currently live there, their joys and sorrows; I never think about what life is like for them or the challenges they face. I never recall I've felt pretty much the same wherever I've lived--the tiny apartment when I was in my twenties or the mock Tudor where I spent thirty-plus years.