Beautiful Shirt

Plenitude

PLENITUDE Ignore them. They are only beautiful and heartless—not because of the unmoving seascape behind them, the august rays crowning pacific, glassy water in leviathan's heavenly backdrop, but because they mean to tell us that our freedom is a machine. It is not. It cannot be redesigned nor can it carry us to a new place. We are here, where history placed us, history that always waited modestly for our consent, sure of receiving it. Those beautifulyoung people standing beside the automobile in the surf agreed to nothing. If there is such a thing as a new place, it belongs to them, and the water will be heaven there and life pacific in the rosy stare of the ideal. Ignore them. Let us love our lives. No one ever truly fled from a suburb. He was expelled or shamed or too easily angered. And when he left, his heart broke. He fell easy prey to the beautiful and to the falsehoods of seascape and landscape with no one moving upon them aslevithan's obsessed challenger. Our houses are buoys set upon restlesswaters by strangers dead when we were born. But we live inside them now, and freedom isno machine to motor us in empty circles and to raise a round wake behind us. Freedom is a dwelling. Sometimes, in the small arcadesof a watercolor bought at the yard sales, brass-lighted in a corner by a chair, you have helped yourself to a dream 25 that drowned whalers, kin of yours, return from sea. A holiday mood and others, likeyourself, living nearby, hurry in from the night's damp and talk the small talk with no thought for sleeping. Then at morning, suddenly through the west window, birds flare golden with flying into sunrise. It feels like driving sometimes, but the music is not tinny and the light is slow, bell-towered from east to west with the morning. Darien. Norwalk. Quaker Hill. Mystic. Do not ignore these. Inconstant,mawkish but deep in the old physical sense of depth, the voluntary hours with neighbors and ghosts teach the beauty of commuting from dark to light, from labor to home life: a vigilance crowned with impatience and visited rarely but adequately by golden changes. Appreciation is mania. Neighbors can be too many neighbors, and cold, upturned shoals of seaboard towns too many churches, too many conversions. I know the stained glass above a doorway is the discomfited piety of change and light destroying what it makes only to remake it more beautifully. Such things make one thing clear: asbetrayer speaks to innocent, liar speaksto liar. A vigil crowned with gentians survives as disappointed love. Visitations of impatience take away our hands and home life. 26 2 Treason we learn from the childless small talk of nights whose sheltering adjustmentsgall us. When I first betrayed someone an angel fell backwards through the air's sheen. When I next betrayed someone the air lost its heart, which is love's density. I was at seasidein an old town, and sea and housefronts brightened but did not open. I was upon the point of prayer when the light froze, converted from churchlight to porchlight. We betray our homes because they arevaluable. No reason not to make the fine distinctions still: we live only half-expecting the suddenflares, or affection, or seasonsout of the sea weather, as expectations and good friends shelter by us from the darkness of streets we've blackened together. Five o'clock in the morning is not four o'clock in the morning. I have betrayed each and might betray all in the spotless, glassy piety of change. But how hotly change limits happiness: the small happiness of possession and the even smaller of self-possession. Imagine yourself transient among these houses and the uncontrolled reflection of hotel hours when no one in the hallway or next room depends on you. Already darkness covers the tilted Common outside your window. You hear a school band playing carols. As always and everywhere, there are too many drums. An hour earlier, in twilight, 27 3 you were out walking, looking into the shops, handling the used books and scentedsoaps, humming a little distractedby a late lunch and the brown New England drinks hotly perfect at Christmas. So many minutiae, so many parts played by drums against the unsteady,truer lines of the horns. In angular twilight, unfocussed and sullen...