All My Days Are Saturdays

Afterword

177 Afterword “To sit still and contemplate,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy , and yet content to remain where and what you are—is not this to know both wisdom and virtue, and to dwell with happiness?”Stevenson died at forty-four. He did not live long enough to realize that great deeds bring turmoil. Instead of pleasing, they disillusion and frequently cause deep heart- and bone ache. Moreover old age does not recall ancient loves or pasts brought to fruition. Instead age mulls the unharvested— imagined pasts, which in their haziness become soporific, calming and dulling, guiding the fretful mind into the close of sleep. Stevenson was partly right, however. To be content with place and person leads to happiness . If one accepts being superannuated without chafing at the moment ’s spawn of newlings, and without, as J. B. Priestley put it, affecting “a superior ignorance,” then feverish agitation vanishes and days become smoother, creating the appearance of virtue and placid wisdom. “‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said,” in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, “‘To talk of many things: / Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—/ Of cabbages—and kings—/ And why the sea is boiling hot—/ And whether pigs have wings.’”Adam, a kernel of earthy biblical 178 All My Days Are Saturdays wisdom noted, ate the apple and fortunately fell from grace to women. Time has nudged me toward the arms of a harridan not delighting in fruity life but rankling with thorny criticism. If I want to smile through the remainder of my days and live pleased, still, and almost sympathetic, I must lay the burden of my pencil down. Of course life is full of things that I think odder than pigs with wings, for example, the telephones that students carry in their hands and incessantly peer into as if looking into crystal balls, devices that don’t have simple names like cabbages and kings but are mysteriously known by their initials. Most of my friends own a GPS, and my son Francis urges me to get one also. “I don’t need it,” I have told him repeatedly. “Your mother never stops directing me. She is my GPS in the house and on the road. She’ll probably be my safety patrolman in heaven, telling me how to flap my wings and making sure I don’t have a head-on collision flying wrong-headedly down a one-way, right-way street into a flock of goose-like saints.” “Well, in any case,” Francis continues, never deterred by my wisdom and ancient references, “you should have a cell phone.” “No,” I inevitably answer, “I’d put it in my back pocket. Someday I’d sit on it and crush it. The pieces would jab into my bottom, giving me rectumitis or, at its fatal worse, turning me into a Republican.” Carroll’s verse is polished and so familiar that it seems threadbare. Maybe instead I should have quoted a stanza I read recently in which rhyme bucked and snorted like a broken alternator, dependent upon pronouncing the i in opposite as long rather than short. If I’d done so, I might have alluded to matters less tedious than politics. Writers, Peter Ryan wrote, “should realize that obsession with politics is a disease of journalists, not of ordinary people.” Of course the stanza itself is ailing , suffering from poetic hypothermia, an abnormally low, rather than high, intellectual temperature. “I stood beside an awkward puddle, / And saw a lady opposite, / Who suddenly across it bounding, / Upon my pet corn did alight.” “There is something almost indecent,” Cunninghame Graham wrote in A Hatchment, “in setting forth all a man thinks and feels, without an explanation or at least a prelude of some sort. A fencing master goes through the salute, a jockey takes a preliminary canter, even divines resort to incantations of some kind or other before they fall a-preaching.” Afterwords differ slightly from preludes and may be more accurate. Not a grand, highly wrought plan, but place and happenstance shaped these pages much as they determined my life. In Outdoor Studies Donald Afterword 179 Mitchell described a footpath. In doing so he sketched my sort of writing .“The very irregularity of a footpath makes half...