Edinburgh Days, or Doing What I Want to Do

Invisible

Invisible “Dear Invisible Man,” the note began. I’d been in Edinburgh two weeks. Since the day of my arrival, Barbara Phanjoo, my landlady, had not seen or heard me. “I just wanted to be sure that you were well,” she wrote. In the old days when gods wandered the earth pursuing nymphs or during more restful times granting wishes, the Rose begged Zeus for a gift. When Zeus asked her to be specific, the Rose demurred. She knew Zeus was imaginative and assumed that whatever he selected would be more magnificent that anything she might suggest. “You choose,” she said. For a moment Zeus gazed thoughtfully through the distance, then he waved his hand over the Rose. Immediately thorns erupted from the Rose’s stems, transforming shoots that had once been soft as shammy into saws. “Oh, no,” the Rose exclaimed and burst into tears, her blossoms wilting , petals weeping, pooling across the ground. She wept until dusk. Then a noise startled her. She looked up and saw an antelope approaching . “He will eat my buds,” she thought, her canes trembling. When the antelope got within a pace of the Rose, however, it paused and bent its neck toward the ground the better to study her stems. The animal remained motionless for what in the life of a flower seemed a season. Then the antelope shook its head, turned, and trotted across a low rise. Just before it disappeared, though, it stopped in front of a patch of lilies. The lilies were blooming, and their blossoms were as sweet as camphor. Invisible 5 The antelope nuzzled the lilies for a moment, almost as if saying grace, then without more ado ate every blossom. What a person gets often serves him better than what he thinks he wants. In Storrs people know me. They wave when I ride past on my bicycle. They stop me on the street to chat. They nod in the local café. They ask me about novels in the bookstore. Editors write and urge me to review books, and journals solicit my opinion. In silly moments this past fall I imagined that Edinburgh would broaden my literary horizons. I would write for the Edinburgh Review and perhaps a newspaper or two, the Guardian or the Scotsman. I’d meet people at the university and give guest lectures. Eventually strangers would greet me on the street, and we’d go into a pub and sandwich talks about books between bites of shepherd’s pie. Of course none of that has happened or will happen. I am simply an aging stranger in a big city, a faceless gray shadow passing along the sidewalk, the invisible man whose animal spirits time has reduced to dregs. Even at the Institute for Advanced Studies I am bodiless . Almost all the other fellows are young. While my career grows weedy behind me, their futures stretch green and alluring before them. Busy with smoothing ways forward, they don’t notice me except to nod. Not wishing to be snagged by a past that cannot serve them, they swivel out of sight when I enter a room. For a few days I was lonely. I regretted leaving family and the appointments that defined me. But then I began to enjoy invisibility. I stood on street corners and listened to buskers playing bagpipes, and no one noticed me. I bought a baguette, and the clerk took my money without looking at me. In Tesco, the grocery store, crowds swirled around me, but no one spoke to me, not even the cashier. If I was unknown, I realized , then so was the Scotland surrounding me. Although people would never know I’d passed through Edinburgh, I decided to know the city. Indeed, because no one would interrupt my ramblings, seeing would be easier than at home. Moreover, in roaming Storrs in December before I left, I saw things I’d seen for two decades, the sights coming to eye, as ideas came to the mind, matted and framed. Spears of ice pushed through dirt and leaves in the dirt road above the Ogushwitz Meadow, looking like striated spun glass, almost as if they were made out of sugar. From the stone seat near the gravel pit, the meadow appeared white and soft, as if someone had plucked down from the breast of a great goose and strewn it over the 6...