Epilogue

Epilogue

Here taketh the makere of this book his leve. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Start of a new year. Death and taxes. Nothing more certain than.

Time to pay federal & state pipers. Can do: “recovering” after open-heart surgery. A repeat of how writing this book began five years ago: “ ‘recovering’ after open-heart surgery.” Same remarkably gifted surgeon both times, though I’ve told him I’d prefer not to go on meeting like this.

In the Author’s Note, I described working on these pages as “daily craft pursuit; house being constructed; mania; self-directed home-schooling; and word music being composed. Also self-sentenced ‘hard labor.’ Also life raft. Also, arguably, spiritual practice.”

Well, whatever it took. The book is what is. Very glad—relieved—to see it come to an end: once begun, there was no other way out. But, oh, I’ll miss it.

During my five-plus (!) decades as author, it occasionally occurred to me to take stock of more than the time—years—a project demanded. Never doubting I was the man for the job, I’d remark on the physical energy needed to build the house of a book. Now, however, I’m tempted to tally kilowatts, calories, volts, watts, joules & therms invested—and spent—to get me to being the reader I’d had in mind.

And, always one more book? Not so long ago, there was Brief Nudity (writer sixty-something), then Here and Gone (writer seventy). And now, whew, Acting My Age.

A doctor who’s repeatedly helped me said, “You’ll never stop writing.” Blessed or blasted recurrence! That never / n(ot)ever yet once again.

So, finito? Although, no surprise to friends and family, there’s more I’d like to say. Have to say. Have (?) to say.

As for these “sins of my old age,” as Giaochino Rossini described his late compositions, unlike maître Chaucer I feel no need to (profess to) revoke / abjure / eschew / recant.

No... misgivings.

Rather, what comes to mind is A. R. Ammons’s phrase “When you consider the radiance.”

And, as so many times before, J. A. Baker’s conclusion in The Peregrine: that he’d described “a dying world, like Mars, but glowing still.”