And the Time Is: Poems, 1958-2013

The Real Wager

190 The Real Wager The cause of all human misery: the inability to sit contentedly alone in a room. —Blaise Pascal Monsieur Pascal, I’m sitting here alone in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Radisson has rented me this room with no amenities but lotion, towels, bathsoap, and a sewing kit. My family’s three hundred miles west by southwest. To be frank, I’m not content. Though Robert Louis Stevenson could say intelligent men, delayed in railroad waiting rooms for days without a book, should not be bored, I’m bored. Despite three books I’ve brought along in case, I’m bored to my toenails. That puts me on the side of human misery and culpable stupidity, I guess. But what of those who face the bookless loneliness of solitary confinement? Both you and Mister Stevenson might say they should be most content, but men have lost their minds or brained themselves against a wall in such conditions. 191 Granted, there are exceptions. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn scrawled The Gulag Archipelago on toilet paper in Siberia. And prisoners of war have stubbornly survived cold years of total isolation. Excepting the exceptions, you and Mr. Stevenson make sense but only if our times of solitude or long delays conclude. After all, the art of making time irrelevant by just abandoning ourselves to life the way that swimmers float and let the ocean be their beds is something everyone should learn. However, the ocean must stay calm just as the room you specify must not be locked, and Stevenson’s late train arrive at last. If not, we’re talking human misery as unrelieved as pain itself—we’re talking hell. ...