Edinburgh Days, or Doing What I Want to Do

Fast Falls the Eventide

Fast Falls the Eventide “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide,” Henry Lyte wrote a month before his death. In three weeks I leave Edinburgh. As soon as my plane turns west, place and event will start drifting from thought. Experiences lodged along the shoreline of awareness will slide into the sea. Life is not shingled, and the tide will strip Scotland from mind. One or two memories will bob for a moment, but soon they will become waterlogged and sink out of consciousness, becoming an indistinguishable part of the past, that dark main under the present. I’d like some things to abide or at least settle on a sandbar for a day or so: the Babel of English at the institute—Bulgarian, Rumanian, Turkish, Hungarian, and my southern American; lunch at the institute spent talking to Norwegian social scientists, my not understanding a word they said, their not understanding me, but the conversation animated; a hedge sparrow in scrub; and the elevator at the National Gallery, a cylinder resembling a transporter borrowed from Star Trek, with a voice saying “Doors closing” but then stuttering and repeating itself twice after the doors were closed. Memories wilt overnight. Along Lutton Place, Japanese cherries are blooming, the pink blossoms hanging over the sidewalk in ruffled clusters, green leaves above them in bows, candying the drab street. Beside St. Peter’s Church is a garden shaped like a fireplug. Circling the garden in a metal rim are enameled patches of color: pink, purple, red, plum, blue, white, and a fan of greens. Between the beds are 156 Edinburgh Days bushes, shoots shattering into leaves, the twigs themselves thin lines of paste gluing flower beds to each other in a mosaic. As I pondered leaving Edinburgh, I thought about a beginning, not of my stay in Scotland but the introduction to this book. At the end of life’s little day, to paraphrase Lyte, I wanted my experiences to mean something. I have not written a know-thyself book, one of those volumes in which the author strips off shoes, socks, shirt, and trousers, so that by the last chapter he stands naked before a mirror, not one that reflects flesh, however, but spirit, the stripping leading to understanding . I never strip. I suspect I was born wearing khakis and a sport coat. I wear socks in the shower. Indeed, if the house is not empty, and to be empty the dog must be outside, I bathe in underpants as well as socks. In In a Green Shade, Maurice Hewlett described my time of literary life, if not exactly my intention. “If ever there is a time for sententiousness it is when one is elderly, leisured and comfortable; that is the time to set down one’s thoughts as they come, not inviting anybody to read them, but promising to those who do, that they will find a commentary upon life as it passes, either because it may be useful or because it may have been earned.” Leisured does not apply to my time in Edinburgh. My observations were earned. For the first fifteen weeks of my stay I was the first fellow to arrive at the institute in the morning, often showing up before Mary, the cleaning woman. I was also the last to leave, walking back to my flat after ten at night. Before going to bed I planned the next day’s activities. Sleep did not come easily, and early in the morning I woke and read. When I return to Connecticut, friends will say they envied my vacation from teaching. I will nod, and soon time will sweep work out of recollection . Eventually I will remember the months in Scotland, much as my friends imagined them, as an extended rest. I am not elderly, but fledgling readers, that is, those under forty, will not appreciate my writings. In Sketches from Cambridge, Leslie Stephen mulled the ending of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses.” “When the crew of Ulysses obeyed his invitation to step in and ‘sitting well in order, smite the sounding furrows,’ they probably did not excite the admiration of Ithaca’s youth,” Stephen said. “Ulysses’ own sentiment, that they were not then what in old times they had been, doubtless met with hearty concurrence from the bank. They must have caught a good many crabs before reaching the Happy Isles.” Although a crab can stop an eight, sometimes swamping it, catching a crab is good for [3...