An Inch Away

15 September 2011

“And it seemed to them that they were within an inch of arriving at a decision, and that then a new, beautiful life would begin. And they both realized that the end was still far, far away, and that the hardest, the most complicated part was only just beginning.”

Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog”

In Chekhov's stories there's always that wisp of happiness just out of reach, sensed, experienced in flushes, but unsustainable, as though by nature true happiness is incompatible with everyday life. And Chekhov's poor lovers, to have any chance at such happiness with each other, must reveal their affair and upend their marriages, which they cannot bear to do. Or can they? Is there a surge of courage, a will to take on “the complicated part” in that last sentence? Or is the complicated part a matter between the two of them? Each time I read that final passage I see it in a different way. I'm left in as much limbo as Anna and Dmitri are. Where is the beautiful life only an inch away?

This early morning, still dark, another shrill bird call woke me – something between an owl's pulsing hoot and a cranes shriek. I've heard it before, always before dawn, and still can't name the mystery bird who's call is as witchy as a coyote's. Anyhow, I couldn't get back to sleep and got up quietly and went to the kitchen to make coffee before sitting down at the lamp beside the window to read. The calm of the early hours was never so serene and vital as it is now with little Ada tearing up the house. All the same, as the trees start to silohet against the greying sky, I get excited for her to wake, to be pulled out of my solitude by the sound of her soft footfalls charging down the hall, her drowsy call for daddy, her tousled hair and the downy smell of sleep on her neck as she lifts her arms around mine. We're never so alone as when we sleep. And never so alive as when the family rustles up together for breakfast at the table, the door open to the cool morning. Am I being too sentimental? Is this a rebuttle to Chekhov? Either way, it's his fault: he put me in this mood.

Some find Chekhov cold, but I think they don't understand him. Or maybe they don't read him at the right time of day. There are certain writers who are not just a reading but a state of mind. When they describe a tree in March coming into leaf against the brown hills you see it precisely. You see it like the leaf was in your hand, the branch bent to you, a current of warmth moving over the hills through the brisk air. All good writers get their voice into your head, of course. But some clear your head. Some are like meditation, settling you and opening your perceptions from within. Chekhov is one of those, as is Hemingway on his good days, Tolstoy. And of the contemporary writers I know, Per Petterson goes on that list. His Out Stealing Horses is one of the best books I've read, ever. I can still smell the pine sap on the boy's hands after a day of felling trees with his father in the summery Norwegian woods.

Maybe I should end on that note, that image. But another comes to mind out of nowhere:

On the radio the other day was an interview with an American journalist who had spent six months in solitary confinement in Libya during the ongoing revolution. He said solitary was the most agonizing, maddening experience, and that what kept him sane were his dreams. When he dreamt, his cell dissapeared and he was no longer alone – and so his dreams became a deeper reality to him. I imagine that his waking hours in the cell became a kind of dead slumber, a grey interlude to pass through, before the meadows and family get-togethers and cocktale parties and seaside hikes and love-reunions and rowdy football games of his dreams.

And I imagine the coldness of waking into that cell. The waking from your family and from the strange lush bird calls outside your window, from your child singing out for you to get up, to the nothingness of a prison cell. And I can't imagine much worse for a person to go through. I don't know why that tangent came to me. I don't want to be dreary. But sometimes it's the sorrows and vulnerabilities of the human experience that come to you when you're thinking of your child. You could cry for heart-joy thinking of them, and from heart-sickness, because they connect you through their big souls to all the human race. You cannot dream or hope or worry for your child without dreaming or hoping or worrying for all the peoples of the world.

Or even for a couple of fictional characters in a story written a hundred and forty years ago. Good literarture connects us; as do our early mornings alone to the lifting darkness; and the sound of our kid's pattering steps down the hall.