Charlottesville

It is official. I am moving. And as if by magic, my little artisanal living space implodes, with books in stacks on the floor, heaps of clothes draped on chairs, unconstructed boxes waiting for the tape gun in the corners.  The biggest challenge, as always, is my library.  I don’t have books.  I have a library.  I use it.  I need it with me.  It is the only thing I have at this point to leave my children. Unfortunately, all the wonderful little wine boxes I’d saved up for years and used and reused (they are perfect for moving books), well they have finally given up the ghost.  At least I have a whole month to beg new ones off my current wonderful wine seller.  (Blanchards in Allston, I name-drop shamelessly, on the off-chance the mention will soften them up in response to the box-begging thing.  Not that they don’t know me pretty well already.  But maybe that’s something I shouldn’t write.)

Perhaps because I am older, perhaps because I have done this so many times over the years, but I can’t seem to summon that productive frenzy that has always attended one of my moves.  The wild dreams, wilder hopes, wildest possible impulse to something more than mere continuation.  I am no longer like the hero of the Odyssey, on his boats, blasting recklessly through adventures heedless of the consequences (ostensibly to get “home,” but we know better … I would have stayed with Circe, myself).  Or, in my case, indefatigably brandishing brooms and color-coded labels, churning out lists, tossing out clothes, trashing files. 

I am more like the Ulysses of the Tennyson poem “made weak by time and fate.”  Movement is more difficult. The hunger for adventure certainly remains.  But it has become so much easier to contemplate than to implement.   Might there be more of an elegance of movement these days?  A gracefulness to replace the frenzy?

The review of a life that accompanies a packing-up is harder as well.  I am haunted. Memories of things read and ideas neglected.  Of projects finished and abandoned.  Of men adored whose names I can’t quite remember. (One indication of my age – I still have piles of letters from some of them.  Even from some of them who thought I had followed their “instructions” to burn them. Ha!  As if a writer who used to be a lawyer ever burns anything. Especially when someone tells her to.  I also keep tapes of phone messages. Ha, again! Ten cuidado, muchachos. But I digress.)

This move, in any case, has a very, very different rhythm to it.  I am hopeful that this is a good sign, but I’m not convinced.  Perhaps it is good that I do not expect too much, that no move-mania overtakes me. Move-mania invariably packs a horrible hang-over, and I am kept from any meaningful work for months.  This time, I feel a more settled hunger: to work, to play music, to dance a little.  I’m not certain this will be enough to get the truck loaded.  But it has to be. There is a short story almost done.  A book proposal ready to send out.  A novel itching to move beyond the first chapter and outline, characters squirrelly and mutinous because they’ve been standing around so long with nothing to do.  My dear friend offers me the opportunity to attend to these things. More importantly she gives me the gift of once more being among dear friends, who have known me forever, and for whatever reason still like me a little.   

But there’s always Tennyson and one of my favorite poems in the world: “Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades forever and forever when I move.” Somehow, I begin to understand that I’m never going to get there.  But it is no less beautiful for that.  Perhaps it is more important that I can still push off.  And will until I die trying.