In autumn, the gardener finds—sometimes—a new equanimity.
There, finished. I close the covers (“too far apart,” as Ambrose Bierce said of another book), ready to bask in the waters of my accomplishment. The too shallow waters. The book presses down against my upturned hand like a good-sized stone. I look at the receipt from the library that I’ve been using as a bookmark. It has been almost two months since checkout, so the book is long overdue, though I don’t imagine there is a line of readers clamoring to get their hands on it.
I was assigned The Count of Monte Cristo senior year of high school but avoided cracking the covers. A friend reading it recently with her book club raved about it, so I checked it out. For some reason I felt compelled to forge through all 1,462 pages. Well, “all” is overstating it. I was on board until woefully mistreated Edmond Dantès escaped from the prison Chateau d’If, self-sewn into the burial shroud of the Abbé, his fellow prisoner and sole companion. Thereupon the plot careened from the dubious into the overtly delirious, the literary equivalent of the hashish-enhanced evening the Count hosted in his gold-bedecked grotto on the rocky island of Monte Cristo with the requisite Persian carpets, fabulous jewels, and mute Nubian slave. Only 600 pages to go! Who was Franz again? The great schooner sailed onward, destined for the paradise of sweet revenge.
Once it was achieved (no surprise), the Count seemed to have second thoughts, suggesting that though he had carried out God’s will in punishing evil, next time he might let God carry out His own will. “Wait and hope,” the final words of the book, was his farewell admonition to his young friend, Morrel. After all that? Wait and hope?
I slip a hoodie over my shoulders, grab my iPod, and head out the door, with the intention to return the book to the library. Who knows, maybe some 16-year-old boy is waiting for it. Maybe it will change his life. Maybe it would have changed mine if I had read it 40 years ago, and I would not be so prone to indirection.
Plum leaves crunch underfoot. The outer leaves of the ginkgos on the block are starting to turn yellow. Autumn. Isn’t it early? Did we have summer already? Numerous times in July and August I thought about turning on the heat but I didn’t, figuring it was immoral when the rest of the country parboiled. News reached us through our earmuffs. Heat index 125. Temperature on the court 157 degrees (100 more than my study). Russia ablaze. Relatives told us how much they envied us as we plotted our suicides.
The sun is out this morning, hatched from the horizon. The street seems both renewed and, if not as old as the hills, getting there. Or is it just me? Forty years ago I came down this street for the first time, in my Dad’s Buick. My parents, sister, and I had driven from Kansas for our first visit to Aunt Dot’s. It had taken four days and we were dying to get out of the car and away from each other. We stayed with Aunt Dot three days, not time enough to scuff my wonder at this alternate universe so different from Kansas wheat fields. Especially remarkable were the lemon trees with pickable lemons, the agave at the top of her garden putting out a gigantic asparagus-like stalk, the green fruit attached to the tree outside the upstairs bedroom where I slept then, where I sleep now, four decades later. (“Are those acorns?” “Persimmons.”) Even though the land was even drier than Kansas, it was lush, and it made no sense when Aunt Dot said, “It gets green here in the winter.” It was green as it was.
The out-of-synch seasons, cool summer, green winter, spring in November and February and May, after all these years can still feel disconcerting, though I’m not deranged enough to actually miss the heat or the cold, the insects or the frozen sinuses.
Autumn is the exception. It looks and smells like autumn, the ripeness bordering on decay. The angle and quality of sunlight thread the hours with nostalgia for something unnamable, lost, and irretrievable. The gaze turns backward. Temps perdu. It is the calendar of melancholics, regrets hovering like fruit flies over fallen apples.
But it’s too beautiful outside now to be melancholy, the sky Delft blue, the air vibrating with possibility. “A change in the weather is enough to recreate the world and ourselves”—that’s also Proust. I put the plugs in my ears, cocooned in well-being. Life is great. When I pass neighbors walking their dogs or sweeping their sidewalks I nod without stopping, not wanting to break the flow of the music and the sensation of the warm sun on the back of my neck.
“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state to another, nothing more.”
—The Count of Monte Cristo, to Morrel
Here’s this from a recent article in The New York Times on happiness: “By the time they [people] are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18,” Andrew J. Oswald, a professor of psychology, is quoted as saying. “It’s a very encouraging fact that we can expect to be happier in our early 80s than we were in our 20s. And it’s not being driven predominantly by things that happen in life. It’s something very deep and quite human that seems to be driving this.”
By 80 you’ve quit waiting and hoping; maybe that’s it. I have another theory: most of us have limited shelf space in the pantry of our consciousness. As we age, we accumulate information like jars of pickles (or streams of pixels), to reach, at the age of 50 or so, maximal capacity. Remember Lucy and Ethel on the assembly line at the chocolate factory, stuffing cheeks and pockets and whatever else is handy while the bonbons keep coming, faster and faster? We max out. Ergo, forgetfulness, as well as less room or time for dissatisfaction. Bye-bye, Weltschmerz.
There’s another angle, explored in the novel I read when I needed a break from the Count, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, by Geoff Dyer: “ . . . What had happened in Varanasi was that something was taken out of the equation so that there was nothing for unhappiness to fasten itself upon. That something was me . . . All I’m saying is that in Varanasi I no longer felt like I was waiting. The waiting was over. I was over. I had taken myself out of the equation.”
That is how it feels this minute. No me in the equation, just the sunlight through the leaf canopy and music filling my head, Willie Nelson singing, “I used to walk in the shade, with those blues on parade . . .” Just weeks ago I could get in a huff how people, especially the young, plugged their ears and walled themselves away from the general clamor as well as the communal discourse. The technologically upholstered world is a false paradise, don’t you see? It’s not about connection; it’s isolating. But here I am, totally seduced. Such an easy mark.
I am back in the equation with a thud.
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy. They are the charming gardeners who make our souls bloom.
—Proust
I am waiting, more or less patiently, hoping the amount of my fine will soon be known. The library is abuzz, as it is often lately, every seat at the long tables occupied. The hush and humid heat is a climate zone in itself, incubating civilized behavior. I study the face of the young man behind the counter, transfixed by the computer. His absorption is full-fathom, and my presence is hardly a shadow on the waters. He looks about 18. His short black hair is gelled to spikiness; the whites of his eyes are almost blue; a pimple near his lower lip has been recently worried.
Being out of the equation at this moment doesn’t feel particularly liberating. Rather, it’s a little disconcerting, a little annoying. His thumb and ring finger pump like tappets on either side of the mouse. The computer is taking its sweet time. At 30 seconds or so, a bloat of time on the calendar of cybernauts, a shift occurs. He has sensed my appraisal. At second 31, he lifts his chin an inch, and turns very slightly. We are now in an alternate universe where human contact is possible. There are a number of strategies and defenses. I wait to see which he chooses. When he turns and looks at me, I read in his clear eyes an uncomplicated engagement. No strategies, no defenses. I’m the one who looks aside.
“I’m really sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what’s taking so long.”
“I’m in no hurry.”
At second 40, there’s a spark on the screen and he says, “You owe $4.50. That’s the biggest fine today.”
I’m not sure why this feels like a compliment. “Well, look at this beast. 1,462 pages.”
“Worth reading?”
A simple question without a simple answer. “Yes. Definitely. You should read it.”
He eyes me dubiously. I give him a $5 bill, he gives me two quarters. I would spill out observations, enthusiasms, reservations, but there are two people waiting in line behind me.
“Thank you for being so patient,” he says.
“Not at all.”
I had planned to go upstairs and scout the fiction to see if Swann’s Way is on the shelf but I step outside instead, destination, as often, undetermined.
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R. E. Faro is a regular contributor to The Monthly since 1996. A collection of his previous columns, In Faro’s Garden, A Tour and Some Detours, was published by Ithuriel’s Spear Press. Readers can find his blog at berrypicking.wordpress.com.
