present is not precedent.

I'm reading Milan Kundera's "Ignorance," about a Czech woman who emigrated to France to escape Communist occupation. Milan Kundera is always an engaging blend of history, philosophy and storytelling. This (timely) selection, in which she seeks to express how hopeless her situation feels to her people, is no exception. Read on; comments follow below.

"Irena would quote a stanza from Jan Skacel, a Czech poet of the period: he describes the sadness surrounding him; he wants to take that sadness in his hands, carry it far off somewhere and build himself a house out of it, he wants to lock himself inside that house for three hundred years and for three hundred years not open the door, not open the door to anyone!

Three hundred years? Skacel wrote those lines in the 1970s and he died in 1989, just a few days before those three hundred years of sadness he saw stretching ahead crumbled... .

Did Skacel have it wrong when he spoke of 300 years? Of course he did. All predictions are wrong, that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind. But though predictions may be wrong, they are right about the people who voice them, not about their future but about their experience of the present moment. During what I call their first 20-year span (1918-1938), the Czechs believed that their republic had all infinity ahead of it. They had it wrong, but precisely because they were wrong, they lived those years in a state of joy that led their arts to flourish as never before.

After the Russian invasion, since they had no inkling of Communism's eventual end, they again believed they were inhabiting an infinity, and it was not the pain of their current life but the vacuity of the future that sucked dry their energies, stifled their courage, and made that third 20-year span so craven, so wretched.

In 1921, convinced that with his 12-tone system he had opened far-reaching prospects to musical history, Arnold Schoenberg declared that thanks to him, predominance (he didn't say 'glory,' he said Vorherrschaft, 'predominance') was guaranteed to German music (he, a Viennese, didn't say 'Austrian,' he said 'German') for the next hundred years (I quote him exactly, he spoke of 'a hundred years'). A dozen years after that prophecy, in 1933, he was forced, as a Jew, to leave Germany (the very Germany for which he sought to guarantee Vorherrschaft), as was all his music based on his 12-tone system (which was condemned as incomprehensible, elitist, cosmopolitan, and hostile to the German spirit).

Schoenberg's prognosis, however mistaken, is nonetheless indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the meaning of his work, which he considered not destructive, hermetic, cosmopolitan, individualistic, difficult, or abstract but, rather, deeply rooted in 'German soil' (yes, he spoke of 'German soil'); Schoenberg believed he was writing not a fascinating epilogue to the history of Europe's great music (which is how I tend to see his work) but the prologue to a glorious future stretching farther than the eye could see."

It seems human nature to believe the way things are now is the way they will always be. Often in despair, more despair is all we can imagine. When we're on top of the world, nothing could bring us down. That present-moment experience of despair or joy, as Kundera alludes, is magnified by our perceived promise that our present predicts more-of-the-same.

Most of the time, 300 years of sadness runs out early. Or the glorious future stretching infinitely ahead is suddenly curtailed. Whether the surprise is from bad to good or good to bad, we never, ever know what today will be until we get there. Nothing is promised. Nor is anything doomed.

Yet it's difficult for human beings to live without the context of the past or the future. Today we remember - or repeatedly replay - what has been. Today we worry about tomorrow. We hope to be happy. Nobody easily turns that off, "and nobody gets out of it, having to swim through the fires to stay in this world."

Stephen Dunn likes to believe that at his eulogy he'll have been able to say, "The truth is, I learned to live without hope as well as I could, almost happily, in the despoiled and radiant now." Some might assign positive value to that lesson, some negative. (Personally I avoid assigning value unless it's real obvious, and here I don't think it is.)

But I'll venture at least that a "now" without hope (said differently, without attachment to the future) might result in less suffering, whether it's experienced in the context of gain or loss. If today is joyful, I'm going to live it for all it's worth, because I don't own tomorrow; I have little say in what it will bring. If today is sad, I'll sit with that sadness because today it is my house-guest... but I won't despair as though it's a permanently-settled-in couch surfer. :)

"The Guest House" (selection)
Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all.
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

everything.

I usually read for a bit in bed before I turn out the light. That's what I was doing a few minutes ago when I found this in an old collection of poetry (I keep folders stuffed with a mélange of photocopies; this was one).

I have no idea how I got it, but loved it enough to run back downstairs to share with you. Enjoy.

A favorite poet, Mary Oliver, writes about a favorite painter, Vincent van Gogh.
He said (which I often think of): "If one intensifies all the colors, one regains peace and harmony."

Mary says:

No doubt in Holland,
when van Gogh was a boy,
there were swans drifting
over the green sea
of the meadows, and no doubt
on some warm afternoon
he lay down and watched them,
and almost thought: this is everything.
What drove him
to get up and look further
is what saves this world,
even as it breaks the hearts of men.
In the mines where he preached,
where he studied tenderness,
there were only men, all of them
streaked with dust.
For years he would reach
toward the darkness.
But no doubt, like all of us,
he finally remembered
everything, including the white birds,
weightless and unaccountable,
floating around the towns
of grit and hopelessness --
and this is what would finish him:
not the gloom, which was only terrible,
but those last yellow fields, where clearly
nothing in the world mattered, or ever would,
but the insensible light.

you must become what you are.

Cities are traditionally cast as loud, lively places where there's too much going on to hear a thought in your head. Small towns and suburbs, on the other hand, are cast as sleepy places where you can hear the crickets chirping, see the stars at night. But I have to say that for me, cities have always been the place for silence and solitude.

Visiting Chicago, I returned reflexively to that mode: walking in silence for long stretches and staring out the windows of trains, a comfortingly insignificant part of the play. It's embarrassingly narcissistic (and unproductive) how long I can listen to myself think. And startling the space a city creates for it. There's so much life that you can be alone and never feel it. So much to see that you can look and look without ever bothering to touch. For me, I spent so much time crammed in with people, I forgot what it was like to let someone in.

The smaller town I live in now has moved in on that spacious silence. At least part of it has to be the South, where everyone seems ready to talk. Another part is the smallness of the sphere, where it is impossible to be anonymous. And I think part must be that when you're not routinely crowded in with others, you start paying more attention to the person next to you.

There is also room to be heard, and therefore someone is listening for you to speak. You can't get away with silent, receptive observation for very long. Instead, you have to enter into the conversation. What you are has to be shared, for better or worse. If you're not sure what you are, you'll inevitably start learning. Whatever ghosts you carry will come awake without the cornucopia of sights to distract them into slumber.

I confess I came to Chicago feeling a little sorry for myself, and Chicago let me keep that up. It was Gainesville that wouldn't let me get away with withdrawal and self-pity. Gainesville made the difference between enduring and flourishing. By then I had stopped using my voice for long enough that I wasn't certain what it sounded like or what I had to say anymore. Not being allowed to be silent helped me find it; after four years, I'm past starting to know.

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Two quotes from this past decade's theme: 1) A dear friend: "Shannon, I try to live with a rough sketch, a framework that leaves space for unexpected beauty to appear." 2) Natasha Bedingfield: "Drench yourself in words unspoken / live your life with arms wide open / to the years where your book begins / the rest is still unwritten." (A pop starlet singing about breaking tradition and being undefined is a little laughable, but it stuck with me even so.)

Erikson's stages are totally delayed for my generation; the twenties are our time of self-discovery. My roughly-sketched friend is now studying Nietzsche, who wrote an entire book on how one becomes what one is. His framework is still loosely structured, but it's building along the scaffolds of his self-discovery. He's going directions he'd been hesitant to take but never stopped loving, and has turned from the paths others chose for him. He is becoming what he is, like an internal compass whose magnet grows stronger as he discovers. And still, as he becomes, the future sprawls wide and mysterious before him.

Five years ago I was enamored with knowing my life could be anything, at ease with a shapeless future hovering somewhere out of sight. I'm still comfortable with - excited about - all I don't know. Still in love with the possibilities of this one wild, precious life. But it also couldn't be anything anymore. Now I know what inspires me, what burns me out, what's a misuse of what I can offer. I've surprised myself by being better at some things than I'd thought, and much worse at others. I better understand who I am, and that means I have an idea of where I'm going, as well as where I'm won't go. More and more these days, my magnet points the same way every time.

It is remarkable to discover you're not floating around full of possibility, but feeling a pull - which is still full of possibility. There will undoubtedly be a host of deviations I don't foresee, and passions I don't know about until I stumble on them and they catch fire. But with each, I'm becoming what I am. And I would bet: as that internal magnet grows stronger, you get better and better at navigating your way down the turns in the path.