We\u2019re going on two months since the pandemic upended our daily lives, and what began \u2013 for many \u2013 as a long unexpected-but-not-entirely-unwelcome staycation is transitioning to a new normal, a world in which we are back to our lives and our jobs but at a careful distance, a summer without festivals and fairs, sports teams playing in empty stadiums. A year or more, perhaps, without singing in choirs or feeling comfortable hugging our friends, without visiting our elders in care facilities. Within myself, I am feeling increasingly restless and reckless, pulled between a desire for freedom from fear and a sense of social obligation, to continue to slow the spread and \u201cstay home, save lives\u201d as our governor implores. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I find myself meditating on a passage from The Living<\/em>, by Annie Dillard. The entire book, a work of historical fiction set in late 19th<\/sup>-century northern Washington State, is a reflection on what it means to be alive, to feel alive, to choose life over fear in a world defined by mortality. Within the context of frequent and unexpected death from accidents and disease, one of the main characters (Clare Fishburn) is under constant threat from an armed and mentally unstable man (Beal Obenchain) who wishes him dead. This leads to a climactic confrontation and a choice, a moment of clarity, a joyful and courageous surrender, as the character turns his back on the threat, accepts the possibility of death, and walks on (pp. 385-386):<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Obenchain stood and stopped him\u2014his face thickened under his hat\u2014and told him he was not going to kill him, he was not going to die, Clare looked out over the trestle and down to the water, where gulls flew without bending their wings. Obenchain was offering him a view he had to reject. The tide on the bay was slack at the flood. There was a plank walkway on the trestle by the rails. Clare moved onto the walkway, nodding and serious; he held his breath as if he were diving. The trestle quit the shore, and Clare stepped out over the bay and the strait in a socket of light. Sky pooled under his shoulders and arched beneath his feet. Time rolled back and bore him; he was porous as bones.<\/p> I love that passage because it combines remarkably evocative imagery of enduring natural beauty with the transience of human life, and Clare explicitly accepts the world as it is, complete with the ever-present possibility and ultimate inevitability of death, and chooses to ride the cresting wave of the present. And he does so without reference to a particular God or vision of the afterlife \u2013 which would limit relevance to those with similar beliefs – but simply a joyful commitment to this mysterious and miraculous experience of life that we all share. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When I think ahead to a year without gatherings, without contra dances and potlucks, without concerts, a year of fearing closeness rather than embracing it, a year of religiously washing our hands, wearing masks, keeping our distance from our parents and grandparents, I think of a song that my father wrote, to the melody of Tom Paxton\u2019s The Last Thing On My Mind:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018No,\u2019 he said to Obenchain \u2013 but Obenchain was already far behind him on the bluff, his head swaying up like a blind man\u2019s. No, indeed. The sky came carousing down around him. He saw the sun drenching the green westward islands and battering a path down the water. He saw the town before him to the south, where the trestle lighted down. Then far on the Nooksack plain to the east, he saw a man walking. The distant figure was turning pea rows under in perfect silence. He was dressed in horse\u2019s harness and he pulled the plow. His feet trod his figure\u2019s long blue shadow, and the plow cut its long blue shadow in the ground. The man turned back as if to look along the furrow, to check its straightness. Clare saw again, on the plain farther north, another man; this one walked behind a horse and turned the green ground under. Then before him on the trestle over the water he saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking darkly as it always walks in every season: it was plowing the men under, and the horses, and the plows. <\/p>
The earth was plowing the men under, and the horses under, and the plows. No wonder you are cold, he said to the broken earth, he said to the lighted water: you kicked your people off. No generation sees it happen, and the damp new fields grow up forgetting. He would return home and see his cedar shingles off on the train. Clare was burrowing in light upstream. All the living were breasting into the crest of the present together. All men and women and children spread in a long line, holding aloft a ribbon or banner; they ran up a field as wide as earth, opening time like a path in the grass, and he was borne along with them. No, he said, peeling the light back, walking in the sky toward home; no. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n