Mid-Fall musings

It isn’t a big apartment—not even 1300 square feet. A kitchen, small dining area, living room, two bedrooms and bathrooms. Oh, and a small but enclosed laundry area. The whole apartment is carpeted with a beige-hued wool. And that carpet is carpeted with editions of the New York Review of Books and London Review of Books that extend back months! In whatever room I settle I have the option of a past issue of either journal. And there are also stacks of books—novels, today some memoirs for a course in at the U in which I am enrolled, memoirs at present but at other times the several surfaces have been littered with other genres. On the dining room table lays the daily New York Times and on a coffee table is the current Nation. And I am comforted by the silent company. There is no shortage of ready reading material. My floor to ceiling bookshelves sag under the weight of scholarly and frivolous tomes. And I must not forget the iPhone and the iPad, the former which I carry about and the latter always near at hand. In every room is a smart speaker that plays my music and holds back the silence. 

            But what I also seem to be saying is that I often feel that I am trying to fill the space with voices so as not to be alone or to be caught doing nothing in particular. To be just sitting and being still. To enjoy my comfort in being just solitary. As if to do so is somehow reprehensible. Emerson cautions that a thinking man is always alone and I think of myself as a thinking man. I believe that often my thoughts bud best when I am by myself, but it often occurs that I am alone when in the midst of a crowd and then I feel alive with the thoughts that circulate in and through me. Like even now as I write this seeming rambling post. Thoreau comments that “What do we want most to dwell near to  . . . but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar.” I have no cellar, but I have dug my cellar well and. At times I clear off the cellar’s door, put some of the older journals into the recycling bin and undertake to replenish the soils with other materials and matters.

            Tonight is Halloween. It has been many years since any child came trick or treating at my door., For years we lived in a rural environment and there were no witches and goblins ringing the front door bell. Many, many years. My own children were driven to neighborhoods to fill their bags. Sweetly we ate for a few days. Tonight again no one will ring my doorbell. Perhaps I will read a frightening story like Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart” or the front pages of today’s newspapers.

And then it will be November, and I will gather from out of doors my things and add too many of them onto the already doubly carpeted apartment floors. I will renew my subscriptions and settle into the reading chair and await the first snow.