From My Microcosmos
In May, I could say that my world consisted of my house and the hills above it and another house and the woods around it. Now it’s late August and the woods a mile from the second house are burning. The air I breathe at house one smells and has the ash of several fires.
My life has become remarkably constrained, although I still communicate with others and they sometimes appear at my door or even come in and have a drink or dinner. I dream of society, but in my waking hours, I don’t crave it. In fact, I’m glad to be relieved of the comings and goings the larger cosmos demanded. Visual communication takes me to Seattle, Berlin, and Montréal, as well as to the study of a friend in Oakland and the living-writing space of a friend who lives only a block or two away. Mornings and evenings, I check the fire map to see if the second house is still standing or if the fire has consumed it. So far, it’s intact. House one, also in a fire zone, was the subject of a warning. Lightning storms are the current plague or the latest addition to the even bigger current plague, which has persisted now for five months.
Bulletins arrive whenever I decide to glance at them. I donate money to different causes. Two canvassers for a local candidate appeared and we spoke. At certain points, I go out to the back garden, stopping to pick ripe tomatoes, and then opening up the barn and reading one or another book. The heat of the afternoon causes me to nap, but recently it cooled down and I looked at a trove of photos I found, a record of travels, family events, art I made and its visual sources, and other things.
The barn has the bulk of my library and most of what I’ve written that isn’t preserved elsewhere. It has more books than there are shelves, so everything is doubled-up. Finding books is difficult. Still, I eventually find them. The ones I’m reading “currently” I keep close at hand.
I read slowly. I vowed to do so after tiring of the pace of academic reading. I have a good memory for what I read, but only if I read it at my own pace.
Everything is slow. This is the nature of microcosmic life. This doesn’t mean that I don’t move around, but much of the time, I’m in one place or another. What’s strange is that I have no real desire to be elsewhere. When the weather is good, I sometimes walk a circuit that takes me uphill and then back down again — about 30 minutes in total. It’s good to do it, and I enjoy the walk, but I do it more from a sense of obligation than for pleasure. Visits to house two are like this — I’m glad to be there when I am, but I’m also glad to be back.
When I think about my travels, often to places at a considerable distance, the return is the real pleasure. I look at my photos and remember what I felt at certain points. I’m not an especially good traveler, although I’ve learned to avoid the depression that can readily overtake me.
My strategies are to have a program and to return fairly quickly. Within the microcosm of house one and its garden, my days are more fluid. This may seem preposterous to an outsider, but it makes sense to me and has supported considerable productivity. It reflects the way the accoutrements of life let me connect with others without our having to meet.
Somewhere in this is a clue about how I might live even without the pandemic. It’s a version of the hermitage to which men of the world once retired to do their own work. For once, they no longer answered to others, except as they chose to do so. They detached themselves from that.
