My father was a lawyer and businessman; my siblings, dot-com doohickey innovators. To them, your job should resemble a chase scene in a movie. You’re the good guy hunting the bad guy dollar—he’s firing a long gun at you. Apprehend the bastard and put him in the slammer, which is to say bank.
So, how on earth did I end up a writer and English professor? The answer lies in my time as an undergraduate at a small liberal arts college. Some very learned people not only showered attention on me, but they also encouraged me to sample a range of humanistic pursuits, including creative writing. They believed, you could say, in exposure, in what the brutal cold and snow of thought could do. Listen to the narrator of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”: “He sat and regained his breath, he noted that he was feeling quite warm and comfortable. He was not shivering, and it even seemed that a warm glow had come to his chest and trunk.” With paradox, there isn’t a need for matches. You discover that “freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die.”
In “Down to Our Ears,” I thank my Russian literature professor for teaching me the value of close reading, of starting with the specific and not the general. An image or phrase right in front of you—this one, for example, in Chapter XVII of Fathers and Sons: “Time, it is well known, sometimes flies like a bird, sometimes crawls like a worm; but man is wont to be particularly happy when he does not even notice whether it passes quickly or slowly.” Ten chapters later, Bazarov says to Anna Sergeyevna, “Live long, that’s the best of all, and make the most of it while there is time. You see what a hideous spectacle: the worm half-crushed, but writhing still.” Bazarov notices too much and thus happiness eludes him. But he’d make an excellent reader! He’d patiently track how the work of art emerges from its dynamic details, how it becomes what it is. “Capture the becoming,” I tell my own students.
Zamyatin’s We, Pilnyak’s The Naked Year, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita—these books renovated my mind. Suddenly, as a nineteen-year-old, I had an internal study and library. Suddenly, I had a huge family room of the word where writers I adored gathered. In the poem I suggest that close reading is the partner to “close living”: “a wish/ to be in it/ down to our ears…buried in detail.” Life can be arranged like a piece of music. This note, that one—the pattern they make. I’ve moved, I say, as a sea snail across the decades. Time, that wave, that water bully, did what it always does.
I’m now in my late-50s and at a point where many of my mentors have died or will soon die. Their books live on in the strange afterlife of the page. (We can’t read in the dark, so there must be a heaven!) I will retire in the next decade. Looking back, as I do in the poem about gardening, I see a neediness creep in. What has it all come to? Have I made a difference? Yes, I conclude, but no one is saved. And, anyway, beauty is best spent. Be profligate. We’re all just annuals, planting our replacements.
