The seasons all are fled and lo, are gone,
E’en those we ne’er shall live nor yet unfold,
They left but little ‘n this house forlorn,
Which thou didst never truly once behold.

The afternoons do speak thereof to me,
Which in a hush I cannot well abide,
I rinse with falsehoods and with sophistry
What faintly mimeth dream ere it subside.

And what I needs must suffer, naught beside,
For little may I ken of what thou writ’st
As now thou dost, in manner once supplied
By thee, when first my hand was taught and kiss’d.

The noisy litanies thereof do tell,
That lean upon this pounding in my brain,
From which I mumble, loiter, and rebel,
With pride unearn’d, as if a sage in vain.

And of it speaketh my insomnia’s spell,
Ah, my splendid foe, in tangles deft array’d,
Painted in anxious hues I know too well,
How much is lost of what once softly laid

That sense of yielding, leaning on thy side,
With belly full and peace ‘yond all mark,
Whilst thou wouldst hearken to my snoring cry,
As I in sleep grew monstrous, warm, and dark.

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(Im)pertinent Detour

There is a house. Let it be said plainly thus, ere the telling grow more difficult: there is a house, and it standeth yet, and the seasons have passed through it as water passeth through the hands of one that hath ceased to cup them with any purpose. They came, the seasons, bearing their various offices and ensigns, the frost with its white ordinance, the blossom with its brief and unconvincing argument, the long golden stupor of summer’s end, and they departed without salutation, and took with them such portions of time as had been allotted them, and also certain portions that had not, that belonged to years not yet arrived, to afternoons not yet endured, to a life not yet fully unfolded, which they carried off nonetheless, as bailiffs carry off the goods of those that cannot pay.

And what remaineth in the house is little.

The man that dwelleth therein hath learned, by long and involuntary apprenticeship, to move through the afternoons with a certain practised care, as one that walketh across ice of uncertain thickness and hath calculated, imperfectly, where it may be trusted to bear his weight. The afternoons are the most treacherous of hours. The mornings have their urgencies, their small violences of routine, their noise, which serveth, if not to silence the inward voice, then at least to make it necessary for that voice to raise itself somewhat above a whisper in order to be attended to. And the nights. Well, the nights belong to insomnia, which is another matter entire, and shall be treated of in its own season.

But the afternoons. Oh.

The afternoons speak.

Not in any tongue that may be set down and examined, not in syllables that might be contested or refuted, but in the manner of light upon a wall at a particular hour, or of the sound a house maketh when all its inhabitants are gone and it setteth about the slow business of its own subsidence; a creak, a settling, a sigh from somewhere in the timber that hath no ready explanation. In these the afternoons speak, and what they speak of is the one that is absent, who never truly looked upon this house, who passed through it perhaps with glancing and distracted eye, who could not have said with any sureness what colour the walls were painted, nor how the window in the eastern room gave its light in the late hours of a winter’s day.

And yet the house knoweth her. This is the injustice of it, the absurdity of it, the thing the man cannot set in order by any argument: the house knoweth her, and speaketh of her in its afternoon voice, and he must stand in the midst of it and receive what is spoken.

He hath devised remedies. He is not without resource. He hath an apothecary’s cabinet of falsehoods, of tinctures of sophistry, of preparations that, taken in sufficient quantity, do produce in the mind a condition resembling the absence of thought; or, if not the absence of thought, then at least its sufficient blurring as to rob it of precision, and what cannot be precisely felt cannot, perhaps, so precisely wound. He administers these preparations with the solemnity of one that hath long since lost faith in the physic but hath not yet devised a better course, and so continueth out of that most human of impulsions: the inability to stand still and receive.

He mumbleth. He loitereth. He rebelleth, after the fashion of one that hath no very clear notion of what he rebelleth against, nor toward what end the rebellion tendeth, but hath discovered that the posture of rebellion – the pride, the refusal, the set of the jaw – doth occupy the body in a manner that leaveth somewhat less room for the other thing. It is a sage’s vanity, he knoweth. It accomplisheth nothing. He knoweth this also. He perseveres withal.

Then the night. Oh.

The night.

Insomnia is a most excellent and terrible companion, and the man hath kept her company long enough to know her fashions and her stratagems. She is not, as the ignorant suppose, merely the absence of sleep: she is a presence entire, wilful and particular, with her own preferred hours and her own preferred subjects of discourse. She hath a fondness for the hour between two and four of the clock, wherein the darkness is most absolute and the rest of the world most completely committed to its oblivion; it is then she arrriveth at her most elaborate, adorning herself with anxious hues and complex arrangements, laying out before the waking mind such tapestries of dread and longing and futile calculation as would be the envy of any craftsman, did any craftsman have cause to envy the products of suffering.

She speaketh of what is lost.

She speaketh of it with the thoroughness of one that hath catalogued every article and findeth the inventory a source of inexhaustible fascination. She speaketh of the letters he no longer receiveth — for she writeth yet, he supposeth, after the manner once familiar, the hand moving across the page in its accustomed fashion, forming words addressed now to some other quarter of the world — and of the strange and bitter novelty of ignorance, of not knowing what passeth in the mind that he once had occasion to know somewhat better, or believed he did, which amounteth perhaps to the same thing.

And then, in the deep watches, when even insomnia hath grown somewhat hoarse from the exertions of the night, she bringeth out her most particular and most devastating instrument, the one for which he hath no remedy in all his cabinet:

The memory of peace.

Not of joy, beware, joy is a large and dramatic condition and may, with sufficient practice, be withstood. But of peace. Of that most specific and unrepeatable peace that hath no name in any of the philosophies, because the philosophies concern themselves with the great conditions of the soul and have not troubled to remark this smaller and more ordinary thing: the peace of the body satisfied and at rest, of the belly full, of the limbs laid down without any intention of service or performance, of the weight of another warmth beside one in the dark.

She would hearken. This is the thing that undoeth him, in the end, when all the other instruments of insomnia have done their worst and he hath endured them: the recollection that she would hearken. That in the passage from waking into sleep, when the body surrendereth its governance and the mind releaseth its customary orderliness and the mouth openeth of its own accord and produced whatever sounds it would, that in this moment of most complete and ungoverned surrender she would remain awake, or half-awake, and hearken, and did not withdraw, but abided.

He grew monstrous in sleep. He knew this. The body that presented itself to the waking world with such anxious attention to propriety became in sleep a thing ungoverned, large, warm, dark, breathing with great and indiscriminate energy, filling its portion of the bed and perhaps somewhat beyond, making its various unconscious declarations without apology. And she would hearken. And she would abide.

This is the thing that the afternoon light speaketh of, in the house she never truly beheld. This is the thing that insomnia bringeth forth at last, in her most deft and cruel arrangement.

Not the grand losses. Not the large and nameable griefs, which have at least the dignity of their own proportions.

But this: the sense of yielding. The leaning. The peace beyond all marking. The being heard in sleep, and found, in one’s most monstrous and most undefended hour, sufficient.

The seasons continue their passage through the house. They take what they will.

The man standeth in the afternoon light, and receiveth what is spoken, and reaches for his cabinet, and findeth it somewhat less well-stocked than on the previous occasion.

Outside, the world pursueth its enormous and indifferent business. Somewhere, a hand moveth across a page. What it writeth, he cannot say.

The house settles. Sighs. Knows.

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