“An Insufferable Prig”

A month of my hospital-, friend visiting-, spouse birthday-, nephew wedding- and Thanksgiving-doings, the manufacture of home-made gifts of the literary variety as well as the writings and mailings of Christmas newsletters and a brief excursion to Cambridge, MA have eaten November.  Chapter Two remains unfinished, but I have submitted my three novellas to Kindle for their consideration, in an offhand sort of way.  The incredible rains of last week are gone, the limbs are cleared out and the sun is very much out in Berkeley, CA.  There has been an earthquake today in Japan, but with “only” a one-meter tsunami.  Is that appropriate for a “date that will live in infamy?”  Yesterday was Saint Nicholas’ Day, and children in the Netherlands looked in their shoes to see what Sinte Claas brought them.  I have been out on Santa’s behalf, scouring odd corners of the town for stocking stuffers appealing to 20-somethings.

But the “brief excursion to Cambridge, MA” has probably left the deepest impression of all… except that I am naturally hoping that the “off-hand mailing” will really amount to something.  Really being someplace makes all the difference, doesn’t it?  Really sleeping in the same building where Robert Frost spent the last twenty years of his life, really hearing gorgeous music on the spot where the original Congregational church stood (and the current one is not so young, either), really, really reading a collection of Longfellow poetry a few doors away from where he lived and wrote it, really moseying past where Joan Baez and Bob Dylan got their start in folk-singing or where Washington first mustered and trained the Continental army, really knowing that it was here that people decided both that education must be required of every citizen and that the Church must get out of that education, at least at Harvard… even just looking up and seeing the little window at Harvard square reading DEWEY, CHEATHAM & HOWE, marking the office where “Car Talk” was taped, all those times… all this confirms the notion that people who make a start at something really matter, that each person really matters, and that believing that really matters.  It also matters that we examine what we do, and why we do it.

Something in the severe self-examination in the literary air of our little top-floor room must have set my spiritual antennae waving, for the very night we arrived, I had the strongest sense of being SUCH a prig!  Yes, the phrase insufferable prig leapt to mind as Robin complained mildly that I had been nagging him ceaselessly for the last few days and if possible moreso during the weary, hungry hours after we arrived and began foraging for dinner at 9:30 p.m. or so.  All at once, I saw myself in the stark, Puritan light of Cambridge, and it wasn't pretty:  a know-it-all, pedantic, self-righteous schoolmarm, thinking she is somebody, pretending to write legible prose, intending to dust off and brush up her poetry:  a dallier, a dilettante, a sponge and yes, an insufferable prig, always telling people what to do and how to do it, judging, correcting… how could anyone stand to be near me? 

Increasingly on edge as to what the publisher will say about my novel waiting patiently on his desk to be re-read, increasingly self-critical for both my wild hopes and my despair, puffed-up at the least sign of praise for stories I love, spending whole days focussed on my own creative process, a deeply selfish enterprise, I had become a jangling ganglion of self-love and self-loathing, lashing out at my own best-beloved as if to blame him for an imperfect world.  What rot!

Yet, having realized all that, I also realized that I was becoming hyper-sensitive to things “not done right” for the first time in a very long time, and that, with considerable dialing-back of sensitivity levels – and stiff resolution not to say whatever comes into my head, whenever it comes there – I saw that after months of numbness, of stumping dully along like some saddle-sore mule, I might just be growing younger again, and might have recovered a long-missing bounce-in-the-step.  Nerve-endings seemed to be working again, certainly, if perhaps unfortunately for everyone around me!  All the same, the stinging correction was liberating as well as painful, like a snake peeling off an old skin and sliding forth quite new and clean.  Quite empty, I roamed the streets, took the subway to the art museum, wandered at will through the art and lost myself in familiar and unfamiliar poetry and delighted to learn all I could: all the above for starters.