For those of us who understand the base-10 mathematics on which western culture relies, the third millennium of the Common Era began not on January 1, 2000, but on January 1, 2001. New year, new century, new millennium: no one now living will ever see that confluence again.
No equivalent this momentous New Year’s Eve of the premature hoopla of the previous December. Instead, we got a near-blizzard to mark the occasion. I preferred it that way, actually. I love heavy snow in the city, especially here on the Island. It slows everything down, suspends time, drapes a soft hush over the world, emphasizes the underlying, enduring rural aspect of life here in the most outer of the outer boroughs, and — for me, at least — creates a profoundly meditative psychological space.
By coincidence, after over a decade of faithful service my water heater gave up the ghost just a few days after Christmas, so I spent the last few days of the year organizing a replacement, boiling water for sponge baths, showering at some friends’ apartments, and generally looking after my personal support system. My goal proved simple: to enter the new year with all systems go. It worked out fine; at 3 o’clock in the afternoon of December 31st I stood in my own bathtub under a hot shower, washing away the last of the twentieth century.
Hunkering down and keeping warm during those last twentieth-century days and nights, I found myself eating home-made pea soup and bread I’d baked myself, as peasants did in the heart of winter a thousand years go. Adrift in this bubble of slow time, I found myself thinking long thoughts, reviewing my life, and asking some hard questions about where I’ve come from and where I’m headed.
I’ve spent this past decade on the road, working my ass off, taking care of family business and various professional commitments and, on top of that, rehabbing the house I live in. All of that has come to fruition and/or closure (well, the house isn’t quite completed; another six months to go). I’m glad to have done it all, and have no regrets: In all cases, I consider the energy well spent.
But I’m frazzled, tired of living out of a suitcase and sleeping in unfamiliar beds, coming home to a tangle of construction and sealed boxes of personal possessions. My life has become much too fragmented and disorganized. I feel like a traveling salesman. I want a home, and a home base. I also want a home life, a social life, a personal life, and a private life that don’t all face constant travel-related disruption. I need stability, and continuity, and a sense of place, and greater engagement with my community.
This has proven an extraordinary year. The car crash, the pilgrimage to my childhood home in France, my mother’s passing, all of which I’ve written about here, plus the publication of several books (including my first volume of creative writing), and a week I spent in Paris in early December, variously consolidated feelings, revealed things to me, brought closure to diverse issues and commitments, opened doors. I’m in very good shape, I think. But I’m not living the way I want to. I’m not satisfied with the quality of my life. I’ve no desire to retire (I don’t even know what that idea represents in my context), or to become less productive. However, I want more time to myself, for creative ends. I want to entertain my friends in my new home. I want to build/rebuild a personal and professional network. I want to reengage with a major research project I’ve put off for a decade. I want to live the life of the mind. And I want to spend more time, literally and metaphorically, in the cafés. So I need to make some substantial adjustments to my current way of life.
How will I do that? To start with, by taking a step back and getting the long view of things as they stand in the present. My work will carry me to the southwest from mid-January through mid-March; by the time your read this I’ll be residing temporarily in Las Vegas, that weird and most American of all cities — teaching at the University of Nevada and, in my spare time, reviewing the lessons I learned in the twentieth century, preparing myself to live as a twenty-first century human, acquiring some new skills, redefining myself, and plotting some updated courses of action.
Yet I do so fully aware of the fact that life is, indeed, what happens when you’re making other plans. If I needed proof of that, the past decade handed me an ample supply. But in fact I knew that already. When I started writing this column, back in 1997, several people asked me what direction it would take. I’m a practicing Buddhist, and one of the tenets of my faith is this: The path is the goal.
Once, a quarter of a century ago, a mentor of mine — a zen master disguised as a failed writer — stopped me in my tracks on a sunny spring day as we strolled the Lower East Side in New York, so that he could teach me a lesson. We’d been talking about the study of art. “Here’s how I look at a sculpture,” Charlie Devlin said suddenly, instructing me to stand stock-still; then — as passers-by gaped — he proceeded to bob and weave around me for ten full minutes, even jumping up in the air and getting down on his hands and knees to achieve different vantage points. It was a virtuoso rendering of the choreography of observation, an analytical cubist’s lindy-hop. No one had ever paid such close visual attention to me as a physical object in my life. “I look at a person the way I look at a sculpture,” he told me when he’d done. I never looked at either the same way again.
If true knowledge has to be earned (and I think it must), then you acquire it only by putting ideas to the test of experience. So the wish to have known something before you learned it the hard way doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. And it seems to me that when someone else’s wisdom resonates for you, it’s not because they’ve spared you the pain of learning it for yourself, but because they’ve helped you see that you’ve already passed that test and don’t have to repeat the course. The “price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice,” in Bob Dylan’s words, is learning your lessons the first time around.
Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way, a few assumptions I’m carrying from the previous century into this new one:
• Lip service is better than no service at all.
• Money from home always comes out of the apron pocket.
• Free advice is worth every penny it costs you.
• Do not protect yourself from heartbreak. Unless interfered with, the heart is a self-repairing aspect of the psyche. Guard instead against your tendencies to relish your own damage or even seek it out, and to stand in the way of your own healing.
• You know something’s a matter of principle if you’ve paid a price for it. Until then, it’s just an attitude.
• There’s no future in nihilism.
A happy new year, new century, and new millennium to you all.
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