There is No End to Williamstown

I went on vacation last weekend. Here is the schedule of things that I was under an obligation to do in the week immediately leading into last weekend:

Class: Monday, 630-830 (CANCELED)
Class: Tuesday, 620-820
Class: Wednesday, 330-530

So you might think it's idiotic that I should decide to take a vacation, and I might say: you are right. But I went on vacation anyway: I took a bus, on Friday morning, northwest to Williamstown Massachusetts, a place that I have been at least a little in love with since I went there as a side trip once in the late 1990s, on a family vacation to Boston, and my father took us to Colonial's Pizza which (prepare to have your mindgrapes squashed, Williams alumni) was at the time on Spring Street. I think it's important -- and important as a bookish person, no less -- to describe Williamstown as a place I have been at least a little in love with since the second Clinton administration because it is also the only place in the history of the world that I have found whose architecture and whose nature I found especially conducive to capital R Reading and capital W Writing.

"It would be no small advantage," Thoreau said, "if every college were thus situated at the base of a mountain." This is the ice-breaker of Williams commencement speakers from time immemorial (or at least time back to Thoreau, which, face it, is not memorialized properly). I have no idea if this is true, and I know of no possible way to test whether it is true; I find it even harder than this to determine whether finding out if it were true in any measurable sense is worth a damn. Would it be so great if we proved that it were less of an advantage to be located in smaller hills? Or on plains? I doubt it. But I can't care about that. At some level -- and I hate people who leave it at "some level", so let me offer the unpalatable but factual counterclaim, "my level" -- at my level, it is absolutely an advantage to have your college at the base of a mountain, because it is my mountain. When I realize that the bus that I'm on is going up -- not just west or north, but UP -- my heart, as silly as it sounds, goes up. The mountains, the mountains, yeah, I greet them with a song.

My big plan for my ersatz vacation was to go to the mountains and sit there reading a whole hell of a lot of Judith Butler, who writes on things like indefinite detention and precarious life, and Jacques Derrida on metaphors, and I read a fair bit from them, for my classes, for what I'm doing just right now. But I also brought, as a sort of off-hours plan -- a vacation plan -- Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, to read for fun. And because I am, I guess, perversely more committed to anything I'm doing for nominal fun over anything I'm doing for nominal work, the only one of the many books that I brought (mostly for work) that I finished was A Moveable Feast. That book is a book a person living with very little money in Paris in the 1920s, but more universally it is a book about a person who is a writer, and why he wrote at a particular time in his life, and the circumstances surrounding him as he did so. And of course, this is the part with which I fell in something like love. Bolstered and given breath by his place, Hemingway bets and eats and discusses, but more than anything else he WRITES. The thing he comes up with is The Sun Also Rises. Which is pretty damn good. Pretty incredible, really.

The work that anyone has to do is the work they have to do, and there are going to be people sitting around wondering whether or not the work has got done. There are people -- people whom I quite like -- who had a very vested interest in determining whether or not I had got through all of my Butler, or all of my Derrida. The work in front of you is going to sit there and get done or undone forever, and the accidents of your life are going to adjust themselves exactly as they should, relative to this sort of thing. But there is, of course, a thing that is not an accident; there is a thing that you can make into your work that no one is going to look at, and that is what you can WRITE. So write when you see your mountains that you've loved for all of your life that matters a damn; write when you see flatness that is all you've ever come to expect; write when you've got nothing else to do to situate yourself between the buildings that make up your landscape. But you've got something in front of you, or that you can get in front of you that, for Christ's sake, you can write about. Write it down. Make words out of the accidents you've got. It's what they are there for. And Williamstown is a moveable feast.

Yes, You

The day after Valentine's Day, I went to the bookstore, because I go to the bookstore like every day. I don't have enough money to buy books every day, and I don't have enough time to read through a book every day, but I go anyway. Just look at the books and such. Anyway, I went to the Strand, and then I went across Union Square to the giant Barnes and Noble, and I started looking at the poetry books. As you know, it is never too early to start getting excited for National Poetry Month, and every year, around this time (or rather, that time, the day after Valentine's Day and continuing up to and through now), I decide to start revving up the poetry engine. So I stood in the little section and read two poems by Frank O'Hara and one by Anna Akhmatova and one by Ted Hughes. Then I realized that I couldn't remember the first line of the ee cummings poem that I had used as one of my Poems in my Pocket for Poem in Your Pocket Day 2008, and started flipping through one of the ee cummings Collected Poem books.

I eventually found the one that I was looking for -- "somewhere i have never traveled gladly beyond" -- but before that, the book fell open to a different poem, which is called "since feeling is first". The reason that the book fell open to that poem, is because the book had stuck in it at that page, as a sort of bookmark, a red construction paper heart, with "You are loved" written on the obverse, and "Yes, you" written on the reverse. This was strange.

The poem is very good -- it's about the textiness of life versus the feeling of life, the latter of which is represented by kissing and the former of which is represented by what's called, in the third line, "the syntax of things". The last line of the poem, which makes a bold claim along this axis (and which was the only line of the poem I remembered, and by which I just found it on google) is "And death i think is no parenthesis." Good stuff, romantic stuff. So what on earth did it mean that the book had a red construction paper heart, with that double message on it, next to this poem? I developed two sorts of theories.

A) On the first theory, the construction paper heart was stuck into the book while it was in private ownership, and then it was returned to the giant Barnes and Noble on 17th Street. This is actually a galaxy of mini-theories. Maybe someone gave it to their beloved, as a gift, and the beloved returned it. Maybe the beloved returned it because they failed to reciprocate the love of the lover. Maybe they returned it because they wanted a different book instead. Maybe someone prepared the book with the construction paper heart, realized that the beloved already owned the collected work of ee cummings, and took it back him- or herself. These theories, especially imagining the book as a Valentine's Day gift already repatriated the day after Valentine's Day, take their appropriate places across a spectrum of more or less sadness.

B) The other theory is weirder, and of course suggests the alternative explanation that the construction paper heart was neither forgotten nor unnoticed, but put into a book that had been, and remained, the property of Barnes and Noble. This is strange. Even I think that leaving messages in bookstore books is strange, and I once drafted (though wimped out of delivering) a note to whomever had checked out the first volume of In Search of Lost Time from the Lockport Public Library (my brilliant plan was to leave the note in Volume II, so that the person would have to prove her commitment before being invited into my Proust Appreciation Society). Maybe the person who left the heart loves everybody, or maybe the person just loves everyone who would read ee cummings. But why stick a message of love that is nothing more than syntax next to a poem all about the syntax-defeating power of kissing?

I didn't buy the book; I hope that someone has, and I hope they got something out of the construction paper heart, with its oddly insistent message, and that they enjoyed the poem next to it to believe and disbelieve the construction paper heart at the same time. Osculum vincit omnia. It's a strange thing to meet just words that tell you emphatically that you are loved: after all, life is not a paragraph. But I guess that the intervention wasn't just words, either: it was also a heart made out of red construction paper.