Old English Major Tells All

     Thirty-one years later, I still have tiny seizures of memory about the writers I loved in college. Whatever was contained between the covers of their books enlarged upon entry, like stepping outside from within a dark and tiny house: the sensation of the sun on your arms and the endless sky.
     Not too long ago I bought another copy of the old Norton anthology, my first literary companion and still the ultimate symbol of my education. The swayback enormity of its pumpkin orange spine arched in an ever-greater curve with each use, each consultation by a student. Like the Bible, its thousands of onion-skin pages spoke with a bygone authority: Here is everything you need to know.
     The bookstore with the wagon wheel is still there, a compartment in the tiny do-nothing shopping mall south of the campus. Walking through its series of rooms was the first time I felt the restrictions—the bite—of economy, longing for the complete novels of Jane Austen or a set of Proust or a particularly old edition of Pylon.

     It was something more than leftover passion that couldn't find a resolution in my girlfriend or was undisclosed for the rare males in my life—what I felt for Virginia Woolf and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Those years formed a vortex into which were sucked not only my reading and artistic discoveries but also my first conscious appreciation of the autumn landscape, the pleasure of food, and even the pop ballads of the time. The integration persists, so that today the taste of tomato paste or the sound of Gerry Rafferty singing "Baker Street" unlock all the sensations with a single key. 
     My heart responded to the enigma of these writers and their celebrated disclosures as it would to the eyes and lips of a lover—with the same urgency to understand and possess—and with the same emotional byproducts.
     Writing my lengthy paper on Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" felt like a brief affair. The unintelligible music of the poem's lines was a kind of literary glossolalia—a grunt of (refined) passion. Flipping through the armfuls of critical studies I carried back to my oak study carrel, I became involved in the sorcery of literary interpretation:

The sea, therefore, symbolizes the principle of maternity, which is to say birth and life. She whispers "death," but coming from the rocker of the "cradle," the implication is that death is but a natural transition to rebirth.

Owning just a vinyl shaving case, three or four changes of clothes, a turntable, a set of the Rachmaninoff symphonies, and my books, I was in an ideal state of monkish poverty to be swept away by culture. My life in the briefness of winter afternoons was reduced to the trickle from a single stream. It was the continuation of a recipe that had been the only workable one for me since childhood: the restriction of social interaction to a single, powerful individual, coupled with a self-driven intellectual focus. My visions compounded.
     Now so much of the writing strikes me as elitist chatter or frank careerism. I continue to have my moments of discovery—a sort of topographical or historical or post-gastronomical Sehnsucht—but they rarely correspond to literature, or to the expressions of any specific artist. In books I was searching for a confirmation of my own unarticulated experience: my own thoughts in snappier prose. But the moment of ah ha! rarely came, and somewhere around the age of 42 I started to manufacture it myself. Never again will the sky be so high, or so clear.
     I kept a few heroes, however, more because of their lives and—perhaps most of all—for their mistakes: loving and vital; talented and wrong-headed; dedicated to satisfactions and the discharging of some singular, urgent idea at the cost of sustained success or personal longevity. A handful of half-remembered lines or sections of prose can still sometimes set the bar for my own efforts. Of the few I can think of easily, this is surely one. From Robert Lowell's "The Public Garden":

All's alive—
the children crowding home from school at five,
punting a football in the bricky air,
the sailors and their pick-ups under trees
with Latin labels. And the jaded flock
of swanboats paddles to its dock.
The park is drying.
Dead leaves thicken to a ball
inside the basin of a fountain, where
the heads of four stone lions stare
and suck on empty fawcets.