Fifty Days of Solitude Read Online Free PDF Page B

living creature in the house. A horde of large black flies had taken refuge around the window frames in the bedrooms. Prudently, they had come in from the cold to live as long as they could in a milder climate. I wondered what sustenance they found on the wood and glass of the southeast windows, but I understood their affinity for the radiating sun. As long as they did not come closer in search of greater warmth when I was reading in bed I practiced my usual tolerance for living things and my dislike of killing them under any pretext.
    But one night my lamp, my book, and I were attacked by an extended family of flying seekers after light and heat. My first instinct was to slap at them madly. So inept was I (I was wearing Sybil’s Soviet mittens) that I missed them all and succeeded only in sending them back to their old berths in the window. I turned out the light so they would not be tempted to return, although I was not tired and wanted to continue reading. But I felt the truce that we had formed in the darkness—they in their place, I in mine—was preferable to mass slaughter. Eventually, pleased with my pacifism, I fell asleep.
    O NE morning there were huge black crows at the feeder, and no one else. They seemed to have frightened the small birds away permanently. Forty or so eider ducks remained in the cove, swimming decorously, almost parading, across the frigid water in the morning and back again at dusk. I shuddered to think how cold they must be and then applauded their gallantry at not leaving me for the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico.
    Befriended in this way—by crows and ducks and black flies—how could I feel lonely or alone in this place?
    D ID I think more about age, aging, being and growing old when I was alone? I think so. I had no resident check on my despair, no one to point out how lucky I was to be here in order to despair. Solitude became the rich breeding ground for my natural depression because I had ruled away every possible deterrent: phone calls, dinners out, television, even the radio most of the time, preferring to choose the music I wished to hear on tapes or CDS .
    I played operatic music and musicals while I worked, and one day reduced myself to tears by listening to La Cage aux Folles . In its uncritical, sentimental way, it celebrates elderly love, fidelity, and acceptance between lovers of the same sex. I could not bear it and had to change the tape to something chillier, more coldly classic: Bach, I think it was.
    When I am among people I have usually been able to forget, or bury, or disguise, my despondency. Without company I have had to remember that despair is always lurking beyond the circle of lamplight, the flames of the woodstove, the warmth of the gas oven. If I took steps into any dark place I was once again afraid, despairing, and aware of how old I was and how young I would give anything to be.
    S OMEONE once told me that my mind was too Gothic, that my mental life was lived in dark, medieval towers and dungeons. What I needed, he said, was brighter, more cheerful interior decoration. I thought about this, in one of those evenings when I was “low,” and decided that when I was young my Buckminster Fuller mind was furnished with Marcel Breuer furniture and Formica countertops, but there occurred a rapid retreat as I grew older, a relapse into the decor of Edward and Victoria.
    I N search of parallels to my experience, to what it was like to walk out on the bare deck and see the moonlit night sky and the frozen waters of the reach, I remembered that Beryl Markham, the intrepid pilot of a small plane that delivered mail in east Africa in the 1930s, wrote in her autobiography ( West with the Night ) about sitting by a camp-fire before the tents with a few natives and two friends, Bror Blixen and Winston Guest, meditating on primordial Africa:
    It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation’s hour had left it.… In a sense it was formless.