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This essay was resurrected from an old blog entry and published
yesterday, 12/22/13, in the Concord Monitor.
“We are standing before a great lake…and suddenly
we are returning to a distant past. We dream while remembering. We remember
while dreaming… The little becomes big. The world of childhood reverie is as big,
bigger than the world offered to today’s reverie… And that is why childhood is
the origin of the greatest landscapes. Our childhood solitudes have given us
the primitive immensities.” –
Gaston Bachelard [i]
Thirty years ago, I took this photograph of my son gazing
out on Jenness Pond in front of my parent’s house, the house I grew up
in. I remember it was a brutal, bone-chilling day in early
December. We had come down to see if the lake was totally frozen over and
to pull the boat up on the bank to safety before it was entombed by the
thickening ice.
The shore we
pulled the boat up on has special meaning to me; it had also been my resting
place. More than 50 years ago, during my young teenage years, I spent a
lot of time on this spot, lost in reverie. Yankees of my generation
weren’t encouraged to just sit and think but it was okay if a person did
something real like hunt–and that was my sport and also a way to put a little
food on the table. By the age of ten I was hunting on my own and that
autumn and subsequent ones, I sat here at dusk, camouflaged by the low-hanging
pine boughs, hoping to hear quacks and the swish of beating wings, signaling
the arrival of a flock of migrating ducks.
Much of the
time it was stone quiet as I sat in solitude looking over at Catamount Mountain
on the far side of the lake. Occasionally I would hear the hum of a vehicle and
watch its lights as it skirted the shore and then snaked up the hill before
disappearing over the top.
In my
reverie, I imagined that at the top of the mountain, each car was escaping the
drab unreality of my world to join the “real world” of substance and
excitement.
David Foster
Wallace once said, “There’s this
existential loneliness in the real world. I don’t know what you’re thinking or
what it’s like inside you, and you don’t know what it is like inside me.” [ii]
From my
present vantage point in life at age sixty-eight, I think Wallace makes a
profound statement about our individualistic society, perhaps all human
societies, and, at least, the 1950s culture I grew up in. Looking back on it, I
can see why my world did not seem real, over and above the fact that I was shy
and rurally isolated. It was more than that. And it was more than growing
up in a reserved, middle class, New England family lacking plain talk or honest
emotion. It was more than that. Looking back it seems everyone was
playing a role without knowing why, looking over their shoulders, afraid of
mushroom clouds, commies under the bed, and, most of all, not being just like
everyone else.
But I didn’t
know all that then.
All I knew was
that I felt trapped like the boat in the photograph engulfed in thickening ice.
My escape was to go to the lake and sit nestled under the protective canopy of
pines, luxuriating in reverie, imagining all the revelations that awaited me on
the other side of Catamount Mountain.
It was a rude
awakening a few years later when I finally managed to scale that mountain and
find out what was on the other side: Rather than discovering the nirvana I had
imagined, I found that the “real world” was itself the culprit, the true source
of the existential loneliness I was trying to escape.
It took many
years for this lesson to sink in, to admit that poets and philosophers like
Gaston Bachelard were right: childhood reverie “is the origin of the greatest landscapes,” bigger and more
nourishing than the world.
XXX
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