Falling Through Space Read online

  A rich man is always afraid he will lose his money. At any moment the treasure he so desired may be stolen or taken from him and then where will he be?

  I want to talk to you this morning about another kind of richness. A richness that is represented by and kept safe in and passed on by colleges and libraries, the repositories of the best ideas man has ever had. The poetry and philosophy and knowledge of the physical universe that thousands of minds over thousands of years have left here for your teachers to pass on to you.

  The men and women who have taught you, for your sake, and for their own, and for the sake of all mankind, have been attempting piece by piece and bit by bit to give you some part of that incredible inheritance. If nothing else to awaken in you in a hunger for more of this sort of knowledge.

  Do not go out into the world and read only newspapers and magazines and watch the unbelievably impoverished and hypnotic junk that is on television. Do not get your fiction and myth from movies and your philosophy and poetry from magazines. It is not only because I write books that I want you to read them. But because I don’t want to live in a world where most of the people I pass on the street haven’t had anything to think about all week but headlines in newspapers and the stuff that passes for entertainment on television. I have worked for television and magazines. I know how frightened and scattered the people are who make the stuff you are being bored and confused and brainwashed by.

  Enough. I swore I wouldn’t preach to you. I swore I wouldn’t act like you were on your way to the North Pole and I was the last agent at the last commissary passing out supplies for the trip and that if I forgot to give you anything you couldn’t get it where you are going.

  If you leave here and never read real books anymore, hard books, the kind that can’t be read while watching television, then you will be going somewhere where the things I want to give you aren’t available.

  I spent several weeks walking around my house trying to write this speech. I was getting a lot of advice from all around town and on the phone from California and New York and Jackson, Mississippi.

  My mother called at least three times to beg me not to sound like an agnostic. My editor kept worrying that I would talk to you about freedom and forget to say that freedom entails responsibility. A young friend who works for Skyways said she thought maybe it would be better if I didn’t write it down but just got up and talked.

  My lawyer said he thought I should talk to you about kissing since that is probably the only thing you haven’t already been lectured to about and since it might be the most honest and meaningful thing most of you would be doing from now on.

  That was a strange and complicated thing to say, and not entirely cynical. My own best idea was to walk up to the microphone and tell you the only role I ever wanted was to be the mother in the musical Hair who climbs up on the stage clutching her pocketbook and says, “Now, kids, do whatever you want to do, be whatever you want to be, as long as you don’t hurt anybody. And, remember, I am your friend.”

  By last Saturday I was getting frantic. I never have trouble writing anything. Writing is as natural to me as talking. This is the most trouble I have gone to in years to write something. Finally, I went out and walked around the mountain and decided what to do. I decided to tell you the best things I know. They were written by other men and women. I found them inside the covers of books that were hard to read. I found them and learned them and they represent the true riches of my life.

  These things came from books that were the products of long hours and days of thought and editing, visions and revisions, the best parts of the best minds that have ever lived on earth, the essence, your real and true inheritance, that no one can cheat you out of, or steal from you or take from you in any way. As long as there are colleges and libraries and free men this inheritance will be waiting for you and you can come and get some of it whenever you get tired of kissing.

  Here are some samples of what is waiting. This is from the first volume of the autobiography of Bertrand Russell. From the prologue, called “What I Have Lived For.”

  Three passions, simple but ungovernably strong, have ruled my life. The longing for love, the search for wisdom and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

  I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy, ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of my life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it next, because it relieves loneliness, the terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I have sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what, at last, I have found.

  With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

  Love and knowledge, as far as they were possible, led upwards towards the heavens, but always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil but I cannot and I too suffer.

  This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

  Try reading that on a rainy day when you are lonely or a long way from home.

  And now I’m going to read you what is perhaps my single favorite piece of writing. It is from The Once and Future King, by T. H. White.

  “The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then, to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the MIND can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn — pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics — why, then you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.”

  “Apart from all those things,” said the Wart. “What do you suggest for me just now?”

  I raised my children with that quotation for advice. It’s what I did instead of feel sorry for them. The Once and Future King. It took T. H. White twenty-five years to write that book.

  Here is a piece of your inheritance that was written thousands of years ago by a man named Heraclitus. “All men are deceived by the appearances of things, even Homer himself, who was the wisest man in Greece; for he was deceived by boys catching lice; they said to him, ‘What we have caught we have left behind, but what has escaped us we bring with us.’”

  Lastly, I would like to read you two lines from Eudora Welty’s wonderful, outrageous book, The Robber Bridegroom. It takes place on the Natchez Trace and concerns a number of characters, including the infamous bandits, Little Harp and Big Harp. “Little Harp hated to see anything penned up. Anything he
saw penned up he would turn loose, himself included.” And so, in the spirit of Little Harp, I turn you loose to do anything you want to do and be anything you want to be, as long as you don’t hurt anybody, and promise to read some books. Go in peace then, and remember, I am your friend.

  Further Reflections

  In Praise of the Young Man

  HE WAS twenty-six and I was forty-four. He took me down rivers in canoes and built fires in the woods for me and taught me not to be afraid. I followed him places I had always dreamed of going. When I was a child, my father and my brothers would strike out for the woods leaving me behind. This time I was not left behind. I was the cause of the expeditions. I was the girl sitting on the floor of the canoe reading fashion magazines while my beautiful lover guided the canoe over treacherous waters. Could I have resisted such seduction? Could anyone have resisted it?

  I lost ten pounds the first month 1 knew him. I lost twenty years. At a time when most women my age are worrying about menopause I thought I was pregnant when I stopped menstruating. That was completely impossible since I had had a tubal ligation years before; still, the idea was exciting and later I wrote a novel out of the fantasy and made a lot of money from it.

  He taught me to shoot pool. He bought me a baseball shirt with blue sleeves. He made love to me one afternoon in the back seat of a car. I had never made love in an automobile. I thought it was hilarious. I thought it was the freest and funniest thing I had ever done. Beside a lake, in a remote part of a national park, I took off my underpants and made love in the back seat of a car.

  He taught me to sing. He taught me that if you know the words you won’t forget the tune. He taught me to sing, “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” He would let me sing it over and over again when we went on car trips.

  He sang to me. He would take his guitar out of his guitar case and sit on my piano bench tuning it for a long time before he began to sing. He would sing songs he was composing and songs he was practicing and finally, because he knew I was waiting for it, he would sing, “Dance with Me, I Want to Be Your Partner.”

  It was the first song he had ever sung to me. On the day we met, he played it for me on a balcony at sundown. An hour later, when the world was dark, he asked me to marry him. This is the way to win a woman. This is the way a woman wants to fall in love.

  He did dance with me. He danced with me in my living room and in nightclubs and on sidewalks at dark in distant cities. He danced with me as if I were an extension of his own body and his joy in dancing made me graceful.

  When I met him I had just moved to a small town in the Ozark mountains. One reason I had moved there was to be near the woods. I longed for woods, for rivers, and wilderness. After I met the young man, he became my guide. He had always lived in the area and knew the rivers and woods like he knew sun and rain.

  He would drop anything to go camping. It would pour down rain for several days, and he would turn to me and say, “This rain is going to fill up all the rivers. We should go down one while we can. When they’re full the sissies won’t be in the way.” Then we would throw a change of clothes into a plastic bag, grab the tent, and be out the door. One morning we set off down the Buffalo River when the water was two feet above the bridges. I don’t know how we talked the canoe shop into renting us a canoe, except the owner knew the young man and trusted him not to get us killed.

  He could guide a canoe down a river without seeming to move a muscle. He had Indian blood and he believed it made the earth his friend. His old Cherokee grandfather had taught him to fish and hunt and live in the woods. He didn’t like equipment. A cigarette lighter and a sack of crackers and cheese was all he needed to enter the woods and live for days.

  What did we talk about during those long days and nights when we were alone on rivers and riverbanks and in woods? I think we talked about ourselves, telling the stories of our lives, laughing about what people were saying about us behind our backs. We thought it was hilarious that people thought I was old and he was young. We were not old or young to each other. We were in love and had been since the day we met.

  Perhaps we only imagined that people were talking about us behind our backs. The people who were interested in us were over at my house talking to us and listening to us talk about ourselves. A passionate love affair is a strange attractor. People cannot stay away from happiness and joy. Healthy people are swept up by love, which is why so much time and energy is happily spent on weddings.

  A famous scientist in town became the mentor of our love affair. He was at least seventy years old and had degrees from Oxford, England and Edinborough, Scotland. He loved to be around the young man and me. He would sit in my living room and watch us interact and later he would talk to me about it. Once, when I said I thought I should end the relationship and force the young man to find a woman his own age, the scientist said to me, “Why are women always thinking they can tell men what to want? All men don’t have to want the same things. Men are as complicated as women are, although women don’t want to believe that’s true. Why do you keep questioning and probing this happiness you have? Why can’t you just be content with it?”

  “They aren’t all as complicated as women,” I replied.

  “The good ones are,” he answered. “The only ones you would be interested in knowing. The ones who write songs about you.”

  The young man had been writing a song about me. He had taken the central premise of a book I had written and turned it into a beautiful, small lyric. The song was plaintive, simple, clean. It said the thing he never said to me in words. I love you and I will lose you because this is a land of dreams.

  What were people saying about us? Young artists and writers around town were basically tolerant. The older male writers either wanted to think it was a joke or talk me out of it. The women mostly understood or else thought it was good revenge on older men who go out with younger women. I supposed their reactions were insights into their own needs and personalities. To tell the truth I didn’t give a damn what any of them thought.

  A journalist in my town says I used to wear the young man like a bangle on a bracelet. I did occasionally like to take him around people my own age and watch him charm them. He was a charming man, intelligent and well-read, with a deep feeling of good-will toward other people.

  There are deeper truths to what went on between us. On the day I met the young man, I had just learned that my daughter-in-law was carrying my oldest grandchild. I was in ecstasy at this news. Perhaps I fell in love with the young man to be part of all that fecundity and life. I had these two great happinesses at the same time.

  I would wake from sleep during those months in a state of bliss. Every shaft of light seemed intense and beautiful. The taste and feel of water was almost unbearable in its beauty, clarity, purity. Every tree and flower and change of weather seemed charged with meaning and with purpose.

  There were darker truths to the relationship. There were things about his life that I could never understand or accept. There were dark, controlling parts of my personality that surprised and wounded him. I was full of old selfishness, anxieties, and fears. He was full of old resentments. When we would try to live together these elements would ignite and burn.

  My oldest son was enraged by the affair. He thought I should be content to be a grandmother. By the time he met the young man, my grandchild had been born and my son thought I should follow in my mother’s footsteps and devote my life to my progeny. It was of no interest to my son that I had just published a book to great critical acclaim and had an exciting career and a life of my own. All he knew was that I was breaking the patterns of the past. It was many years before he forgave me for this, if he has forgiven me, and I’m not sure he has.

  The young man’s family was probably equally unhappy about the love affair, but I never knew the details of that. If they spoke to him about it, he never told me what they said. As much as we could we stayed away from both our families. We tried to protect each other
from their intrusions and I think we did a good job of that. Once, after we had known each other for many years, I took the young man to Jackson, Mississippi to meet my parents. They called me up two nights later. They were eighty-two at the time. I was fifty-seven. “That won’t do,” my father said, when he got me on the phone. “This business with the young man has got to stop.”

  My mother got on the other phone. “You will have to get rid of him,” she added. “I’m sure your children are embarrassed to death by this.”

  “Nothing I could do to them could be as bad as the things they have done to me,” I answered, in the nasty tone I reserve for talking to my mother. “I am fifty-seven years old, Mother. I am hanging up.”

  The young man and I were always hanging up on the world. When we were together nothing the outside world did seemed to be able to harm what went on between us. We made each other happy and we made each other laugh and we made each other strong. When we were together love was its own protection, a barrier against reality.

  Of course it had to end. I always knew it had to end. I told him in the beginning I would be his girl until I was fifty years old. I was almost sixty when it finally really ended. We had broken up and made up many times during those years but always without rancor or ill-will. The truth was we couldn’t stay away from each other. We had created a paradise when we first met and when we were apart we would long to have it back. He would call me or I would call him and within an hour we would be in bed. We would lie in each other’s arms and tell the story of how we met and fell in love and told the world to go to hell. We shared a fabulous story of who we had been together, of what we had dared and what we had created.

  I have been in psychotherapy for many years. I know that the young man was a surrogate for my sons who had grown up and gone off to have lives of their own. I know that for him I was the mother all men dream of having. The mother who is their sole property. The mother who adores them without question. I know these psychological realities were the ground for our disagreements and the reason the relationship could never last. I knew this while it was going on but it did not change a thing.