About Jane Kenyon, poet:
"She married fellow poet Donald Hall, whom she met as a student at the University of Michigan, where he was a professor. They lived in his family farmhouse in New Hampshire. Hall wrote:
"We got up early in the morning. I brought Jane coffee in bed. She walked the dog as I started writing, then climbed the stairs to work at her own desk on her own poems. We had lunch. We lay down together. We rose and worked at secondary things. I read aloud to Jane; we played scoreless ping-pong; we read the mail; we worked again. We ate supper, talked, read books sitting across from each other in the living room, and went to sleep. If we were lucky the phone didn't ring all day.
In January Jane dreamed of flowers, planning expansion and refinement of the garden. From late March into October she spent hours digging, applying fifty-year-old Holstein manure from under the barn, planting, transplanting, and weeding."
Would such a life have suited you (it hugely appeals, you were so envious when you read this passage), or would the "wild, restess gods within you" have strained at the bit, to be off, in search of problems to solve, a world to save, a balance to set right, a solitary space?
Are you like Camus' Rambert after all, who returned to stay in a plague-infested city and volunteer at the hospital, because he would "feel ashamed to seek a merely personal happiness"?
"She married fellow poet Donald Hall, whom she met as a student at the University of Michigan, where he was a professor. They lived in his family farmhouse in New Hampshire. Hall wrote:
"We got up early in the morning. I brought Jane coffee in bed. She walked the dog as I started writing, then climbed the stairs to work at her own desk on her own poems. We had lunch. We lay down together. We rose and worked at secondary things. I read aloud to Jane; we played scoreless ping-pong; we read the mail; we worked again. We ate supper, talked, read books sitting across from each other in the living room, and went to sleep. If we were lucky the phone didn't ring all day.
In January Jane dreamed of flowers, planning expansion and refinement of the garden. From late March into October she spent hours digging, applying fifty-year-old Holstein manure from under the barn, planting, transplanting, and weeding."
Would such a life have suited you (it hugely appeals, you were so envious when you read this passage), or would the "wild, restess gods within you" have strained at the bit, to be off, in search of problems to solve, a world to save, a balance to set right, a solitary space?
Are you like Camus' Rambert after all, who returned to stay in a plague-infested city and volunteer at the hospital, because he would "feel ashamed to seek a merely personal happiness"?
1 comment:
I've refrained from saying this all along but I think this is the only 'problem' I have in life- that tight rope of 'To be or not to be'. Although my inspirations came from a reading of 'The Bridge Across Forever'. :)
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