Neighbor,Neighbor

1. Ignore them. They are only beautiful and heartless—not because of the unmoving seascape behind them, the august rays crowning pacific, glassy water in leviathan's heavenly backdrop, but because they mean to tell us that our freedom is a machine. It is not. It cannot be redesigned nor can it carry us to a new place. We are here, where history placed us, history that always waited modestly for our consent, sure of receiving it. Those beautiful young people standing beside the automobile in the surf agreed to nothing. If there is such a thing as a new place, it belongs to them, and the water will be heaven there and life pacific in the rosy stare of the ideal. Ignore them. Let us love our lives. No one ever truly fled from a suburb. He was expelled or shamed or too easily angered. And when he left, his heart broke. He fell easy prey to the beautiful and to the falsehoods of seascape and landscape with no one moving upon them as levithan's obsessed challenger. Our houses are buoys set upon restless waters by strangers dead when we were born. But we live inside them now, and freedom is no machine to motor us in empty circles and to raise a round wake behind us. Freedom is a dwelling. Sometimes, in the small arcades of a watercolor bought at the yard sales, brass-lighted in a corner by a chair, you have helped yourself to a dream that drowned whalers, kin of yours, return from sea. A holiday mood and others, like yourself, living nearby, hurry in from the night's damp and talk the small talk with no thought for sleeping. Then at morning, suddenly through the west window, birds flare golden with flying into sunrise. It feels like driving sometimes, but the music is not tinny and the light is slow, bell-towered from east to west with the morning. Darien. Norwalk. Quaker Hill. Mystic. Do not ignore these. Inconstant,mawkish but deep in the old physical sense of depth, the voluntary hours with neighbors and ghosts teach the beauty of commuting from dark to light, from labor to home life: a vigilance crowned with impatience and visited rarely but adequately by golden changes. 2. Appreciation is mania. Neighbors can be too many neighbors, and cold, upturned shoals of seaboard towns too many churches, too many conversions. I know the stained glass above a doorway is the discomfited piety of change and light destroying what it makes only to remake it more beautifully. Such things make one thing clear: as betrayer speaks to innocent, liar speaks to liar. A vigil crowned with gentians survives as disappointed love. Visitations of impatience take away our hands and home life. Treason we learn from the childless small talk of nights whose sheltering adjustments gall us. When I first betrayed someone an angel fell backwards through the air's sheen. When I next betrayed someone the air lost its heart, which is love's density. I was at seaside in an old town, and sea and housefronts brightened but did not open. I was upon the point of prayer when the light froze, converted from churchlight to porchlight. We betray our homes because they are valuable. No reason not to make the fine distinctions still: we live only half-expecting the sudden flares, or affection, or seasons out of the sea weather, as expectations and good friends shelter by us from the darkness of streets we've blackened together. Five o'clock in the morning is not four o'clock in the morning. I have betrayed each and might betray all in the spotless, glassy piety of change. 3. But how hotly change limits happiness: the small happiness of possession and the even smaller of self-possession. Imagine yourself transient among these houses and the uncontrolled reflection of hotel hours when no one in the hallway or next room depends on you. Already darkness covers the tilted Common outside your window. You hear a school band playing carols. As always and everywhere, there are too many drums. An hour earlier, in twilight, you were out walking, looking into the shops, handling the used books and scented soaps, humming a little distracted by a late lunch and the brown New England drinks hotly perfect at Christmas. So many minutiae, so many parts played by drums against the unsteady, truer lines of the horns. In angular twilight, unfocussed and sullen clusters of teen-agers, underdressed and loudly self-aware, anticipating nothing of change, feeling none of the desolate childlessness of Christmas, jostled you, marred the picturesque of the darkening Common, and drove you back indoors. Those same teen-agers are perfectly reconfigured in the night now, playing carols or holding candles as the merchants' trees come to light. The shoppers join in then and lift their children up to see what you see from a hotel window; something perfect, an incidental miracle taking no notice of a transient or his cold need to interpret convincingly accidents in the lightsome context of personal history or a fictive changelessness. You could be a returning mariner stealing a welcome properly due to those who cannot return. You feel childless but as though a sign is coming, perhaps from among those children out there trumpeting mock-starlight, or from farther away, from the black ocean beyond the Common. Where will you not be barren? Where will you not prayerfully resist change to the death or to the last drum-tap of the disorganized religion of sorrow? Sometimes, however lonely, a wealth beyond your reach is enough wealth, the plenitude of the lives of strangers is enough life, enough to prove the world adequate to desire though still strange. 4. And when I have enough, am I afraid no longer? When desire flutters its last broken wheel in the red west and day falls into the opened arms of laughter, is it satiety or just the beginning of fear's moment, the early dismantling and inland birds suddenly trapped in coastal cry, in the gulls they are not, or is it really annihilation wrapped in a premonition I had almost forgotten? Between history, that topography of roofs, and freedom, that indirect solitude housing neither a family nor an echo of my birth, runs a fly-blown cheerless corridor of air. It is the windy premonition of nothing to desire. It lauds the greater pleasures of the immediate present where all things depend on paraphrase and the betrayal of history to fiction, of freedom to delay. Between transience, that Christmas hostelry, and home, where I once found time to make fine distinctions capable of taking words or an opened hand and seeing the democracy in it, the warm sufficiency, runs a mania of years like atrocities. Those years are full. They transform tirelessly inland creatures to sea-birds, inland towns to seaports and to submissive widows of coastline where strangers assume the dead's renown. Though ever strange, though nearly adequate, the world's, or to speak honestly, my life's suburban intervals lose buoyancy like birds unused to tides or to wracks of net. 5. In sinking or in being caught in nets we find a lonely, accidental escape, something to do with music on the radio of an automobile, the tinny, driving, middle distances of houses and neighborhoods like the bouys of strangers calling us back to life though not to our own lives, opening as the undertow opens on the first evening of a full moon, as sky does on the mornings when sunrise and moonset are one hour. I am sure that something happens. The world is too full not to rescue what loses buoyancy or becomes trapped. The fullness makes a protest, and its proposal is labor, that needle-sharp history that follows everyone to his remote place and serves him there. And if we refuse rescue, we do so because we cannot believe that fullness and innocence inhabit the same places, haunt the same sidestreets and rock formations in amateur choirs, in the brass-lit, private hum of landscapes carefully miniaturized by our pleasure in fullness and selfless love for the ignorance swaddled in futurity or the miraculous. These are accidental colleagues forever bound to one another, often in love. I got up early and went out walking deep into woods that betrayed nothing of ocean except the wound it makes on air. I came to a compound barrier of rocks beyond which I saw nothing and above which the air was crystals of jagged salt turning to murk. Like an exhalation, spume appeared and then the black water edged under the spray toward me in tendrils. There was a water rat soaked and trembling on the barrier, coruscated, unsure of what to fear: the advancing tide and tendriled backwash or me, hooded in a raincoat, standing between him and dry land, his only future and safety. There is no difference worth noting between thinking of oneself as "you" or "I," between the impostor and the true mariner. Better to ignore the difference and believe that the unseen ocean is no machine but the irrepressible origin of many freedoms, many dwellings. I stepped back into the woods, and the rat dashed past me into common futures of small arcades and enough welcome.