"Like the Fingernail from the Flesh"

In the Spanish medieval epic, The Poem of the Cid, the hero fights to help his king regain territory lost to the Moors.  Like all such epics, the story is mostly battles and bloodshed, except for the moment when, preparing to leave on a raid, the Cid says good-bye to his wife, and the two part "like the fingernail from the flesh."

That was me last night, sorting books to give away in preparation for our downsizing.  I was working on the French bookcase, boxing up my high school French books, my college anthologies of French lit., the fusty Old French lays and epics and romances from grad school, and finally the texts I'd used to stuff all that knowledge back into the heads of my own recalcitrant undergraduates.

With a few exceptions, the books were dusty, since I hadn't touched them since our move to Vermont nine years ago.  For that matter, I hadn't touched many of them since grad school, except to take them down and box them up and then shelve them again at each of our many moves. 

But this time is different, because Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes won't be coming with me.  They'll be going to new homes or, more likely, to recycling plants, because who wants a bunch of old French books these days?  I'll be keeping the leather-bound Prousts and Colettes and a few others.  But the rest--the yellowed and brittle copies of long-ago works of genius with  my maiden name written inside the cover in green ink and the bizarre upright handwriting that I thought distinctive in my youth--I'll never see again.

As I forced myself to place each book in the box, it did feel a bit like the  fingernail being parted from the flesh, over and over. 

Today I'll tackle the Spanish and Catalan bookcase.  Next will come the art books, and then the dog books, and the country-living books.  I must be ruthless and not keep too many of them, because there's still three floors of material possessions to sort through, and I don't want my independent-living cottage to become a shrine to my past.  I must remember that the key to successful aging is flexibility, non-attachment, and a sense of adventure.

I know I'll get through it somehow, but by the time this move is over, my fingers will be a bloody mess.

The Muse Takes A Nap

On ordinary days, as I go about my business I have at least a couple of topics for posts running through my head. On less ordinary days, themes and phrases tumble around in my brain like lottery tickets just before a drawing.

But yesterday was different. I could not think of a single thing to write about.

Now I know very well that there's no such thing as nothing to write about. Not for nothing did I spend a couple of decades studying and then teaching French lit, many of whose masters prided themselves on making something out of nothing (“faire quelque chose de rien”). A hint of adultery here, a spot of introspection there, and voila: a 500-page masterpiece.

On a day when I feel only some reluctance to write, I just focus on whatever is in front of my nose—say, my hand—and pretty soon stuff comes to me: how it's getting bonier, how it reminds me of my father, how I've never been able to grow my nails, or keep polish on them for more than five minutes. And each of those thoughts can take me in a dozen different directions.

But yesterday my reluctance was absolute. I had run up against a stone wall—not a hard thing to do in Vermont—and I couldn't even write about the wall. My Muse, I suspected, was hiding behind it.

Sometimes if I don't feel like writing I go do something else for a while, then give the Muse a whistle and she comes running. I spent the entire day yesterday doing something else, then whistling, then doing something else again. But she didn't show.

Eventually, I gave up. The Muse, I decided, was taking a nap. Maybe she was cold. After all, my hens have stopped laying the last couple of frigid days. Why shouldn't the Muse get a break too? So she did, and today, I'm glad to say, she's hovering near.

When your Muse yawns, how do you react?