Free Fifty Days of Solitude by Doris Grumbach Page B

bookstore to find on the wall a framed quotation from Paul Valéry:
    The truth is that every sheet of blank paper by its very emptiness affirms that nothing is as beautiful as what does not exist. In the magic mirror of its white expanse the soul beholds the setting where signs and lines will bring forth miracles. This presence of absence both spurs on and, at the same time, paralyzes the pen’s commitment …
    This came from his essay “La Feuille Blanche.” Finding it saved the pallid day for me. Imbued with the presence of absence I suddenly felt occupied and productive. I had been paralyzed by a lack of ideas, but now I saw that I did not need to produce anything on the page to feel better, even, somehow, complete. What I did not produce was, to Valéry’s way of thinking, more beautiful than anything I could have written. Nothing was more comforting than to have remembered dimly, and then found, Valéry’s words on the wall of Wayward Books.
    J UDE BARTLETT , the handsome young dancer who died of AIDS this winter, a few miles away in Brooklin, continued to haunt my solitude. Having been so close to his dying, I kept expecting to hear of the sickening and then death of others I knew were afflicted with the same terrible plague.
    I remembered that Emily Dickinson wrote to a friend: “I notice where Death has been introduced, he frequently calls.” This turned out to be prophetic for me. Two days later I had word from Allan Gurganus that an old acquaintance from Yaddo days, the artist David Vereano, had died, at forty-four. I could still see him clearly, seated on a low stool on a hill above Saratoga Springs, wearing his wide Walt Whitman hat, his handsome smile and Egypt-tinted skin shining in the half-sunlight he loved to paint. I remembered how much of his canvases were sky and clouds; I thought of him now as elevated to his beloved empyrean, having risen above the horizon to become another himself. This was as it should be.
    T HE radio reported a storm on the way from the south. The weather bureau broadcast a WINTER STORM WATCH . I battened everything down, and waited. Then the announcement was changed to WINTER STORM WARNIN G. Obediently I watched as it approached, blackening the sky over Deer Isle and then lowering itself, it seemed to me, over my roof, singling me out for its largest delivery of snow. The heavy-flaked snow fell straight down all evening, all night, and the next morning, until the heralded WINTER STORM diminished into flurries and passed on to the north. It had made no noise, no wind created drifts. It left behind a flat, high landscape and a greater silence than I had heard before, a welcome isolation, for the moment, from roads and the desire for outward-bound excursions.
    While listening for reports of the storm’s progress, I heard part of a story about the newly elected president who, it was said, was a saxophone player and a lover of jazz. All I caught was that, as a young boy, he had thought the name of the great jazz pianist Thelonius Monk was The Loneliest Monk.
    â€œS HARE.” “Sharing.” “I want to share with you.” The fine thing about being alone was that the whole odious concept of sharing completely disappeared. For one, there was no one to share with . Quickly, my desire “to share,” never very strong at best, died away. I found pleasure in storing up, saving what I realized and saw and thought, like a miser, like a squirrel.
    Somewhere else I have put down what I thought about the conversationalist who begins by saying, “Let me share with you my experiences.…” At once, I recoil, knowing that this is to be a long, tedious monologue and not, as the word means, an exchange of something we have in common. What has become of the honest, direct, Old English word “tell” ( tellan , to relate)? When someone on the radio, as it happened one morning during my weeks alone, announced she was going to