Believe It

“‘One moment longer,’ whispered solitude and the summer moon, ‘stay with us: all is truly quiet now; for another quarter of an hour your presence will not be missed: the day’s heat and bustle have tired you; enjoy these precious minutes.’”

So speaks the evening to Lucy Snowe, the narrator and protagonist of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, a woman worn down by the strain of her new teaching position and the emotional solitude of her days. The relief after her tiring regime is a stroll in the garden. But what will be her relief the next day? Another stroll? And after a year? A decade? Will a stroll still feel like magic once it becomes routine?

And what of this relief? It allows Lucy to go on, but does not ease her closer to any particular goal. So I ask: Go on for what?

Just go on, the reader might decide—until she solves a problem that once vexed her or finds an answer that long eluded her. After all, it’s vexing problems and elusive answers that have us looking for relief. For Lucy, though, enduring is the difficulty. What, then, could turn the act of living—what an act!—from a series of difficulties requiring relief into something of value? For her, or for me? For anyone?

This would be the moment to produce an answer.

“Voilà!” I’d say, and with a flourish and a wave of a wand, deliver what half the world is looking for.

“Yes, believe it!”

But like the little man behind the curtain, called on to get Dorothy home, I have no magic. Instead, my mind drifts from Lucy Snowe to another personage—my Kansas friend. He’s a good, smart, cultured, and kind person with an enormous problem: He sees no good in living, yet he doesn’t want to die. Where does someone in such circumstances turn? To the past.

Ah, the past! Those streets, those parks, those cheery rooms that were once his soul’s nourishment—sweet and savory, light but filling. Oh, to be back in that delicious, golden aforetime. Back with a beloved spouse, with family or friends. One finds comfort in simply remembering those days—knowing they were no mere dream. Such comfort is fleeting, however, not nearly enough to keep one going in the bare rooms and winter parks of this lonely present.

I, too, think of a golden past—but that’s no good, says Thomas Mallon in a New Yorker article about nostalgia in art (and life, I’d add). He writes that works depending on nostalgia must “alchemize, rather than simply recognize” what they’re unearthing. What’s retrieved must arrive with the power to transform. But isn’t nostalgia by definition a transformation of the past? It is imagining the past as prettier than our present, when in truth, were we to encounter the past in the past, we’d see how mundane it was. Mallon makes this point, too. Taking Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as an example, he cites the Stage Director’s counsel to Emily to avoid revisiting as a ghost the happier moments of her past life—because doing so inevitably alters what she sees. Simply in extracting the past from its time, you impose new value on the material.

A bit of rock looks as good as a gemstone when you hold it up to imagine it in a new, present setting. Imagine is the crucial word. And yet, we are at least happy about something. Life is worth little right now, but it wasn’t always so meager, we might tell ourselves with a sigh when all our jewels are in the past.

So thoughts of the past bring comfort, but it is comfort drawn from loss.

Best not to think so, though. Much nicer to hope that such a gem as we had could flash again in our present and light up our dreary, sad life. That days, months, and years turn over. That new ones begin. That they can be rosy, too.

So I wrote to Mr. Kansas one September morning, after walking at daybreak along my usual dirt track between the town and the river, passing between fields and forests. Soon gray gave way: through the branches waves of golden cloud appeared. “Look at the incredible sky!” I wrote, to accompany a photo I took, the trees black skeletons, the sky radiating pink and yellow, as if a bomb had gone off.

“Enjoy these precious minutes,” urges the moon to Lucy Snowe. Her collection of minutes is special because it is not the tiring work of her life, but a short break from it—measured in minutes. For Mr. Kansas, whose trouble is not too much work and no solitude but too little camaraderie in the ever-lasting hours of his days—for him, could a collection of minutes alone with nature be precious? It appears not. His time alone is desolate, even in the lovely setting of the botanical garden where he volunteered. He had hoped that nature would soothe, but he was only reminded of other gardens where he had been happy. He wanders the past like a man lost in a labyrinth, accompanied only by ghostly memories.

Mr. Kansas gets no relief. And wants none, really. His pain and suffering enshrine 40 years of marriage to his late wife. They were well-suited and like-minded, but surely endured their share of hurt and ire.

The sun was at the head of the track, as if waiting for me. Yet I knew it was coming in my direction and I was walking out to meet it. There it held, lighting the clouds an extraordinary yellow, a golden hue, a real treasure. I looked around. No one. I looked ahead again.

Just for me?

Certainly worth coming upon, worth witnessing. “Worth living for?” I wondered. I would have to ask Mr. Kansas.

And so I was no longer alone. And for an instant, when he opened my email, he wouldn’t be either.

“Worth living for,” I added to the message—but without the question mark.

But did he believe me? No? Then, believe something. Anything. Believe it.

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