If the only prayer you said in your whole life was
“thank you,” that would be enough.
—MEISTER ECKHART
SO MANY MARVELS ARE BUSTLING through this slender dawn: Lens-shaped clouds signaling high winds aloft. Roof shingles overlapping like dove feathers. A busily sniffing dog reading its scent-version of the morning newspaper. On tree limbs and window ledges, birds facing upwind, to keep their feathers ironed shut, not ruffled up by the breeze. And several apes, walking down the street on their way to work, engaging in social pantomime. Such is the texture of life, the feel of being alive on this particular planet.
Most evenings, I think about the day’s experiences, and choose one that stands out. It may be as zesty as a bowl of great lemon sorbet, as eye-opening as a passage in a book, as peaceful as a lunchtime snooze, as unexpected as a quick slant of sunlight catching dust particles in the air, as pulse-revving as a long-awaited letter, or as smoldery smooth as a piece of Endangered Species 70 percent cacao dark chocolate. Or maybe realizing for the first time that the blue butterfly on its wrapper is a Karner blue, named years ago by fellow Ithacan Vladimir Nabokov, and that the last remaining Karner blues now live among the whooping cranes in Necedah National Wildlife Refuge. An odd synchronicity. Embellishing that realization with words helps to store it in memory. What was the best thing that happened? Reviewing the day’s delights often yields surprises, and serves as a reminder of how full a life is, how lucky some days feel, and how even stressful days may contain glowing nuggets of peace, pleasure, or joy.
We can’t enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention. My life has been changing, I’ve been near death several times, experienced the illness and death of loved ones, and the simple details of being have become precious. But I also relish life’s sensory festival and the depot where nature and human nature meet. Everything that happens to us—from choosing the day’s shoes to warfare—shines at that crossroads.
To reflect the instantaneous takes time, and Monet achieved it through a sort of reverse weathering, like the buildup of crystals. In increments barely visible to the naked eye, he layered one brushstroke upon the other, sometimes just skipping a dry brush across the surface to create a flickering quality. Other times, he mixed colors right on the canvas so that you can see the pigments meeting and blending. Or he painted in corrugations—heavy brushstrokes applied perpendicular, touching only the ridges of the thinner layer underneath.
“Fat over thin” is basic to oil painting, and for a painting to dry properly, each layer should be thicker than the one below it, layer upon layer, and progressively oilier, or it risks cracking. Unlike thinner fluids, oil paints don’t evaporate as they dry but oxidize—they rust!—which can take months or years. Many art conservators regard an oil painting as truly dry only after eighty years. So although he painted instants, it took them nearly a century to solidify. For years after Monet finished a painting, even while viewers admired it, the pigments were still in motion, changing invisibly before their eyes.
In his eighties, with failing eyesight, he once more painted the steeply arched Japanese footbridge in his garden. This time he painted it in thick autumnal colors—brown, red, gold, orange, and green streaks—with only the merest suggestion of a bridge, its railing slabs of blue, the sun vertical brushstrokes of ochre and white shining through the open panels. It doesn’t give the impression of a mist-clad morning softening the edges of things and veiling summer’s shrieking greens and florals. Instead it’s an abstraction seen by a deteriorating eye, in jagged edges, angles of paint and heavy strokes of color declaring their relationship to one another, their strings to the world, their reflection of the rising sun, and their debt to Monet’s aging grip on the instantaneous.
It’s as if he were reaching a brush-wielding hand back onstage from the wings, waving to an audience whose rough whereabouts and clothes he remembers. A Monet still animated, creative, and alive, but declining, not fading but its opposite—becoming heavier-handed and more abstract. Even with most of its details gone, his world still existed as changing instants of color. “I only see blue,” he complained to a doctor at Giverny in June 1924. “I no longer see red…or yellow. I know these colors exist because I know that on my palette there is red, yellow, a special green, a certain violet; I no longer see them as I once did, and yet I remember very well the colors which they gave me.” His sunrises from this period look dark to us, and they did to him, too, but only after several operations to have cataracts removed. Then he looked at his recent paintings, dismayed by all the brown, and destroyed some. When the cataract scales fell from his eyes and he saw the world restored, he repainted some of the water lilies, making them brighter than before. To his friend and art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, he once wrote: “Everything is pigeon-throated and punch ablaze. It’s wonderful.”
As Monet chronicled, no time is more alive than the intimate now, where truths are eternal. Our sense of time changes as we grow, from the elongated days of childhood to the quickening years of old age. We pass through different time zones. Children digest more information, and faster, than adults, and since everything is new, and much of it flashy, there’s a bundle to process and it seems to go slowly. The elderly sense the world with a slower metabolism, and they find fewer surprises, so life seems to stream by. Increase anyone’s metabolism—with a shock for instance, and adrenaline pours to handle the emergency. Then the brain speeds through information, since any detail may count. Time slows down. This is also the world of predator and prey. It’s odd picturing other animals existing in their own private time zones, but I think they must. More than anything else, what we pay attention to helps define us.
With what do we choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of our life? That question comes painfully and late to some, to many only on their deathbeds, and to others, like me, repeatedly and deniably over the years (especially so if one is raising a family), and then repeatedly but less deniably. How one soothes oneself then takes different forms. Myself, I have been a restless sleeper, waking often through this dream, then plunging back into a death-denying sleep. With the death of parents, the looming death of a spouse, the death of younger friends, it’s hard to sleep quite as soundly. I wake, and when I do the beauty of the world, however fleeting, fills me with an incontestable joy that leaches right into my bloodstream. I need only allow it in. Born into a world of light, my senses mature and will decay. But until they do they are the gateways to the mysterious kingdom in which I find myself, one I could not have imagined, a land not entirely of hope and glory, yet no less beautiful for that.
We exist as phantom, monster, miracle, each a theme park all one’s own, and mainly unknowable in the end, not just to others, but to ourselves as well. I often think about the charade of trying to capture a self in a mirror. One day we feel like the toast of the town, the next day the hoax, one moment flighty, the next fully present for and part of life’s contrapuntal fugue. Think about the lunacy of the Moon landing, the lunatic fringe of wild loons on a lake in the Aleutians. A word is a kind of pebble in the hand, at once irritant, worry bead, reminder. Nothing surpasses the single suchness of this moment. Presence is always a present, a gift, intransitively given, in some stage of unwrap, waiting to be explored.
Just show up. That’s all we have to do, that’s all I do when I am fully present, for good or bad, right here, right now, without thinking about work or recess. A sleeper can wake and be lured out of bed by the sorcery of the sky as day is dawning. Time well spent. After all (or more accurately, during all), I may not live to the end of this sentence, to lift my felt-tipped pen and settle a tiny black dot on the page. I did. But that was then and this is now, the thisness of what is, the ripening dawn.