IN 1997 I AGREED to be part of a literacy fund-raiser sponsored by the New Yorker. I agreed to write a letter to whoever purchased me. My subject was “The consolations of Art.” A woman named Ellen Geneo purchased me. Here is the letter that I wrote to her.
Dear Ellen Geneo,
I have been thinking about this letter for some months now as my eighty-eight-year-old father died in the fall and I have had need of the concept as well as the reality. During the month when he was on his deathbed I spent all my spare time in bookstores. Since I was a child I have not spent that much time in a bookstore or library. I was there nearly every day for at least an hour. I was buying five or six books at a time to give to people for Christmas presents and then I was going back and buying copies of the same books for myself. I built a fort of books against myself and my father’s death. Some of the books were actually helpful in finding my way through the maze of denial and emotions I was experiencing. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying; God, A Biography; An Atlas of Human Anatomy; Everyday Zen; The Collected Poems of Robert Frost, with the haunting and brilliant poem “Provide, Provide,” which was the main poem that kept occurring to me during those weeks.
So when I say the consolations of art I mostly mean, for me, the consolations of written books. The heft, the feel, the touch, the mighty consolation they have always been to me in every way. Music, especially Bach, and, this year, Bach played by Christopher Parkening on a classical guitar or the beautiful flute music of Paula Robson, which came in the mail as a gift from the artist on the worst of the days that led to the end of my having a father, have also been an unmeasurable consolation. Music coming down to us through the centuries. From Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven and all the thousands who have followed and played them and the makers of violins and pianos and flutes and the patrons like you who have inspired every artist who ever lived have come the vast exaltations which make us glad to live in the midst of contradictions.
So I thank you for wanting this letter. Even before you knew you wanted it or I knew who it would be for I was profiting from the thought that it might be wanted. I had this letter and you on my mind as I surrounded myself with music and books in a small house on the coast that is papered with posters from museums and thought that Van Gogh and Vermeer and Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci and Cézanne and Monet were already at the place to which my father now was traveling.
I never loved painting and music and literature and philosophy as I loved them this year because I had never really needed them before. All my love had been to prepare me to throw myself into their charms when my need became great.
I hope that your life is filled with these great expressions of man’s hope and glory and praise. For today and every day and so that when you need them they will be there.
Thrive, flourish, “Dance in the fullness of time.”
Ellen Gilchrist
Postscript
There was one other thing I meant to tell you. After the funeral I flew to Atlanta to the press screening of the four-hour version of Hamlet directed by Kenneth Branagh. I flew all that way to heal myself, and to hear, writ large on the big screen, that the “common theme is the death of fathers.” I thought of you and this letter as I was traveling and so could not leave it out as I write.
FEBRUARY 1997