And then you begin to wonder how you got here. For you can't even begin to grasp what you were at 16 or even 25 or 30. You know those people were you; you even have pictures and diplomas to prove it; but they seem virtually unimaginable now. You remember the journey, the story, and you can see yourself trekking along, but it's as though you're looking down from a mountain top, and those places where you used to meet yourself face to face, astonished and shaking, now are covered by gnarled underbrush that like some old scars occasionally itch, just to remind you that something once happened here.
I remember a letter of Petrarch's where he describes a journey homeward, which was north through Italy to France. The quickest and most convenient route was by river, but a conflict between two of the cities along the way overran the river with warships and battle. So his party had to travel up river by land, through woods that at least offered protection against the land forces, as much as possible using darkness as a shield, hoping that they could find their way, as they finally did, behind some city's walls. I remember this, I suppose, because it seemed to be a journey something like my own. I was 10 when World War II ended, so those impressionable years when we begin to form our first coherent narratives were for me years of war fought in the movies, the newspapers, in the streets, and on the radio, for though I was only 5 years old on December 7, 1941, I remember the absolute seriousness of the scene, though I can't see anything but myself and the small wooden radio with its cloth covered speaker from which FDR is telling us of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of war. When the Korean War ended I was 17, just finishing high school, and during the Viet Nam war I was already a father with two small children, though I do remember expending a bit of ingenuity between those wars keeping myself out of the army and in school. Those are the wars that affected me most directly and personally, but we all know that this has been a century of unmatched carnage, most of which we have watched on t.v. This is the river, this river of conflagration, that runs through our lives, shaping the course of consciousness. But I have been lucky, making my way through the safety of the woods where the dangers and terrors are merely the dangers and terrors of ordinary life. The journey is always homeward, like Petrarch's, returning to his beloved library, to the study, to the studio, to wherever it is that art survives.
And it's when I think of the end of the journey that I take out a photo like the one on this page. It's my daughter's 10th birthday, whom I've always adored; she's 2nd from the right. I lived in an apartment that overlooked the Red River, which you can see in the background, so beautiful even in the winter when covered with ice that leaving it for a house with a backyard was a psychic displacement. Along the riverbank, behind the apartments, was a picnic table, where this party is taking place. On weekends in the summer, a paddle boat filled with dancers and music puttered by once or twice a night lighting up the darkness of the river like a constellation.