Dear John Dickerson

I’ve been listening to you for years, but always as the smart, incisive commenter on current affairs. To be sure, history and theology and whimsy were never far from your commentary, but these were glimpses only. Your new venture, Naval Gazing, opens the door to your inner life, and I’ve loved it. Thank God you took notes, and kept the notebooks, because in the rush of everything to waste, as Robert Frost put it, it’s hard to hold onto anything at all. With small children and an absorbing job, I find it all but impossible to write down what’s happened, let alone any further reflection on what what’s happened means. I’m encouraged that even your hasty, harried shorthand is meaningful enough to you, years later, to build these beautiful essays on.

When I listened to the 9/11 episode, the one that explains why and how you opened the books, I was walking in autumn beside a lake and the sky was grey but the trees were bright and the lake shone and the place we call Black Mountain was perfectly reflected in it. I was very moved by the September 11 stories (who would not be?) and the elegy for a loved father-in-law, and at the same time realised I’d been moved by all of it — every episode. In each one there comes a moment, or a passage, when the long looking yields its riches and you stand on the heights of what all this detail amounts to. You realise anywhere you stop is a vantage point if you only look. There is after all something moving about being still.

I was most moved by the voice in the final episode - the one that’s not yours. A woman named Caroline describes her hard and humble and extraordinary life. It was a kind of unbearable grace to hear from her, and to know that someone like her is aflourish on the other side of the world. Then you reflected on the lights in other houses, and the blessing you wish on other lives. I was walking through a department store this time, and I was undone. Thank you for the gift of this undoing.

The lines that have haunted my listening all along come from Marilynne Robinson, who I feel sure you love as I do. In Gilead, old John Ames writes to his little son: ‘This is an interesting planet. It’s worth all the attention you can give it.’ Likewise, ‘There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.’ And again, ‘It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance — for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light .... Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.’

All this reminds me, too, of Annie Dillard, who’s also been at the back of all my listening to you. In her book of long looking, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she wanders, awed, around Roanoke and spends whole days looking (‘Spend the afternoon! You can’t take it with you.’) The tone is an abiding astonishment at the universe, and she concludes: ‘My God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it.’

Accounting for it, or trying to, is both impossible and worthwhile. We can’t, of course, but all the attempts - in writing and art and music - are what give life its lustre. Your essays, accounting for your own passage through this unaccountable universe, have given a glow to my days, a new intensity to my attention, and a hope that one day my own books will be opened and I might find something there worth looking at. Thank you, again, for this gift.

Sincerely.

Losing Hilary Mantel

I read An Experiment in Love at university. I found it gripping, but it released me as soon as I finished it and never reached for me again. I read Fludd and found it mildly engaging, but again, it kept no particular place in my mind or memory. Being repulsed by its subject, I never went near Beyond Black. Then I read Wolf Hall.

Its effect on me, as on the world, was electric. It was an apparition. A comet. ‘The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!’ All the superlatives reviewers bestowed were justified. It was beyond anything we could have hoped for: from this author — from any author. Its two sequels bestrode the literary world at the same latitudes, the same altitude. Heights no others would even attempt, let alone accomplish as she did. Immaculate world-building, each thread and fibre held at the precise tension to make the pictures true — in both senses. Lives plucked from the dust of the past and animated with minds, moods, expressions, energies, quirks; unfolding in rooms or gardens or woods — ‘acres of England’ laid out in ‘leafy shires’ — where wood and stone and fire, fur, silk, linen, leather, and parchment, give every scene lustre and fragrance, as well as verity. The whole thing stitched to history with strong but secret stitches. Sustained brilliance across some two thousand pages. They were — are — prodigies.

They deserved all the praise. They all deserved the prizes (though, inexplicably, Lee Child stood like a troll on a bridge between them and the Booker trifecta). She wrote them at the height of her powers, and thank God she lived to do it, given the pain and ill-health she lived with so long. She mastered her art, and made her masterpiece, and now she’s gone.

What we’ve lost is not more masterworks (there might have been no more), nor more heights of power or accomplishment, but her way of seeing the world. Her mind and eye, at work together. We keep the work, but we’ve lost the only person capable of such work. The work is miraculous, but we’ve lost the miracle of just that person, that portal, where this idea, this desire, apprehension, aptitude and achievement coincided. She made worlds, but she was a world — as all of us are — and the world she was is now extinct. She once said that these Cromwell books might be the thing she could have done that nobody else could have done. In the wake of her death, they look all the more singular (in the way a supernova is singular). All the more wondrous, given how fragile and contingent, how mortal, we now know her life to have been. I suppose this is true of any death. ‘And blue-bleak embers… Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.’

Fins fletched like wings

Here is Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet of love and revolution, and one of my favourite poets, though I only know him in translation. I chose this one not — as its translator suggests — because it’s shaped like Chile, but because it’s whimsical and lyrical at once. It’s not quite serious, I don’t think, but still it’s in earnest. Like much poetry, and maybe all art, it’s serious play.

I love the idea of a poet standing stock still in the middle of a busy market, musing on a dead fish — diving deep and coming up with riches. This, to me, is part of what animates and exalts poetry: the magnifying glass it trains on ordinary things. When you stop and look through the glass you see the depths and layers you’d otherwise miss, the gleam things wear up close. DG Rossetti said ‘a sonnet is a moment’s monument.’ A poem like this testifies that every moment, each thing, is worthy of such a monument, if you only look. I had to look up ‘catafalque’ – it’s the raised bier on which a casket rests. It’s the right name for the last resting place of a mighty fish. This is ‘Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market.’

Here,   

among the market vegetables,

this torpedo

from the ocean   

depths,   

a missile   

that swam,

now  

lying in front of me

dead.
Surrounded

by the earth's green froth   

—these lettuces,

bunches of carrots—

only you   

lived through

the sea's truth, survived

the unknown, the

unfathomable

darkness, the depths   

of the sea,

the great   

abyss,

le grand abîme,

only you:   

varnished

black-pitched   

witness

to that deepest night.



Only you:

dark bullet

barreled   

from the depths,

carrying   

only   

your   

one wound,

but resurgent,

always renewed,

locked into the current,

fins fletched

like wings

in the torrent,

in the coursing

of

the

underwater

dark,

like a grieving arrow,

sea-javelin, a nerveless   

oiled harpoon.
Dead

in front of me,

catafalqued king

of my own ocean;

once   

sappy as a sprung fir

in the green turmoil,

once seed

to sea-quake,

tidal wave, now

simply

dead remains;

in the whole market

yours   

was the only shape left

with purpose or direction

in this   

jumbled ruin

of nature;

you are   

a solitary man of war

among these frail vegetables,

your flanks and prow

black   

and slippery

as if you were still

a well-oiled ship of the wind,

the only

true

machine

of the sea: unflawed,

undefiled,   

navigating now

the waters of death.

Of night and light and the half light

Here is Yeats, circa 1899: “He wishes for the cloths of heaven.”

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, 

Enwrought with golden and silver light, 

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths 

Of night and light and the half light, 

I would spread the cloths under your feet: 

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; 

I have spread my dreams under your feet; 

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

It was the last line that got me first. In my swoony youth, it was just the line to take my fancy. Coming back to it in maturity, it seems less romantic. It’s one thing to throw your dreams under her feet, another to tell her: watch your step! Like other gestures of art or love, there’s ego in it. But something about this poem still captures me, in spite of its confused meter and identical rhyme. Something about the third and fourth lines that feels less contrived and striven for, a more pure expression of wonder. ‘Blue’ and ‘dim’ and ‘dark’ give you deep night skies in a way ‘embroidered cloths’ never can. The overwrought first two lines, with their stilted syntax, stock conceit, and dactylic lurch, here give way to a slower, more halting rhythm, and to evocative words that echo each other. Short words that follow each other just the way lights might blink and flash: ‘night and light and the half light.’ Here, the poet looks up. The poem becomes about the light itself and not his own gesture. Then he seems to descend again to ego and cliché.

For all that, it is a romantic poem. It glows with light — he does bring the heavens to her, after all. It ends in intimacy — ‘tread softly’ is a whisper. And the three ‘dreams’ of the last three lines sound like bells, or like an incantation. It’s swoony, but its spell is real. C.S. Lewis wrote: “This is one of the miracles of love: it gives a power of seeing through its enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.” You can see how the spell works and still fall under it. Thus is love like poetry. And poetry like this is like love.

Hurry

As we return to school this week, and some of us start preschool, there’s a poem that reminds me to take it easy, and take it in. It’s “Hurry,” by Marie Howe, New York’s poet laureate from 2012 to 2014. She adopted her daughter when she was in her 50s, so it’s just the two of them. This adds intimacy to the poem, but its dynamics will be familiar to anyone with children — or with parents, for that matter. I know the feeling of hurrying through life, and trying to hurry children, which always seems to slow them down. The poem makes me ponder what’s gained by hurrying, being on time, getting things done, and what might be lost.

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store   
and the gas station and the green market and   
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,   
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.   

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?   
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?   
Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,   
Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry—   
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.   

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking   
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,   
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

I like the way the ‘hurry, hurry,’ and all the other ‘h’ sounds give the poem its pulse, its hurrying breath. There’s pathos in the little girl running behind with her blue jacket unzipped, and something more than pathos in the girl all grown beside the grave in the still middle of the poem. The middle slows us down, as though the poet stopped in the street to ask herself why all this hurry; to picture where it might lead them. Then the hurry begins again, but this time it’s a game, a joke between them. It restores all the childish joy that’s missing from the bustle in the first stanza. Here the hurry is parody, a happy travesty of haste. The final gesture — taking the house keys — takes away weary, rushing adulthood from the mother, and gives back play, make believe, time unmetered and untethered. It could have been a lecture, but it’s the laughter in this poem that tugs at my jacket and asks me: Where are you hurrying to? Why?