I lay on the grass in the Catskills on Friday night. The sky was dotted with an infinitude of stars. I hadn’t seen so many stars in – I can’t rememember when. I saw the faint band of the Milky Way. I saw a tiny white dot move slowly across the sky – a satellite. I love seeing satellites in the night sky – they’re so eerie.
Matt and I went with Mike and his roommate/our friend Dan up to Mike’s mom’s house in the Catskills on Friday. We ate dinners cooked by Dan, who is a gourmet cook. We watched about seven episodes of Arrested Development on DVD as well as most of Sunset Boulevard on Turner Classic Movies. Other than that, I mostly read and did crossword puzzles.
I had a sense of expansion this weekend. It’s possible to have space and quiet! Some people live that way year-round. If I lived like that, I bet I’d get a lot more writing done. A little house in the middle of nowhere with a writing room with unfinished wooden walls.
I spent several moments out in the yard by myself this weekend, just being. Every few minutes a vehicle would zoom past on the neighboring road. Other than that, it was dead quiet, except for the water flowing in the stream at the edge of the yard and the occasional breeze blowing through the trees.
It was heaven.
Early yesterday afternoon I stood by the stream and just stared at the water and at the opposite bank. I can do that sometimes – I can just sit or stand somewhere for minutes on end and drift off into a reverie. “What are you doing, Jeff?” someone might ask. And the answer will be that I’m thinking. Just thinking.
I thought about nature and about Native Americans, and about what the land was like before electricity and before log cabins and any permanent settlements. I imagined how quiet and peaceful the world used to be without any people on it, without any words or language. I stared at the trees and and water and rocks and tried to imagine myself pre-verbal. Language leads to thoughts and intelligence, which make us feel separate from nature. But we and the trees and the dirt come from the same stuff.
When we die we will decompose and rejoin the earth, and we will be silent again.
Not to burst your bubble, but…
I do live in a house like that: in the middle of nowhere, closest neighbor a mile away, surrounded by woods and creeks and farmland. (I live on 27 acres in VERY rural Iowa.) It’s so dark out here at night that I can see the band of the Milky Way all year.
We have so many unfinished walls you could spend a whole day and not have time to shake a stick at all of them.
We have acres of grasslands and woods, and we can tell it’s spring when the pond suddenly sings with frogs all night, and we always know what phase the moon is in because there’s no light pollution out here.
When NASA sends an email about a good viewing opportunity, I can always see naked-eye objects from my yard.
At night when we shut off the lights and turn off the television or stereo, it becomes so silent you can hear the blood flowing through your veins.
Restful is nice, but it’s got downsides. For instance, sure you *could* write a lot like this… or not. When there’s this much restfulness, it’s hard to stay focused. It’s hard to get things done. There’s no push, no rush, no need.
It’s so restful you can realize one lazy morning that you basically haven’t done anything in like a year and a half.
Just sayin’, that’s all. :)
I’ve often thought of turning this place into a writer’s retreat; writers are *always* waxing poetic about going out into the country to write in the wondrous solitude!
Most of Sunset Boulevard ?
What prevented you from watching it all? Some car-hop? Some dress extra?
Jeff, if you ever come to Daylesford, Australia, you can see the same number of stars as in the Catskills. You can most certainly see the ‘faint band of the Milky Way’here. Amazing sight after having lived in a place of 3.5 million people (=Melbourne) where one can see only very few stars!
Reading this makes me want to take a vacation.
Mushlette: Renting out any rooms :)