At fifty, Alix Kates Shulman left a full and active life in the city and went to live alone for a summer on an island off the coast of Maine. She ended up going back each summer for ten years, to stay in a cabin with no plumbing or electricity perched atop a rocky promontory known as “the nubble.” She found more there than just uninterrupted days and meditative solitude in which to write; she discovered a slower, more contemplative way of life that changed her outlook in ways she hadn’t imagined.
— Andrew Snee
Always before a creature of others — of my husband, the family, the world — I’d expected solitude to be the challenge, the handicap, the price to pay for the freedom to feel and think unencumbered. For while part of me always longed for it — the part that had angled for a single in the dorm, rejoiced when my husband was called out of town, and occasionally sent me off to an artists’ colony — another part cowered before the loneliness and anxiety that threatened to follow freedom, the part that made me marry at twenty and that kept me married, ostensibly for the children’s sake, after love died. In the ceaseless battle between the two my fears won out, sending me dashing to safety after each tentative charge on freedom.
But now I find that solitude, far from being the price, is turning out to be the prize. Solitude its own reward! Instead of making me anxious, it seems to be sweeping away my anxieties, opening up possibilities, and as I walk from cabin to rocks to beach to cove to outhouse and shed, and back again, I feel a composure I’ve never known before. At night I fall into bed weary instead of tense. My fingernails, bitten since childhood, are growing long. Not that I’ve willed them to grow — years of trying haven’t worked; I simply notice, one day after clamming, an irritating deposit of grit beneath ten unfamiliar growths on my hands. Just so, after half a lifetime of adapting to the needs of others in the high tide of the family, here at fifty, with no one to ask or answer to, I’m beginning to see who I am when the tide goes out.
Kneeling before the Franklin stove and crumpling paper to start a fire, I reach into the pile of old newspapers and pull out an obscure literary journal. It’s six years old; I may have read it. Shall I burn it? I look over the contents page. The essays look mildly interesting; I wonder who brought it here and why. A couple of poems catch my eye. I put it aside and crumple something else, noting that a year ago I’d most likely have burned the journal as dated. But old habits are losing their hold on me.
For years I avidly read books and eagerly wrote them, systematically trying to stuff my head with all the thoughts of mankind, but always so determined to master a subject or pursue a goal that I seldom practiced the simple pleasures of reading whatever caught my fancy or following a thought wherever it happened to lead. My plans and projects were usually so backed up that no matter what work I was engaged in at any moment, I suspected it ought to be something else. Once, I started a short story in which the protagonist leaves home for a month in order to devote herself to completing a story she’s been writing, but she slips away from her place of refuge to another retreat to begin a different one, and from that one she plays hooky for yet another one. Each time she leaves one undertaking to pursue another, she leaves a bit of herself behind, until by the time she steals back to her starting place she is strung out with no stories left at all. I never finished the story.
Now, evidently, a tide has turned. Without a witness, what I ought to do and what I want to do begin to merge, until I lose my ability to distinguish them. My ambitious, ego-driven will, that muscular taskmaster I’ve cultivated for years and honored with obedience, ambles languidly in the sun, awaiting my orders. Instead of leading, it seems content to follow along wherever I want to go: down to the shore with a bucket, into the kitchen with a specimen, curled up before the fire with an unexpected book — not one of the books I sent on ahead from my other life but, like my new food and my old clothes, one I find here waiting.
When the fire’s crackling, I meander freely among the books as I last did as a child loose in the library. The old literary journal on the kindling pile is as satisfying as the new ones creating a stir back in the city. The fat college anthologies of world literature I once picked up at St. Joseph the Provider but never found time to read, the odd assortment of paperbacks left behind by visitors seem as brilliant as the stars — the very stars obscured in the city by artificial light. I know that any book or magazine in print can be had through mail order or subscription, but making do seems more appealing than keeping up. Here in the college readers are thousands of pages packed with works by writers I’ve been meaning to read for years, mixed with some I’ve never heard of. Here are the Bible and Baldwin, Le Guin and Lessing, Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Mann, Castaneda, Kafka, Stravinsky, Tolstoy, the Brontës —
Ever since the early fifties in New York, when I first read the Brontës as I rode the subway between upper Broadway, where I lived, and my Wall Street clerical job, I’ve wanted to reread them. But too much else was lined up waiting; rereading was a luxury I had no time for. But now time has stepped out of its running shoes, dropped its disguises, returned to the rhythm of the tides, the cycles of the planets and the moon, the slow ripening of the plants I gather, the long leavening of the yeasty breads I bake. Pointless to try to slow or hurry it, much less to “save” it. Slowly the kneaded dough rises in the bowl at its own pace, and after the first long rising you punch it down and let it rise again, and when it once more fills the pan you bake it. The rich aroma of freshly baked bread permeates the cabin all day long, and each time you cut a slice, spread it with jam, and chew it, you experience again the whole sensuous process: the kneading, the rising, the punching down, the baking. Gradually I realize that the very concept saving time is either a solecism (surely time goes at its own good pace) or a waste (save it for what?); the more lavishly I spend time, the more I seem to have, like the wild leaves I pluck for salad which grow more lushly the more I pick. In nubble time history melts away, taking with it all traces of the number game. Old, young, obsolete — these time-bounded words don’t apply in a realm where there’s time enough for everything; indeed, all the time in the world.
“Think long thoughts,” I read in a strange book with a fuchsia cover. The author is P. D. Ouspensky, a follower of Gurdjieff, both early-twentieth-century Russian-born mystics. “Each of our thoughts is too short. Until you have experience from your own observation of the difference between long and short thoughts, this idea will mean nothing to you.”
Until this moment, I’ve been one to whom the idea of a long thought meant nothing; it never even crossed my mind. I lay the book in my lap and reflect: have I experienced the difference between long and short thoughts or haven’t I? Perhaps not before this summer, never having been alone long enough. But recently I do seem to have had the luxury of several rather long, uninterrupted, exhilarating thoughts — though maybe not long enough to qualify. How long is long? And long enough for what? I’m puzzled, intrigued; the question certainly seems worth investigating.
Here I must confess that before coming alone to the nubble I would never have had a moment for a book by a mystic, particularly one that called itself Conscience: The Search for Truth. Having come of age in the fifties, a time when the very concept of Truth with a capital T was suspect, when the fashionable philosophical theory of logical positivism held that nothing can be known except what can be stated in verifiable sentences, I would have dismissed such a book with a snicker. But here on the nubble, where no one can judge my thoughts, and snickers have nothing to feed on, I’m free to read anything I like. Indeed, now that I’m following my nose, whatever I read seems like a special message beamed directly to me. Just as the most innocuous-looking plants are gifts of sustenance, so even the most unlikely authors speak to me. Is this what it means to be in tune with your surroundings?
Looking out over the sea, I recall an earlier time when I was briefly but intensely curious about matters mystical. It began with a strange episode on a speeding subway train.
I was sitting alone on the downtown IRT on my way to pick up the children at their after-school music classes. The train had just pulled out of the Twenty-third Street station and was accelerating to its cruising speed. All around me people sat bundled up in mufflers, damp woolen coats, and slush-stained boots, reading newspapers or staring off blankly as the train jerked along the track. The air was cold and close, with the smell of stale tobacco clinging to winter coats. An elderly pair exchanged words in a Slavic tongue; a mother read an advertising sign to her three bedraggled, open-mouthed children.
Then suddenly the dull light in the car began to shine with exceptional lucidity until everything around me was glowing with an indescribable aura, and I saw in the row of motley passengers opposite the miraculous connection of all living beings. Not felt; saw. What began as a desultory thought grew to a vision, large and unifying, in which all the people in the car hurtling downtown together, including myself, like all the people on the planet hurtling together around the sun — our entire living cohort — formed one united family, indissolubly connected by the rare and mysterious accident of life. No matter what our countless superficial differences, we were equal, we were one, by virtue of simply being alive at this moment out of all the possible moments stretching endlessly back and ahead. The vision filled me with overwhelming love for the entire human race and a feeling that no matter how incomplete or damaged our lives, we were surpassingly lucky to be alive. Then the train pulled into the station and I got off.
I emerged from the subway stunned and thrilled. Crisp midday light glinted off the windows of a tall apartment building across the street; a high wind shivered through me and shook the corner traffic lights. I looked around at the familiar world, which was the same yet not the same. My ordinary existence had been shattered, letting me glimpse something I had never before imagined, something I could not begin to describe.
If only I could see it again! But I had no idea how to get it back. It had come and gone unbidden, without the least boost (or hindrance) from my will. It was as if I had suddenly fallen through a deep hole into another world, only to emerge again as suddenly. Besides, if I didn’t hurry I’d be late for the children.
In order to keep it alive, or at least prevent the memory from fading too quickly, I needed to speak of my experience. But whom could I tell? Who would care to believe me? No one I knew. In my Manhattan, mysticism was scorned; mystics, like Communists, and the few bookstores that catered to either, were underground. Still, I could not doubt that my vision had occurred, even though I had no way to verify it. And this inspired in me a new humility toward such knowledge and a secret gratitude that the vision had appeared to me, an atheistically tending agnostic.
Time passed, and though I would not forget or deny my strange experience, it made me so uncomfortable that it ossified into a mere biographical fact, something slightly embarrassing that had once unaccountably happened to me.
Alone on the nubble, I’m now able to recall that momentous event of decades before without embarrassment. Mixing it with water, wind, and memory, I reconstitute the desiccated fact as a full-blown experience pulsing with life. The vision of unity I saw on that subway begins here to extend beyond humanity to the whole natural world. No longer is it tainted as “mystic,” for here, with no one passing judgment, no experience is tainted. The effort of thought is always the effort to see underlying patterns; here, with no distractions — or rather, where nothing I do can distract me from my thought — the patterns and hidden harmonies begin to dance before me. Perhaps I’ll have all the time I need to follow a thought, any thought, wherever it leads for as long as it takes to come to clarity.
After half a lifetime of adapting to the needs of others in the high tide of the family, here at fifty, with no one to ask or answer to, I’m beginning to see who I am when the tide goes out.
It’s Saturday, and I’m walking home from “down front,” where I’ve just stopped at the store, the post office, and the pay phone to make my weekly calls to my family. At the crest of the hill I stop short as I read an alarmed note from my old friend Katherine: “We worry about you up there by yourself. It’s not healthy to be so much alone. Isn’t it time for you to come back home?”
I’m shocked. I’d written her five pages about my love affair with solitude and how grateful I feel to be living on this island, eating the weeds and drinking the rain. But instead of rejoicing she’s distressed, afraid I may be flipping out. She’s one of my closest friends, one of the eight feminists with whom I’d been meeting once a week for years to try to keep alive the passion we first developed in the late sixties, when the movement known as the Second Wave of feminism stormed the historical stage, giving us the role of our lives. Now, years later, when so many women have grown weary, discouraged, or distracted, we still try to carry on with our protests and actions, fighting injustice as we did back when the movement was young, vigorous, and winning.
I fold up the letter and stop to pick serviceberries, or “pie berries,” my newest find, off three high bushes along the road. For weeks I’ve been eyeing these small, smooth-skinned spheres that resemble huckleberries and have ripened to a dull red; though bland and tasteless when raw, they are reputedly delicious in a pie. Thinking about Katherine’s letter as I fill my sack, I’m not exactly sure myself what to make of the changes I’m undergoing. But far from flipping out, I feel whole, the opposite of crazy. The anxieties I suffered only months ago over the state of the world and the weight of my years have fallen away, replaced in this tranquil space by acceptance of what I find, of who I am. Amor fati, goes the Latin proverb now tacked up over my desk: accept what is — literally, “love fate.”
Perhaps I shouldn’t have tried to explain to Katherine what I’m feeling here. What friend wants to know that you prefer to be alone? Even my children seem suspicious of this move away, as if it means I care about them less, despite how eagerly I anticipate our Saturday talks or how disappointed I am if they’re out when I call. Katherine seems worried, as I sometimes am myself, that solitude is eroding the passion from my politics, as if harmony and struggle are two masters that cannot both be served. After all, it’s hard to be an activist by yourself — particularly in a movement that exalts community and distrusts all individualists and loners.
I think wistfully back to those idealistic days in the movement when we made all decisions by consensus, rotating tasks or choosing them by lot so that each of us could be empowered. We learned to listen hard and think together, insisting at each meeting that everyone speak her mind. We studied oratory, self-defense, anatomy, electricity, car repair, carpentry, history — imagining we could make ourselves so strong and skilled that we could each take responsibility for everything in our lives. Maybe, I think, I’ve come to a place where I can again expand my powers and live once more by consensus — but this time consensus of one.
Back in the cabin I mix the berries with sugar and lemon peel, then roll out the pie crusts. The hand method of doing things is making me stronger every day. Extensions of my hands, my tools are teaching me artistry I never knew myself capable of. In my kitchen, equipped mainly with discards from an army of kitchen modernizers, I can perform every desired task; I am three generations behind, and probably as many ahead, as I cut my pastry with a wooden-handled wire pastry blender, beat batter with a wooden spoon, strain the peels from my applesauce or mash potatoes in a hand-powered food mill, grind seeds with a mortar and pestle, whip egg whites with a whisk, grate against a versatile hand grater, juice on a ridged glass juicer, toast on a four-sided toaster set over an open flame, sweep with a broom, and brew in a drip pot the coffee I grind by turning a handle and feeling each bean crumble as the gears bite down.
While the pie bakes, I pick up the freshman reader and open to a luminous essay by James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son.” His thoughts surround and carry me until, as I reach the final page, I find myself immersed in the fundamental political question, the disturbing paradox awakened in me by Katherine’s letter. “It began to seem,” writes Baldwin,
that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.
But how? I wonder, laying down the book. How can it be done? How hold in the mind for a moment — much less forever, as Baldwin commands — ideas and feelings so locked in opposition as acceptance and resistance, contemplation and struggle, solitude and solidarity, harmony and political passion? How can one live without rancor in a world steeped in suffering and injustice — or live without contentment in a world bathed in bird song at sundown?
All through dinner Baldwin’s paradox nags at me. I continue to chew on it even as I taste my first bite ever of serviceberry pie — which I have to concede is disappointing: a bit mealy and bland, like the dried blueberries in a box of muffin mix. It pesters me until, after I brush my purple-tinted teeth at the edge of the deck and light the evening lamp, I take up my reading again.
And now I’m forced to confront the conflict from another side, this time by Jacobo Timerman, an Argentine newspaper editor who was imprisoned and tortured for his politics. Reading his ironic reflection on how his particular mix of views utterly baffled his captors, slowly I begin to understand that no one’s life can make perfect sense to another person.
Colonel Battesti wanted . . . Timerman . . . to explain what he was doing in the Youth League for Freedom, why he was supporting that strange alliance between the United States and Russia, why he was active in Zionism and simultaneously reading Freud and fighting against Perón, and was also a Socialist, though claiming to be opposed to Russian totalitarianism. . . . This was the same individual who, according to the police report, had given a lecture at the age of twenty or twenty-two at the Academy of Plastic Arts, formulating a proposal in support of cubism, structuralism, constructivism, or some other ism. . . . They couldn’t accept or comprehend that an Argentine patriot could simultaneously be a patriotic Jew, a Zionist of the Left, a publisher of psychology books, a defender of Salvador Allende, of the Soviet dissidents, and of political prisoners in Cuban jails.
Why, I wonder, must my former selves — the committed political activist, the loyal feminist, the passionate mother, the engaged writer — compete with the quiet person I’m becoming here? Why can’t all of them reside in me as confidently as Timerman’s seemingly dissonant selves reside in him? Doesn’t he show that a life, a soul, is spacious enough for everything in it? Isn’t it as futile to ask oneself to choose among the impulses that live inside one as to ask the shore to justify its constantly changing appearance?
Why must my former selves — the committed political activist, the loyal feminist, the passionate mother, the engaged writer — compete with the quiet person I’m becoming here?
My colleague S., writing from the Royal Carnival Beach Hotel on a small Caribbean island where she and J. are taking a week’s vacation, asks if I too have been “getting in touch with nature.” She says she has been swimming laps until her crawl is now under a minute per lap — 20 percent faster than she did the day they arrived. Twenty percent in less than a week!
Is that getting in touch with nature? I suppose so: what in this world is not nature? As, equally, what in this world has not been affected by us? Our fallout falls everywhere, part of nature too. The city is nature; electricity is nature; power, poetry, and pollution are all equally part of nature. Are molecular biology and physical chemistry nature? A three-minute lap or a six-minute egg? If not, then S. herself, with her sleek, muscled body and her bleached-blond hair, is not. I don’t know if I’m more or less in touch with nature than I was before I came to live here, but I’m certainly more in touch with myself. I want to tell S. I’m getting in touch with the given, inside and out. For example:
Last week I woke up one morning to see a large, brown blob at the water’s edge. The tide was halfway out. Through the binoculars I thought I made out an animal stretched out on the beach on a beeline from my window.
I ran down to investigate. It was a dead seal with light tan fur, open eyes, and a set of small, even teeth. I poked at its decomposing body with a long driftwood stick, working to turn it over. No visible genitals, but two round holes on either side running clear through the body and connected by gashes, chunks of flesh missing from its back. I tried to shove it off the beach into the water, but it was bloated and heavy and wouldn’t roll. Maybe the tide would take it out. “Yeah, sometimes fishermen take shots at the seals when they got nothing to do,” said one of the women at the store. Of course! — those were bullet holes. “But,” I asked, “then why are there chunks missing?” “Dunno. Maybe sharks got after it,” said someone else. “The smell of blood.”
When I examined the seal again after returning from the store, I noticed a perfect set of claws on each of its rather stubby flippers, long dark nails like Joan Crawford’s in a black-and-white still. Mammal, I thought. Perfect manicured fingernails, dark and shapely, ladylike.
Before nightfall, the seal had disappeared on the tide, making me sorry not to have taken a nail or two. When it was back again on the far side of the beach the next morning, I didn’t hesitate. I put on two of the blue cotton fishermen’s gloves from the dozen or so I’ve salvaged from a certain spot on South Beach where they’re always washing up (Once I found gloves at that spot for eight days running when I went across for the mail — mostly left-handed. Where did they come from? Why just there?), took down a pair of pliers, and carefully plied off eight nails, leaving one on each flipper — like the bit of food some people ritually leave on their plate to give something back.
Getting them out was a harder job than I’d expected, but once I began I was determined. Most of the nails wound up with bits of fur still clinging to them; this worried me because there was no knowing how long the seal had been dead or what organisms had invaded it. Sappho wisely warned, “If you’re squeamish, don’t prod the beach rubble.” Here, I’ve shed my squeamishness. Still wearing gloves, I washed off the nails in sea water, then carried them in a horse-mussel shell up to the cabin, where I sterilized them in boiling water.
If that’s getting in touch with nature, I say to S. (alone, I speak to anyone I like), then how come the gloves? But she’s hardly one to tell about stripping the claws from a dead seal and doesn’t get my joke. As I arrange the nails on a shelf among shells and bones, I think about S. on her island and me on mine. Are we different or alike? She’s out to break records, I to establish mine by discovering how little I need in order to have everything, how much awaits me under the tide, how long I can stretch the season without freezing or cracking. My new rules are few and simple: follow my interest; go as deep as I can; change the rules whenever I like.
Excerpted from Shulman’s Drinking the Rain, just published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. © 1995 by Alix Kates Shulman.
