No Escape, Part Thirteen: "Switch Love, Move House -- You Will Soon Be Back Where You Started"

I am intimately familiar with both the dream of Escape and its companion, the Siren song of the Ideal Place.  A long-time reader of this blog recently commented that he had spent his holiday in the Lincolnshire Wolds. Being unfamiliar with the area, I did some Internet research.  Upon seeing how lovely the area is, I soon began dreaming of spending my remaining years in a secluded vale amid the Wolds, "and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made."  With occasional treks eastward to the North Sea for a walk along the shingle.  And so it goes . . .

Harry Epworth Allen (1894-1958), "Summer" (1940)

The theme of this "No Escape" series of posts is:  "Wherever you go, there you are."  As I have noted before, this notion is not a contemporary pop psychology platitude.

"Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and lust do not leave us when we change our country . . . Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels.  'I should think not,' he said, 'he took himself along with him.'"

Michel de Montaigne, "Of Solitude," The Complete Essays of Montaigne (translated by Donald Frame) (Stanford University Press 1958).

Two centuries or so later Samuel Johnson retraced Montaigne's steps:

"The general remedy of those, who are uneasy without knowing the cause, is change of place; they are willing to imagine that their pain is the consequence of some local inconvenience, and endeavour to fly from it, as children from their shadows; always hoping for more satisfactory delight from every new scene, and always returning home with disappointments and complaints. . . . [H]e, who has so little knowledge of human nature, as to seek happiness by changing any thing, but his own dispositions, will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove."

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, Number 6 (April 7, 1750).

Yes, yes, well said, sirs.  But easier said than done.

Harry Epworth Allen, "The Caravan"

                         Ideal Home

                                   1

Never would there be lives enough for all
The comely places --
Glimpsed from a car, a train, or loitered past --
That lift their faces
To be admired, murmuring 'Live with me.'

House with a well,
Or a ghost; by a stream; on a hill; in a hollow: breathing
Woodsmoke appeal,
Fresh paint, or simply a prayer to be kept warm,
Each casts her spell.

Life, claims each, will look different from my windows,
Your furniture be
Transformed in these rooms, your chaos sorted out here.
Ask for the key.
Walk in, and take me.  Then you shall live again.

                                   2

. . . Nor lives enough
For all the fair ones, dark ones, chestnut-haired ones
Promising love --
I'll be your roof, your hearth, your paradise orchard
And treasure-trove.
With puritan scents -- rosemary, thyme, verbena,
With midnight musk,
Or the plaintive, memoried sweetness tobacco-plants
Exhale at dusk,
They lure the footloose traveller to dream of
One fixed demesne,
The stay-at-home to look for his true self elsewhere.
I will remain
Your real, your ideal property.  Possess me.
Be born again.

                                   3

If only there could be lives enough, you're wishing? . . .
For one or two
Of all the possible loves a dozen lifetimes
Would hardly do:
Oak learns to be oak through a rooted discipline.

Such desirableness
Of place or person is chiefly a glamour cast by
Your unsuccess
In growing your self.  Rebirth needs more than a change of
Flesh or address.

Switch love, move house -- you will soon be back where you started,
On the same ground,
With a replica of the old romantic phantom
That will confound
Your need for roots with a craving to be unrooted.

C. Day Lewis, The Gate and Other Poems (1962).

Harry Epworth Allen, "A Derbyshire Farmstead"

No Escape, Part Eleven: "Back"

The theme of this "No Escape" series is:  "Wherever you go, there you are." This remark sounds like a bit of contemporary pop psychology.  However, it may have its origins in a remark by Socrates.  This surmise is not based upon systematic research, but upon a passage from Montaigne (which I have previously posted):

"Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and lust do not leave us when we change our country. . .  Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels.  'I should think not,' he said, 'he took himself along with him.'"

Michel de Montaigne, "Of Solitude," The Complete Essays of Montaigne (translated by Donald Frame) (Stanford University Press 1958).

             Charles Ginner, "Lancaster from Castle Hill Terrace" (c. 1947)

Yes, all roads do lead back to ourselves.  That being said, I know quite well the siren song of escape.  It goes something like this:  "I should not be withheld but that some day/Into their vastness I should steal away . . ." (Robert Frost, from "Into My Own.")

                  Back

Where is that sought-for place
Which grants a brief release
From locked impossibilities?
Impossible to say,
No signposts point the way.

Its very terrain vague
(What mountainside?  What lake?)
It gives the senses nothing,
Nothing to carry back,
No souvenir, no photograph.

Towards its borders no train shrieks
(What meadowland?  What creeks?)
And no plane howls towards its heart.
It is yourself you hear
(What parks?  What gentle deer?).

Only desperation finds it,
Too desperate to blaze a trail.
It only lives by knowing lack.
The single sign that you were there is,
You know that you are back.

D. J. Enright, Unlawful Assembly (1968).

                                              Cedric Lockwood Morris
                     "From a Window at 45 Brook Street, London" (1926)

"We Are Never At Home, We Are Always Beyond"

We tend to spend a great deal of time looking forward to -- or worrying about -- the future.  In the meantime, the present moves into the past.  Of this tendency, Montaigne writes:

"Those who accuse men of always gaping after future things, and teach us to lay hold of present goods and settle ourselves in them, since we have no grip on what is to come (indeed a good deal less than we have on what is past), put their finger on the commonest of human errors . . . We are never at home, we are always beyond.  Fear, desire, hope, project us toward the future and steal from us the feeling and consideration of what is, to busy us with what will be, even when we shall no longer be."

Michel de Montaigne, "Our Feelings Reach Out Beyond Us," The Complete Essays of Montaigne (translated by Donald Frame) (Stanford University Press 1958), page 8.

                                 William Ratcliffe, "Attic Room" (1918)

Montaigne's thoughts bring to mind a poem by Thomas Hardy.

           A Two-Years' Idyll

              Yes; such it was;
       Just those two seasons unsought,
Sweeping like summertide wind on our ways;
              Moving, as straws,
       Hearts quick as ours in those days;
Going like wind, too, and rated as nought
       Save as the prelude to plays
       Soon to come -- larger, life-fraught:
              Yes; such it was.

              'Nought' it was called,
       Even by ourselves -- that which springs
Out of the years for all flesh, first or last,
              Commonplace, scrawled
       Dully on days that go past.
Yet, all the while, it upbore us like wings
       Even in hours overcast:
       Aye, though this best thing of things,
              'Nought' it was called!

              What seems it now?
       Lost: such beginning was all;
Nothing came after: romance straight forsook
              Quickly somehow
       Life when we sped from our nook,
Primed for new scenes with designs smart and tall. . . .
       -- A preface without any book,
       A trumpet uplipped, but no call;
              That seems it now.

Thomas Hardy, Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922).

I suspect that most of us have had this sort of experience, and it is not one that is limited to romantic relationships.  Of course, "hindsight is 20/20" (as the saying goes), so perhaps it is unfair of us to judge ourselves for not appreciating what was passing us by unawares as we dreamed upon the future.  "A preface without any book" is a very nice way of putting it, I think. This is why the Chinese T'ang poets and the Japanese haiku poets would have us look at the world around us, at this moment.

                              William Ratcliffe, "Cottage Interior" (1920)

"Beyond All This, The Wish To Be Alone"

Ah, the allure of solitude.  But it is likely that, after a stretch of being alone, we will long for company.  Even Montaigne found that, for reasons other than mere loneliness, retirement to a life of solitude was not all that it was cracked up to be:

"Lately when I retired to my home, determined so far as possible to bother about nothing except spending the little life I have left in rest and seclusion, it seemed to me I could do my mind no greater favor than to let it entertain itself in full idleness and stay and settle in itself, which I hoped it might do more easily now, having become weightier and riper with time.

But I find -- Ever idle hours breed wandering thoughts (Lucan) -- that, on the contrary, like a runaway horse, it gives itself a hundred times more trouble than it took for others, and gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose, that in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself."

Michel de Montaigne, "Of Idleness," Essays (translated by Donald Frame) (1588).

Yet, a romantic notion about the pleasures of solitude persists, and I would be disingenuous if I claimed not to share that notion.  Hence, I confess that something like this appeals to me (even though I have never been a fan of D. H. Lawrence):

                         Delight of Being Alone

I know no greater delight than the sheer delight of being alone
It makes me realise the delicious pleasure of the moon
that she has in travelling by herself:  throughout time,
or the splendid growing of an ash-tree
alone, on a hill-side in the north, humming in the wind.

D. H. Lawrence, Last Poems (1932).

                     J. A. G. Acke "In the Stockholm Archipelago" (1910)

But, when it comes to the putative joys of being alone, Lawrence cannot (needless to say) hold a candle to Philip Larkin.  And thus, as is so often the case for me (which, I acknowledge, is surely a sign of some sort of malign pathology), I shall give the last word to Mr. Larkin (who, as always, is brutally honest, appalling, and, alas, correct -- after a fashion).

                            Wants

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff --
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death --
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.

Philip Larkin, The Less Deceived (1955).

When, decades ago, I first read "Wants," I was taken with "the wish to be alone" business.  Now, however, I think that the finest part of the poem is this:  "The costly aversion of the eyes from death."

                      Charles Ginner, "Dahlias and Cornflowers" (1929)

No Escape, Part Eight: "No Traveller Tells Of It, However Far He Has Been"

The search for the Ideal Place is, at bottom, a search for Home (whatever that is).  Being of a melancholy turn of mind, Edward Thomas was wont to express a longing for a missing "home" or "land" that seemed always out of reach.  But, because he was a wise and a sensitive man, Thomas knew that he was kidding himself.  The Ideal Place -- the Home we long for -- is a chimera.  And the old saw (traceable to Socrates via Montaigne) beckons:  "wherever you go, there you are."

                         Home

Not the end: but there's nothing more.
Sweet Summer and Winter rude
I have loved, and friendship and love,
The crowd and solitude:

But I know them: I weary not;
But all that they mean I know.
I would go back again home
Now.  Yet how should I go?

This is my grief.  That land,
My home, I have never seen;
No traveller tells of it,
However far he has been.

And could I discover it,
I fear my happiness there,
Or my pain, might be dreams of return
Here, to these things that were.

Remembering ills, though slight
Yet irremediable,
Brings a worse, an impurer pang
Than remembering what was well.

No: I cannot go back,
And would not if I could.
Until blindness come, I must wait
And blink at what is not good.

                                 Richard Eurich, "Seabound" (1984)

No Escape, Part Four: A. S. J. Tessimond

We have previously heard from Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, and Cavafy on the "wherever you go, there you are" problem.  A. S.  J. Tessimond (1902-1962) (who I intend to write about as a neglected poet) has spoken on this subject as well.  That Tessimond at times worked in the advertising business (and wrote at least three poems on the business -- "Advertising," "The Ad-Man," and "Defence of the Ad-Man") may (or may not) be something to bear in mind as you think about the poem. 

                  Where?

You are in love with a country
Where people laugh in the sun
And the people are warm as the sunshine and live and move easily
And women with honey-coloured skins and men with no frowns on
     their faces
Sit on white terraces drinking red wine
While the sea spreads peacock feathers on cinnamon sands
And palms weave sunlight into sheaves of gold
And at night the shadows are indigo velvet
And there is dancing to soft, soft, soft guitars
Played by copper fingers under a froth of stars.

Perhaps your country is where you think you will find it.
Or perhaps it has not yet come or perhaps it has gone.
Perhaps it is east of the sun and west of the moon.
Perhaps it is a country called the Hesperides
And Avalon and Atlantis and Eldorado:
A country which Gaugin looked for in Tahiti and Lawrence in Mexico,
And whether they found it only they can say, and they not now.
Perhaps you will find it where you alone can see it,
But if you see it, though no one else can, it will be there,
It will be yours.

                 Caspar David Friedrich, "The Life Stages" (1835)

No Escape, Part Two: Samuel Johnson

When it comes to obtaining wise, no-nonsense, eloquent, and entertaining counsel on Life and/or How to Live, I am more than willing to rely solely upon Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.  As far as the quiddities of human nature and human behavior are concerned, one can be fairly certain that the two of them have been there before we have.

Hence, we should not be astonished that Samuel Johnson has visited the "wherever you go, there you are" territory and has reached the same conclusions as Montaigne (but in his own delightful fashion, of course):

     The general remedy of those, who are uneasy without knowing the cause, is change of place; they are willing to imagine that their pain is the consequence of some local inconvenience, and endeavour to fly from it, as children from their shadows; always hoping for more satisfactory delight from every new scene, and always returning home with disappointments and complaints. 

     [Johnson then describes Abraham Cowley's plan - as expressed by Cowley in the preface to his poems - to abandon England for America in order to gain peace of mind.]  Surely no stronger instance can be given of a persuasion that content was the inhabitant of particular regions, and that a man might set sail with a fair wind, and leave behind him all his cares, incumbrances, and calamities. . . .

     [Cowley] never suspected that the cause of his unhappiness was within, that his own passions were not sufficiently regulated, and that he was harrassed by his own impatience, which could never be without something to awaken it, would accompany him over the sea, and find its way to his American elysium.  He would, upon the trial, have been soon convinced, that the fountain of content must spring up in the mind; and that he, who has so little knowledge of human nature, as to seek happiness by changing any thing, but his own dispositions, will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, Number 6 (April 7, 1750).   
 

      Claude Lorrain, "Imaginary View of Delphi, with a Procession"

No Escape, Part One: Montaigne

An old saw:  "Wherever you go, there you are."  (Have no fear!  I am not venturing into "pop psychology," nor am I about to offer "self-help" advice.  Montaigne will arrive in a moment.)  Put differently:  There is no escaping yourself. 

Not surprisingly, Montaigne (and, it turns out, Socrates) covered this ground long before we moderns arrived on the scene:

Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and lust do not leave us when we change our country.  "Behind the horseman sits black care."  [Horace]  They often follow us even into the cloisters and the schools of philosophy.  Neither deserts, nor rocky caves, nor hair shirts, nor fastings will free us of them. . . . Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels.  " I should think not," he said; "he took himself along with him."  

     Why should we move to find

     Countries and climates of another kind?

     What exile leaves himself behind?  [Horace] 

If a man does not first unburden his soul of the load that weighs upon it, movement will cause it to be crushed still more, as in a ship the cargo is less cumbersome when it is settled.  You do a sick man more harm than good by moving him.  You imbed the malady by disturbing it, as stakes penetrate deeper and grow firmer when you budge them and shake them.

Michel de Montaigne, "Of Solitude," from Essays (translated by Donald Frame).

On the rafters of his library, Montaigne engraved quotes of which he wished to be reminded.

The rafter below contains part of a quote from Terence: "homo sum humani a me nihil alienum puto."  Alas, I have no Latin, but here is one way of translating the line: "I am human; so nothing human is strange to me."