Saturday, November 10, 2018

Evanston: my last 76th evening

        This might be ill advised.  It is almost 10 PM as I start writing and I have a second glass of Laphroaig beside me  which was preceded by half a bottle of wine.
        Carol has gone to bed.  
        I watched college football for a while with the sound muted, listening to music.  Some Bach naturally—the best thing that might be said about Webb Chiles is that without any musical talent or education, Bach spoke to him as no other did—and then a shuffled list of contemporary music.
        Four poets:  Dante, Tennyson, Kazantzakis, Cavafy, saw a Ulysses who would not after the Trojan War and his ten year return to Ithaca be satisfied to remain there and would as an old man set out for the edge of human experience again.
        I doubt that any of those poets thought of a Ulysses 77 years old.  
        I also doubt that any of them thought of Penelope, who according to the legend was faithful for twenty years, giving up the natural fulfillment of her beauty and life.  I have often thought of and admire Penelope.
        I wrote in a long ago deleted poem, ‘intensity not duration’, yet incredibly and inexplicably I have known both.  
        That Webb Chiles has grown old is a statistical aberration almost beyond belief.
        Yet I am sitting in a comfortable condominium in front of a fireplace.  A life that would be envied by almost all our species, but which is redeemed for me only because I know that in two months I will be doing something difficult and dangerous, something that no other of our species has ever done before,
        There is no ego in this.  Or I hope not much.
        I was given by freak chance a one in a hundred billion horse to ride and the ability to write about that ride.  If I deserve any credit, it is that I did not quite fall off and I rode far beyond what anyone, including myself,  thought possible.  77 tomorrow I am still riding hard.
        And I wonder, assuming time and chance permit me to reach San Diego next year, what I will do next.
        I pause.  A sailor a thousand miles from the sea with a problem beyond the imagination of poets.