I am now listening to ‘The Lark Ascending’ by Ralph Vaughan Williams. What a joy! I can almost see it–the lark, high in a clear, sunny sky, soaring up and up and up. Aaah.
It reminds me of once seeing a lark, in England, appropriately enough. We were in our twenties, and staying in Somerset at a bed and breakfast near Glastonbury. We went for a walk, hoping to have a picnic somewhere rural. We went down a dirt road, then across a field. There were cows around, and cow droppings on the ground. We spent as much time watching the ground as looking around at the surrounding hills and trees and farmhouses. And then, we heard it: a lark. We both looked up in surprise, thrilled, and stepped promptly into a large, moist cow-pie.
This is just one reason why my theory about life is summed up in the phrase, “Never Mozart without static.” It’s a phrase that comes originally from “Steppenwolf” by Hesse. Mozart himself teaches the protagonist that life is filled with beauty, but it seldom is unmitigated beauty. There’s usually some distraction, some touch of something annoying or negative, which you must try to ignore in order to see and appreciate the beauty.
Years later, John and I were in Greece for a month with Pasley, who was a year and a half. We were lucky enough to be in a villa overlooking the sea, with a patio rimmed with roses. We were young, good looking and able to stay at such a place only by sheer chance, for little money–$300 for the month, which included laundry services. At night, we sat on our patio and drank oozo or retsina with newly acquired friends, or went to an outdoor terrasse overlooking the sea to eat and drink, with Pasley trotting about in little shoes I had made out of denim, visiting the other diners and collecting from them their worry beads. During the day, we hiked through pine forests to clean, virgin beaches with white sand and turquoise water where Pasley could swim naked. It was a paradise. And yet…
We spent most of the time worrying about whether or not the landlord was going to charge us more for the villa than we had agreed to; we couldn’t speak Greek and he couldn’t speak English, so we couldn’t ask. His wife obviously thought we were too young to enjoy such a lovely villa, and made a point of banging around in the hall behind or villa doing the laundry every other day around 6. We were eaten alive by mosquitoes each night, despite a smudge pot at the door. And we could hear people partying down at the beach, along with awful, tiny music, all night long, until finally, silence, and then, at about 4 am every morning, the sound of scooters coming along the little road below us: vendors heading for town with produce to sell. They sounded like overgrown hornets and always woke us. We were, as a result, both itchy and sleep-deprived during the entire vacation.
In other words, Mozart with static.
The same was the case when Pasley and I rented a cottage in the hills above Dartmoor. It was hundreds of years old and quaint. It was in a tiny village with an ancient well in its center, and one night the wild ponies of Dartmoor came in to drink at the well, and we fed them carrots in the fog. There was a pub nearby. And yet…
We had no means of transportation, since I hadn’t realized that ‘good for touring’ meant ‘in your own car’: I had thought that meant by tour bus. We had to walk about 5 miles down and back up to where we could get a bus to go anywher, or even buy groceries—through wonderful, mountainous scenery, but on a very wearying way. The cottage, for all its quaintitude, was fixed so that you couldn’t get hot water, electricity or the badly needed heat from a gas fireplace if you didn’t have a slew of coins to put in the proper meters, coins which initially we didn’t have and always seemed to be running out of. The pub was poorly lit, had no charm, and the people in it were unfriendly. The moor ponies were filthy with their own dung, so that you couldn’t stand near them. Walking so far every day just to get a bus, plus then walking wherever we went to, I managed to get ‘plantar’s fasciitis’, a sprain of the muscles across the sole of my feet, so that by the time we hit London, I could hardly walk, which meant that we didn’t go around the Tower of London as we would have liked.
I managed to make things somewhat better by getting us out of there to go to the tip of Cornwall overnight, to eat seafood at a restaurant once frequented by smugglers. But on the whole, it was Mozart with static the whole way.
The thing is, I’ve found, you have to anticipate a certain amount of something negative in any experience, and try to overcome it rather than sitting around complaining or getting depressed. This takes a great deal of effort, which means that you are never really allowed to relax, but it does mean that you will rememberr the experience fondly. The ’static’ actually makes the remembrance of it all much more bitter sweet, because instead of relaxing, you were trying so hard to focus on the pleasant aspects that you really ingrained them into your memory.
I have to remember this every day, for it’s not just on vacation that you find such things.
