Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

In one of the “Letters” I quoted Naevius, an early Roman poet (my interest in Latin being perhaps the sole solid tie I have with my father’s world) . . . “Q. Tell me, how was your great commonwealth lost so quickly? A. We were overrun by a new lot of orators, a bunch of silly youngsters.” I believe we thought that fitted us. We answered their declarations and old speeches with avantgarde aesthetics; we thought we would be the “silly youngsters” who’d usher in a new order. I suppose, vaguely, we believed that artists should inherit the universe.

One of my friends at the Academy took to composing symphonies of odor, the foulest odors he could find and produce, dedicating each work to the two governments. Another created an artificial flower which would wilt if touched; yet another gathered dung and baked it into likenesses of the Heads of State. My own contribution (halfhearted at best, I suppose) was the sculpting of single grains of sand, using the tools of my father, then scattering my invisible beauty in handfuls wherever I walked.

I’m not certain any longer what we really thought we were accomplishing. In our own words we were reacting, we were speaking out, we were being ourselves, we were caring. At any rate, this activity channeled our energies, made us work, made us think, let us live off of each other’s various frenzies. It taught some of us, a few, that words and gestures get nothing done. Maybe somewhere, somehow, it accomplished something larger; I don’t know. (I understand, by the way, that microsculpture is quite the thing in the academies today.) Such, anyway, was the temper and tempo of my youth.

When I was twenty, I left Ginh with my degrees and came to live in a small room up four flights of stairs here on Juhlz (my poem, Crown of Juhlz). I worked for a while as a tutor, then held a position at the old Empire Library, but came very soon to realize that I was unable to fit myself to a job of any sort.

I fled to Farthay, where I wrote my first novel and married. She was a young, small thing with joy in her heart and fight in her eyes, a Vegan. Two years with me, and without the comfort of a child, was all she could bear. She left. It was best for both of us. We had already spent too much of our separate selves.

The rest of my life (I am 84) has been spent in forming and breaking idle patterns. I travel a lot, settle for short periods, move on (your letter retraced, and made me remember, many years of my life). What money I have comes through the kindness of friends; and from other, distant friends who buy my books.

My books: you ask after them. Thank you. Well, there’s Letters Home, which I’ve already mentioned and which you’ve probably read. Quite against my own preferences and wishes, it has proved my most popular book; I’ve been told that it’s taught in literature and sociology classes round about the Union.

There are the novels: Day Breaks; Pergamum (a sort of eulogy for my marriage); A Throw of the Dice; Fugue and Imposition; one or two others I’d just as soon not admit to.

Essays: Pillow Saint; Halfway Houses; Arcadias; Avatars and Auguries. Two volumes of letters between the Vegan poet Amdto and myself, concerning mostly Out-world poetry, entitled Rosebushes and Illuminations.

A collection of short stories, three volumes, Instants of Desertion.

And of course, the poems . . . Overtures and Paradiddles; Misericords; Poems; negatives; Abyssinia; Poems again; Printed Circuits; Assassins of Polish. Some while back, I received a check with a letter informing me that a Collected Poems was to be issued through Union Press. I can’t remember just how long ago that was, and can’t know how long the message took to find me, so I don’t know whether the book is available.

And coming at last to the poems you’ve sent, what am I to say? All critical intent is beyond me, I fear. I’ve been constantly bemused and confounded by what critics have found to praise and damn in my own work: I was aware neither that I had “narrowly ordered my sensibilities” nor that I “struck out boldly into the perilous waters that lie between a poetry of device and the poetry of apocalypse” (which another renders as aiming between “a poem of sentiment and one of structure”). Give me always die Common Reader, the sensitive ignorance.

(“The perilous waters” . . . had I known there was danger of drowning, I might never have begun to write.)

You want Authority; I can give you none. Let me instead look up at these winter-blurred hills and say this: the poems you’ve sent, and which I return with this letter —they are not unique, but they speak of something which may come, something which may become yours alone.

Perhaps you have it now. But two years is a very short time.

They are direct, compact, all the flourishes are beneath the surface—things greatly to be praised in a young writer. In one line you are content to give shape, in another you pause and form; always something comes easy, to the ear, the eye, the tongue, the mind, the heart. Also to be admired.

You evidently achieve control with little struggle, effective structure with somewhat more difficulty (precision and accuracy are often separate things). But you have patience, and this will come. Your diction draws crisp, sharp lines around a poem, while imagery and resonance make what is contained soft and yielding. This is at least a proper direction. And I think you are right to work from the outside in, the way you seem to do.

Two years ago, when you wrote the letter, you were looking for an older, wiser, gentler voice than your own. I am sorry that I have been so long in admitting that I cannot provide it. Perhaps you’ve already found one, in some academy, some café. Or perhaps you no longer need it; edges have a way of wearing oft. Peace, calm—but what I can give you is closer to a stillness.

I was quite moved by the Betelgeuse mood poems in particular: I should say that. I envy you these poems. Because of a late-developing nervous disorder, a clash in my mixed parentage, I am confined pretty much to Vega. I’ve not been outside the Combine since the day I came here. Something in the specific light complements my affliction, and I can go on in good health. But I believe I shall have to return to dark Earth before I die, that at least, in spite of all.

It occurs to me that you obviously know about writing, and I think you must have known the worth of your poems, so I can only assume that you are really asking about living. And I have one thing to say, a quiet thing: Ally yourself to causes and people, and you’ll leave bits of yourself behind every step you take; keep it all, and you’ll choke on it. The choice is every man’s, for himself.

The day is wearing down, burning near its end. Lights have gone on, then off again, in the houses around me. Everyone is feeling alone.

So as darkness and winter move in, hand-in-hand, let me wish you the best of luck in your ambitions, apologize again for the delay, and bring to a close this letter, longer than any letter has a right to be.

And in closing, please accept again my thanks for your kind words. They are given so easily, yet mean so much, always.

Night now. Juhlzson birds have come off the lakes and out of forests, and are throbbing softly around me. The moons are sailing in and out of clouds. In a moment I shall move off the patio into the house. In a moment.

Yours, Samthar Smith

Here is an exuberant and funny story about death.

Sometimes, too, warmed by the fire, Shakespeare stayed downstairs all night . . .

“Rest, rest, don't fight so, ” Judith whispered to him once.