Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

Please write me when you can — to Rio. I have to go back to Ouro Prêto for a week or two before Christmas, to get the work started on the house, — but I’ll be in Rio most of the time until I leave now. I hope you are all well — how’s the daughter?

With much love,

Elizabeth

Sometime I want to go into more details—

Perhaps there are ghosts at school, or wicked wolves in hiding on the ridge, or evil spirits that dwell in the depths of the furnace room and grope their sinister way up through the pipes and into our rooms. But we have never seen them. We have lived for two seasons untouched by the slightest hint of the supernatural; there are no haunted houses in the immediate vicinity, and no neglected grave yards — scarcely even a blighted tree, in this spring term, or a barren field to hold before us a symbol of terror and death. Why is it then, when there is nothing to fear, and we have surely outgrown the bogies of our younger days, that so many of us seem to dread being alone? We say to each other, “I hate Sundays; there are so many quiet hours,” or “It must be wonderful to have a roommate, someone to talk to in study hour.” All this is rather strange. Why does being alone, when we have a hundred companions most of the time, present such a great trial, or why should we wish to keep the conversation going so endlessly? The fear of a “quiet hour” alone is greater than the fear of all those innumerable quiet hours alone that are ahead of all of us.

There is a peculiar quality about being alone, an atmosphere that no sounds or persons can ever give. It is as if being with people were the Earth of the mind, the land with its hills and valleys, scent and music: but in being alone, the mind finds its Sea, the wide, quiet plane with different lights in the sky and different, more secret sounds. But it appears that we are frightened by the first breaking of its waves at our feet, and now we will never go on voyages of discovery, never feel the free winds that have blown over water, and never find the islands of the Imagination, where live who knows what curious beasts and strange peoples? Being alone can be fun; alone the mind can do what it wants to without even the velvet leash of sleep. But we can never understand this while we stand on the shore with our backs to the water and cry after our companions. Perhaps we shall never know the companion in ourselves who is with us all our lives, the nearness of our minds at all times to the rare person whose heart quickens when a bird climbs high and alone in the clear air.

1929

About a week ago there came a certain evening with a particularly long and quiet twilight — a dove-colored twilight, filled with shadow and the smoke of burning leaves. It was the kind of weather to make you forget a great many of the important things such as dates and the winds of last March and the snows of next February. You seemed at home, more or less, in the interior of a large and mist-grey pearl, and knew no more than that. Little things might seem of greatest importance if you lived inside a pearl, and so they were that evening of strange moment in the obscurities of half-light and quietness. The leaves hung asleep upon the trees dreaming themselves through death; the clouds lay low on the hill-tops, even on the roof-tops; color had fled beyond the sky forever with the smoke of the leaves’ scarlet burning. All the world said softly yet without speech,

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

Nor the furious winter’s rages.…

Where a treetop touched the sky I saw a bat flutter out and downwards in a darkly diabolic circle over my head, and a little network of icy chills spread down my back. I felt myself a foreigner in a strange land, whose people I had never seen and whose language was too delicate for my human ears. It was the expectant moment before something happens, and just then in the dead, brown leaves at my feet, there was a movement and a rustle. It was a little mouse, small and long-tailed as a fairy mouse, on his way home from what tiny errand with the cornstacks and fallen apples? He was dressed completely in modest grey and his ears were quite large and petal-shaped. I walked behind him through the leaves while he ran nervously on ahead, occasionally looking at me over his shoulder with shining little black eyes. He was so small and yet so artistically perfect, so absorbed in his minute autumn world and its traffic with him. I followed him until he disappeared under the side of a building, and then I walked off, thinking of mice and their unknown ways. I pictured them en famille — eating supper in one of their narrow dining rooms between our own, from a red check tablecloth; and father mouse in a tasseled nightcap pulling off his cat-skin boots with a faint sigh and calling it a Day.…

There is something about such creatures both amusing and strangely touching. In a certain mood, represented in its atmosphere by that clouded autumn evening, they can seem to be significant and even ominous. A cold, bony finger has been laid for a second at our lips — we look over our shoulders and think we may have laughed because we did not know. Perhaps the mouse’s eyes, holding two almost invisible candle flames, can see more than we can. Perhaps they see the bat overhead and the mystery he traces in the dusk, the dead leaves decaying to the earth under our feet, and more that we can not see on the clearest of summer mornings. We become for the moment apprehensive of ourself and mice and our evanescent journeys to and fro.

“Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.”

Well, such little things may take the place of punctuation marks in the world. The bat may stand for no more than a dot over an i, or an apostrophe on the wing ’ And here is a whole family of mice,,,,,,,,,

1929

Stanley first took me to see Sabrina one afternoon for tea. She had one of those silk-hung apartments, with sunlight coming in at the windows through pale lime-colored curtains, and clear fragrant tea running out of a silver teapot all day long, more or less. By some chance, perhaps because it was an unnaturally hot day for May, we were the only people there. I could see at once that she was beautiful, and I could feel at once, too, that she had another gift besides beauty. A sort of magnetism, I suppose. Anyway, it was a gift that made people willing to sit and drink tea all of a May afternoon, just for the sake of being near her. I’d known people like that before — some of them not beautiful, either — who had the trick of making the atmosphere of a room faintly exciting — charged with a bit of lightning, waiting for a sudden electric storm. Sabrina always had it with her — that was the trouble — it was there even when you didn’t want it to be. Well—

She was quite a small woman, very little and light. “Small bones,” you would say; or “Light as a feather.” In the first moment I realized vaguely that her face was extraordinarily beautiful, and that she wore a dress colored like dim gold — gold under water, maybe. Then, because it’s a sort of game I play with new people, I began to look at her very slowly, bit by bit, saving her face till the last. It took me quite a while to manage the tea-drinking and to look slowly enough so as not to appear rude, but Stanley saved me from having to talk much, and I kept quiet. Her feet were small and slender and her legs, and the line of her thigh was thin, too. She was pleasing to watch as she talked to Stanley — full of little motions and quick, almost nervous, gestures. Her left hand lay along her knee, her fingers pressed against the soft gold cloth. The hand was palely gold-colored, too, with a narrow wrist and delicate fingers. A civilized hand, you would call it, interesting to watch or touch. After a while I began to study her face, and I found in it the same color and fineness I had seen in her hand — a rather sophisticated face, gay yet quiet. If you could think of a Madonna whose face was thinner about the cheek and chin, with a look of humor and something subtly emotional about it — well, that would be Sabrina. Her eyebrows were straight across and black, her eyes were grey, and so was her hair — really I suppose it was brown — dove-brown, if there is any such color.