One of his most characteristic and constant traits had ever been a certain longing for escape, for a lifting, from time to time, of the actual horizon. It was like the necessity under which the painter finds himself, to set a window or open doorway in the background of his picture.”—Marius The Epicurean by Walter Pater
When I was a kid growing up on Long Island, our family vacationed in Upstate NY, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. My father insisted on leaving early, to beat the traffic through the City.
The night before we left, he packed up our camper and hitched it to the Dodge Coronet, so that everything was ready to go in the morning.
It was still dark when he woke my brother and I, and we got dressed. He carried my little sisters to the car in their pjs, and when we were all snug in the back seat with our pillows, we took off.
But I couldn’t sleep.
I didn’t want to miss the first delicious moment of escape, the sudden opening in the wall of our ordinary life.
I didn’t want to miss the lights of the great bridges twinkling in the predawn light—the Whitestone taking us north to Vermont, the Verrazzano west into Pennsylvania. When the rock outcrops appeared on the side of the road, I knew we were on the other side of the wall. We had made our escape.
All my life I’ve been looking for that experience, only on a grander scale, seeking transport to another world.
I’ve looked for it, and found it to some extent, in the pew—in prayer, hymn, and the Word. I’ve tasted it in poetry, where words spin me into new ways of feeling. I’ve felt it at 10,000 feet, swimming in a mountain lake, and on a cushion, in Zen meditation.
Even at my most atheistic, when I scorned all belief in other worlds and promised myself only this life, I was looking for it, hoping to wring transcendence from the force of my negations.
Searching for some escape hatch, some “lifting of the actual horizon,” some word out of God’s great silence, is built into my bones.
I have not come up empty-handed. I’ve been granted my fair share of larger moments, unfoldings if not revelations, when will and grace joined to poke a hole in the canopy and give me a peek into a new sky.
If the peek wasn’t enough to turn me from my evil ways, at least it knocked some common sense into me, gave me a standard to measure my mortal life.
James Wright, the American poet, describes the experience beautifully in a little poem called “Milkweed.” Lost in thought, standing in the open, the poet receives his revelation from a ordinary pod of milkweed, the silky white hairs carrying the seeds into the air.
Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for
Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes
Loving me in secret.
It is here. At a touch of my hand,
The air fills with delicate creatures
From the other world.
As a boy my family took many summer trips to Burke, Vermont, where my father had property, but one time we went on a winter vacation, just after a great snowstorm. We drove out to our property, and my father led us into the woods where the snow was deepest.
My brother and sisters and I sank in up to our bellies, struggling to lift our legs high enough to take a step. We couldn’t control our laughter and joy. We had never seen snow that deep.
We called it Vermont, but it was another world, and we wanted to see all of it.
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I wasn't familiar with James Wright. That poem is exquisite... I really enjoyed this whole beautifully worded piece, thank you!