I’m setting off again soon on another road trip through American landscapes: Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. I love the US, my home from home, a place where you can find some of the most outstanding scenery and natural beauty on this planet. The freedom I experience, travelling alone, is the greatest pleasure left for me in this last segment of life. There’s something dreamlike about the parade of motels, the endless roads stretching away into the distance like a ribbon stretching to heaven, the silence in the vehicle, broken only by music on occasion, and the holy quiet when I alight to take photos, just the wind, the gravel underfoot, sometimes passing traffic, day after day.
Now unmistakably old and very definitely outside life’s feast, and having abandoned women as a lost cause, as too much trouble, I regard couples and families almost like another species, so foreign to me is their chatter, their easy affections. I smile at them politely, doff my cap perhaps, and they usually defer to me as a senior —sometimes making allowances, offering a seat for instance, or engaging in especially friendly repartee— one of the few advantages of age.
I notice that if I do not talk to anyone for more than a week, I start to lose my voice, the price one pays for living a solitary life.
“Moved, for after all that is what I must have come out for, in a way, and with little expectation of advantage from what might follow, I resolved to speak to him. So I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended. But it was nothing, mere speechlessness due to long silence, as in the wood that darkens the mouth of hell, do you remember, I only just.” (Beckett, The Calmative)
I had a moment of intense happiness recently, while regarding an empty ultramarine sky, across which an isolated cloud was moving, white fringed yet with dark interior, framed by an intense halo of light as the sun, from behind, blazed down on it from 150 million kilometres away. There was something so good, so beautiful about that cloud, coruscating in that vast, clear firmament, that I was transported. I was that cloud in those vacant heavens. A moment of yea-saying, one of those moments that come sporadically in life, moments of insight, and moments that illuminate the gloomy patches that separate them, like lighthouses sending beams across dark and dangerous seas.
I touched base, via WhatsApp, with some old acquaintances this year, after half a century. Of this group, many had already passed away, for various reasons (victims of criminals in SA, misadventure, cancer, despair etc). Those who remain are largely unchanged, sometimes depressingly so, a testament to the dogged persistence of DNA and personality. From some I experienced touching and unexpected sympathy and support for the loss of my wife, and from a couple, the cold shoulder, for reasons unknown. Some remember me as the “angry young man” I was a long, long time ago. A few of us got together for old times sake, and these meetings were extremely enjoyable — top blokes. Then there’s Mike in Houston, who I’m probably going to meet in uMhlanga next year, Steve and Gino in Jhb, Max in London, and a few more. As for many of the rest:
Some are mathematicians
Some are carpenters’ wives
Don’t know how it all got started
I don’t know what they’re doin’ with their lives
But me, I’m still on the road ….
It’s difficult and probably unwise to go back in life, to try to recreate relationships. I cannot make people think well of me, so in true Stoic fashion I focus on what I can control and let go of what I cannot.
