In her column “Snippets and sketches,” Lily reflects on what it means to live a beautiful life.
Being sick is strange. When I am full of energy, I can walk the world; I relish new places, new faces, new habits. But when I am sick or tired I want to retreat. I become withdrawn and silent. I don’t enjoy the sickness, of course, but it is strangely nice to be nestled within myself, not really talking to anyone, just watching.
Even when I am not sick, I have a powerful tendency to retreat from the world. I have an inner sanctum, made of my books and music and philosophy, a place filled with beauty – how can I not wish to be there? How rude and uncouth the outside is in comparison!
This tendency became dangerously strong toward the end of high school. I yearned for a peaceful country retirement and a past way of life. But inwardness, and nostalgia, which usually accompanies it, is dangerous. It is not good to turn from the world and live in shadows and dreams; it is a rarefied form of cowardice.
I pulled myself out of it. Like any Stanford student, I am involved, interested in current events and driven to make an impact in the future. This is good. But today I was sick, and retreated, as I described, a little way within myself, and I am reminded of how nice it is. It is nice to be hidden.
I had an art history lecture today with Professor Alexander Nemerov. We were shown a photograph of a woman’s face carved in granite, part of an old fountain, crumbling and fading into the granite wall. The seclusion, the hiddenness, of that face was palpable. As I gazed at it I could see the woman’s figure, dressed in white, turning away from the viewer and vanishing into a long corridor.
It is nice to be hidden because one’s sacred things are hidden – down that long vanishing corridor. Retreating means one returns to them, the shrine within oneself. That is the only way to be grounded, or tethered, to oneself. If one is always at the surface of things and events, one is easily lost.
A consequence of being in that hollow space is the most vague and incomprehensible language – the language of shadows and impressions, where things are felt to the core, but not in the brightly lit precision we are used to. Such language is necessary to speak of deeper truths.
But it is good to be precise, to talk about real things, to have a healthy irony and skepticism and Mark Twain-like scorn for fluffy fools, just as it is good to be active and engaged in the world.
How to reconcile these two modes? I am undoubtedly in an active time of my life – busy doing things, building my career, thinking of exciting plans for the future. But it would be nice to retreat inwards with some regularity, before a bout of sickness brings me back. Maybe it should be a cycle – expansion and retreat, facing outwards and facing inwards. Or maybe it is possible to walk the world while being tethered to oneself, to go about one’s business with a deep consciousness and rootedness. Possibly that is the best way to face the world. I suspect, at any rate, it is the way to live a happy life.