Well, what do you know? I thought I wouldn’t see my second draft back for a while yet. But before I could dance a private little jig for having finished it, it was back on my desk from my husband, always my first reader, with glowing praise for certain chapters and troublesome question marks over others. So goes the craft, and thus I write to you with my nose back to the grindstone.
With that said, as I continue to contemplate my planned essay series about the world that formed me in the run-up to turning 60 to be published here on Substack (see my last post), I am re-reading Stefan Zweig’s memoir, “The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European,” first published in 1942. It opens with some lines about Europe before 1914, the world that formed him, that cut straight to my nearly sixty-year-old heart:
“If I try to find a handy formula for the time before the First World War in which I grew up, I hope to be most concise when I say: it was the golden age of security” (Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers, first ed. 1942). When he wrote these lines, he was, like me, 59, living in a war-torn world in which one could not trust the ground beneath one’s feet.
Alienated and displaced from his native Austria as World War II raged, Zweig, a leading Austrian writer and a Jew, submitted the manuscript to his publisher and, shortly thereafter, ended his own life together with his wife in a hotel on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro in 1942 (where, coincidentally, I was born 25 years later). Despite the fate of its author, or perhaps because of the strength it must have taken to write so exquisitely under such pressures, books like this renew the human experience in language that reassures us, all is not lost.
Herewith a short poem that emerged after an early morning immersed in “The World of Yesterday” before another challenging day in the terrible beauty of the early 21st century. I’m tinkering with voice recordings of my work, so if you enjoy listening to poetry, you can listen to this imperfectly but most humanly recorded poem read by yours truly.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Morning Read Waking with a stone In the heart Or the lungs, The belly Not sure where, But there, where life force arises Too early sunlight Encrusts eyelids, Presses temples— How is a person To be On another day of killing? There is another world Right beside me Still and clear Familiar and tragic Stretching itself wide To hold us all Summon the will Open to the page Sink deep Let go Feel, know The stone dissipating.
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