THE WORLD OUT THERE

By Robert Sheckley

Rain, Melancholy, Travel

Today, like every other day in Portland, Oregon in recent memory--32 days in a row--the rain is falling. It's not heavy, but it's relentless. The drops may be small and scattered, but they keep on coming, night and day, out of an eternally gray overcast sky.

I am reminded of a poem by Oscar Wilde that begins:

" The sky is flecked with bars of gray,
The dull dead moon is out of tune
And like a withered leaf, the moon
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play."

This is from memory, of course. I think I've got it about right. During the Renaissance, scholars studied something they called The Palace of Memory, which existed in your head and could be entered imaginatively. You could stroll through its various rooms, halls, stairways, all of them filled with symbols and icons, calling to mind things from the past. 

My own palace of memory is a waterlogged ruin. The exhibits in the rooms are soaked, melting, dripping with water. The roof is broken, and through it I can glimpse the dull dead moon as it appears in the gray-barred sky. Down here in the cellar is my grandfather's portrait. It is under several inches of water. Here is a statue of my high school sweetheart; it looks like she drowned. All the statues in my memory-palace, still in their niches, are mildewed, tarnished, moldy, or decayed. 

Swinburne wrote of "Time, with a glass that ran." He must have been anticipating Portland.

What does a man do in such a situation? He dreams about getting out, to someplace warm and sunny. My dreams to that effect are adversely affected by the fact that I am actually going to such places, in mid-February. Italy! Spain! But here the pleasure of anticipation is sullied by another emotion--foreboding. 

I have visited these places several times. I can't help but make a prediction as to what this visit will be like for me. And I wouldn't be me if my anticipation were not streaked with dread.

What am I afraid of? Of things and their opposites. 

Loneliness, first: sitting in a friend's apartment, alone, waiting for something to happen. Something that will break the long hermetic silences of my afternoons in Genoa, Barcelona, Ibiza--wherever I happen to be. 

But the breaking of the isolation carries its own constellation of fearsome images and worrisome thoughts. I anticipate being saddled with talkative foreign people whom I can't understand and don't want to understand, in a situation that goes on and on, maybe with a glass of white wine, until I'd do anything to embrace the silence again--at least for a little while. 

Maybe it won't rain. Maybe I'll go sightseeing. But then there's the knowledge that I'll soon grow bored with monuments, statues, museums, and art galleries. These things which seem so special to me now will swiftly lose their novelty, their aesthetic appeal, their reason for being. Forcing me to turn to libraries and bookstores. 

There are plenty of bookstores in Italy and Spain, but their books are unsurprisingly written in Italian or Spanish. An English language bookstore is as rare in these places as the first rose of summer on the Arctic Circle, or the song of the meadow lark on the Mountains of the Moon. 

And I'll be arriving in southern Europe in late winter, early spring. The season of rains. Am I running halfway around the world to put myself into another deluge? Am I condemning myself to sitting in a hotel room or my friends' apartment, wondering what to do next?

And will I be able to sleep? Nervous, jet-lagged, I anticipate I will not. So to my long boring days I add my endless sleep-deprived nights, when I sit at the window without a book and watch the rain which has followed me around the world.

Is there no prospect that pleases me? Not at the moment, no.

What to do with myself despite rain or its lack? I can write, and I can paint. 

In its simplest terms, the art of writing comes down to getting down one word after another. There's no question of getting it right because there is no right or wrong way to do it. 

As for writing, which I have more experience at than painting, you just do it, and do it, and do it again, and then you revise and do it again. Until you have something at least marginally better than what you began with.

Painting and drawing, I have no doubt, will proceed in much the same way. How do you do it? You force yourself to do something for so many minutes per hour if you can find no better way, and for so many hours per day.

After all, I tell myself, I am a professional, at least at writing. And what does that mean? It means I spend most of my days writing a sentence or a paragraph, and perhaps at the end of the day I cut the paragraph, and the day after I start again.

In my present mood, work is the thing one does to alleviate the boredom, the tedium of duration, the slow passage of time. This is not a good attitude with which to work. But it is a possible one. 

When you're a long, long way from home, far from friends and family, faced with unfamiliar food, chattering foreigners, and the constant threat of rain, you need something to keep yourself going. If you've learned how to work, then you can do that, at least until something more pleasant presents itself. If nothing better turns up, at least you've gotten some work done, and maybe made some money.

If nothing better turns up, it could be a great opportunity to write a novel.

If you're writing a novel, then the rain assists your effort, and it doesn't much matter where you are. 

So in that case, why travel at all? 

RSheckley@aol.com