The Recluse

i read the obituary this morning of a Russian ballerina who came to the West leaving a son behind in St. Petersburg.  When later in life he died in a boating accident she returned to Russia, and as it turns out permanently, despite entreaties from former friends and colleagues abroad.  For the rest of her life she was a recluse.  I am always fascinated when I read that: "became a recluse."  It seems like such a great idea, so restful, sort of like meditation, maybe.  I like to think that it means the end of all anxiety.  First off, you don't have to plan spend hours on your calendar.  I see the recluse as having a large window box to which she devotes time, taking the dead leaves off the geranium plants for one, debudding things.  If you do it with care, that can take time.  If you read The New York Times carefully that will eat up an hour--but already I have the wrong perspective, thinking only of filling time.  No, the recluse will read the Times only if she really wants to.  She can go shopping once a day and not speak to others enroute.  Actually I have plenty of models for this in our building in Manhattan.  Lots of the residents of the studio apartments were, when I bought a coop there, living in the studios, alone, retired, many of them enfeebled.  You didn't hear lots of television sets in action so I guess they must have been reading, or had the sound off, or were staring into space.  I choose to believe that i am on my road to recluse-dom because it pleases me to sit on the porch (Floridians would never never use that word; it's lanai, of all things) and stare off into the clouds scudding over my head, the tops of palm trees in the immediate distance waving and watch the sunset light dissolve the outlines of the roofs of buildings in the greater distance.  I have lived a life of frenetic socializing twice with reluctant spouses who were born to a solitary existence for whom marriage to me was a detour into madness.  Why put that in the past tense?  I am describing my husband whose idea of happiness is to study the Iliad in the original Greek or lie on the sofa reading a murder mystery without saying a word.  Here in Sarasota the people we meet seem nice enough, but they are conservative, not viciously or tiresomely so, it's just that their belief is in god, or in a world in which everything is getting better and better, and their remarkable financial successes strike them as the obvious and inevitable result of a life of industry, thoughtful strategy. Their cheerful take on life's rocky road always reminds me of the Eisenhower era, so I have trouble relating, as they say.  Another help on my road to reclusivity is learning to live with the notion of the empty hours, or  I guess recluses can still go out to the theater, opera, chamber music, symphony, or does that violate the pledge of aloneness?  Becoming a recluse is a spiritual exercise like meditation, an act of renunciation which---is the idea to make me into a finer person?  I guess the Russian ballerina knew that she was too old to dance, her son was dead, she wasn't going to live all that much longer, why make all the effort.  If you can do that with a positive step, a firm grip, an energetic forward motion mentally and physically, then why not.  The distractions of this world are no more than distractions.