The Monk In His Cell

My bedroom here on the third floor of our U-shaped complex is on the inner side facing the courtyard, and since we are on the north end out beyond through the trees to what is in fact a parking lot for a mall but comes through as an indiscriminate mass of open space broken by massing branches and leaves of live oak trees.  A nature scene, really, punctuated in the farther distance by the occasional palm standing very tall and solitary.  Down close, of course, it transforms itself in the squalor of mall parking lot and makes the residence less than desirable I should imagine.  We love it.  When we sold the big place in Cambridge I got a bookseller to take my library for a very good price.  Here I have only kept my art books and a few Greek and Latin texts.  Richard is now collecting DVDs as though he were going to open a store.  That's his compulsion; we do not discuss it.  Back to my subject, if it could be said that I have one.  Off my bedroom is a lanai reached through sliding glasss doors; this is a small screened in porch where I had two canvas chairs and lots of relatively ugly Florida flowering plants which look to be made of papier maché and rubber, take little water, and stay in full bloom for months.  It is a joy, however, to sit out there in the early morning and at sunset, and indeed later in the night when the moon shines down; the breezes off the Gulf are always splendid, the changing colors of the changing cloud formations are endlessly fascinating and beautiful.  I do not go out to walk, except for pacing back and forth on the galleria outside the front door.  Surprising how richer my monk's cell is what with the Sarasota public library, the New College Library, richer, I say, than I would have thought, but of course lacking the resources of Harvard's Widener Library in proximity to which I spent fifty or sixty years.  I have brought a considerable portion of the art I collected over a lifetime, spread on the walls of our two units, crowded together salon style from ceiling to the level of furniture.  I can sit for hours looking at a painting, with the same concentrated gaze i give the moon and the stars and the clouds.  I am at rest, I guess, although the anxiety and incipient terror which is the curse of my personality means that I shall never be satisfied or happy.  The Carthusian monks in their cells in the Grand Chartreuse high in the mountains in that documentary "Into The Grand Silence" or whatever it was,  my ambition to be like them.