14 March 1985

It is now 14:45 and the sun is shining brightly. (The self that reads the lines written by the self that writes them is dumbfounded by that embalming opening. But he—or it—can be confidently scornful only by forgetting what today has been like.) From 6:30 or so until 11:00 the sky was full of sun, and the air, though fresh, was clear. At 11:00 gray clouds massed together and formed one thick, low bank of cold mist from which small pellets of frost—not snow—fell in irregular and scattered showers. Then we had a burst of summer sun followed by rain. An hour later we had a proper snowstorm; for about thirty minutes, fat, wet flakes crashed against and slithered down the window panes.
     I watched them for a short time and thought back to my first freshman English class at Middlebury College, convened on a snowy day much like this one, thirty nine years and 3000 miles removed from this time and place. I remember only one sentence spoken by the instructor, a young man who looked to me then like a cross between Walter Abel and John Lund. He wore socks that did not match and was obviously recovering from some recent heavy drinking that led to his dismissal later in the day on which I met him for the first and only time. Perched unsteadily upon the edge of a table and leaning precariously to one side, he shared with us the riches of his wisdom—or the distresses of his hangover: "As you look out the window at those snowflakes, remember that no two flakes are the same, and none of them ever collide."
     I have often suspected that that professorial profundity gave me instantly the courage to contemplate a career as a member of a university faculty: if someone who greets a class with an opening like that one can get a job, why not me? The weight of unworthiness heaped upon me by three and a half years of life in the army as private first class began to lift. (Although I did not know it then, on that winter's shower morning, both my first professor and I were on the move.)
     My day today began a bit earlier than usual because I wakened at 6:00, about an hour and a half before the alarm was to ring. I got dressed, experimented casually with the new gym equipment in the basement and then took a walk around both lakes. At the big one I came closer than ever to seeing the munt jac deer. Robert told me last night that he was now seeing them in the morning in the bright red thicket of young dogwoods at the east end of the island. As I came abreast of it, I saw something russet colored flash past a small break in the branches shining in the morning sun. The glimpse was of the briefest sort, however, one of Mark Twain's "candid camera snapshots of frightened creatures in the grass."
     I walked on quietly, hoping for another look, but I saw nothing. When I got to the north side of the lake, much closer to the island, I stood motionless for about five minutes, in the hope that one of the deer—Robert said he saw three does and one buck—might appear. None of them did, but I continued my walk certain that tomorrow, or one day soon, I would catch sight of the whole tiny herd. I don't want to leave here having seen only a dead specimen. I want to see one full of life, stamping its small hooves at me, bowing its neck, bounding swiftly away, then stopping for one last backward glance, a mixture of inquisitiveness and blustering but unconvincing defiance, before it springs out of sight.
     At the place where I usually end my walk, I cut across the lawn below the gardens to revisit the badger setts east of the sheep pasture that Mr. Fox rents from the College. The side trip was uneventful, but during it I recalled two grim little tales I came upon recently. The first came from Robert, during our hike together on Saturday.
     When we got to the top of Taylor's Pool, he broke his silence and said, as much to himself as to me, "Right there," pointing to a distant spot, "is where that young chap from the village fell into the well. He came through the grounds one foin morning, spoke to my dad, and was never again seen alive. He was found later, head down in the old well. We'd hunted a week for him, all through the woods and even in the lakes. The police set up their base in the Abbey for days. They dragged the lakes and even used doivers. And then soombody found him. I've always worried that he may not have perished outright. Terrible thought, him wedged head down that way all that terrible time."
     Robert's genre tragedy sent me looking through Kilvert for a passage recounting a similar sort of anonymous rural catastrophe. I found it among his early entries:

"Tuesday, 8 March [1870]. Yesterday there was an inquest at the Blue Boar, Hay, on the body of the barmaid of the Blue Boar who a day or two ago went out at night on an hour's break, but went up the Wye to Glasbury and threw herself into the river. She was taken out at Llan Hennw. She was enceinte. Met the Morrell children returning from a walk with the first white violets and primroses."

     When I came to that last sentence about the Morrell children, I felt, on my second reading, exactly what I had felt on my first: a strange astonishment, a mixture of joy and enchanted disbelief. No highly sophisticated, craft conscious writer could ever have those first three sentences followed by the fourth. Kilvert's doing it is proof of a marvelous simplicity of authorial mind that makes Pepys' or Boswell's most revealing confessions seem subtly calculating. No matter how many times I return to that March 8 entry, therefore, I will feel a warm affection for Kilvert, but also an amusing necessity to make tolerant allowance for his ingenuousness. I will, in other words, feel both condescending toward him and humbly aware of his ability to fashion lines of unforgettable power by accident.
     Someone I discussed art with years ago told me that he believed that all great art is an accident. I agreed with him, on the condition that he would agree with me that the miraculous accident befalls only those blessed few who are accident prone. Most of us are too prudential to run the risk of divine calamity.