Robert Gerst: the heat of life in the handful of dust
I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon—before life itself.
Joseph Conrad, Youth
Thinking back on them, the countless trips my son and I took up and down this path all merge into one, perhaps because one summer is every summer and every summer is every life. The path runs along the canal for seven miles and the wind blows almost always from the south, so the heading back into the wind is always more difficult than the heading out and in the mornings when we start the ships and boats heading up north seem moving with us like bathtub toys flying flags and leaving large white wakes that wash up on the shore. I remember once a fisherman who was every fisherman with his rumpled shirt falling to his hips and his stolid casting in a stream of water where no fish has ever been caught in my viewing.
We started taking this trip when my son was no bigger than my hip and now he towers over me, lanky and sinewy while I am feeling fits of dizziness and we have never stopped doing this because, I think, we feel it as a moment together in the vast blank loneliness of life. I know that what I have to say is what everyone has to say: that life is evanescent and the blink of a firefly. But the trip is worth taking. It is always the same: the trucks rushing along the highway, the ripples of the herring run, the branches of the shrubs obscuring the way along the road, and always the feeling that in the glorious sun—it is perpetually sunny—the joy of passing up is the same as the joy of passing down.
We bike to the beach where the jetty is perpetually the same—the same riprap rocks leading to the light at the end where the children gather and the lobster pots float—and we dive into the water, always scrotum crushing cold, and we dive beneath the surface. The hot sand, the girls on the beach sunning, the rustle of the surf. It is all a jumble, a moment in time, and there is no time, only the endless present.
I am sitting now on the porch beneath the fan where I always sit this time of year gazing at the green lawn where the roses droop from the rain and the daisies are emerging.
Robert Gerst