A Reflection on a Reflection of a Reflection (June 20th, 2023)
The entry for June 15th, 1923 in E.B. White’s journal begins, “A man must have something to cling to. Without that he is as a pea vine sprawling in search of a trellis.” Later he adds, “Obviously, I was all asprawl, clinging to beauty, which is a very restless trellis.” Oftentimes I feel as if in this world all a man has is what he cleaves from, and instead leaves the clinging for the pea vines. I find it quite easy to cleave from most things, that is usually, the behaviors and thoughts of others, as if the process of breaking down had come before that of building up during creation, and is somehow a more natural and physical endeavor—all stands to be broken down, to be cleaved from, but invisible is the beautiful thing yet to be constructed.
If one were to say (who, one is, or why they would be so keen on proving me mistaken, I don’t have the slightest idea) that in cleaving from all is in fact an act of creation in itself, I would disagree—the image is somewhere there, at the inception, buried underneath the mounds of the real, not quite yet fully realized nor carved out from its mute stone background.
Still, all things must come from something, and to create “from scratch” is a phrase only worth as much as the cunning and slight-handedness of its creator. At varying intervals I find myself either with huge, lumbering mittens, grasping at my tools with the clumsy maladroitness of a toddler, or with the dexterity of a man condemned to think himself totally, and without remorse above the rest. On either day, however, I am equally “contemptuous of all, envious of all, proud, courageous, and scared to death,” as White concludes from the recollection of his Alaskan expedition in 1923.
The desire to be at one end of this scale once and for all is almost enormous, and yet I have about as much consistency in regards to my “something to cling to” as a metronome, no matter the tempo; regardless of whether the weight lies all the way out marooned at the end of its arm, or sits firmly on its fulcrum, I am liable to bounce in between these two extremes with some regular interval.
At the moment I am sitting in the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library, somehow simultaneously a tourist and a native. I can pretend either way, largely dependent on what type of stares I receive from passerby—from those wide-eyed tour groups I am granted the mystical status of a New Yorker hard at work, permanently installed in the reading room like a fossilized nautilus at the Museum of Natural History (only less daringly-colored), and from the patrons beside me, (more specifically, their occasional and predictable side stares at having arrived at the library well after them and most likely will be leaving well before them), I am as useless and as transient as the tour groups myself.
This theme has carried on today since its inception: before I arrived here, I was at the Israeli consulate to get a student visa, and was rejected on the basis of not having Israeli health insurance. I had prepared the documents well in advance (having been stored snugly in a yellow folder) and my plan was virtually assured success. I made it through metal detectors and interviewers to the top of the consulate building, the 13th floor of 800 2nd avenue, an inconspicuous and very Israeli-looking (shabby, almost self-defeatingly so, yet confident and well-oiled) office building on 42nd street, and was ready to put to rest the whole tiring business of paperwork arranging and cataloging required of traveling abroad when a very cheery desk attendant turned me away with the lick of her tongue. It was over before then, however, when she at having collected and reviewed my tidy yellow folder, turned to her native tongue and consulted her neighbor to discuss, I presume, the grave folly I had erred against her proud mother country (on a side note, I am always uneasy when people switch languages in front of me—there is something very unsettling to me about having changed an entire mode of being, or being flown halfway across the globe, mid-conversation, without a hint of warning). The receipt of insurance which was not listed as a requirement prior to appearing at the consulate (this verb feels more suitable for what this was than ‘going’ or ‘arranging,’ as it was with as much regret as a prosecutor or foul-intentioned judge that this woman turned me away from the visa window) as it were, must have been worth another full appointment, another months-worth wait (I would make a truly terrible lawyer), two hours of commute time, and a handful of Tylenol, then simply an email of my insurance card. Intentions don’t seem to matter all that much nowadays. I could be meaning to explode a plane, but as long as I’ve got all of my insurance in order, my visa is as good as gotten.
I suppose there is a proper reason for their sternness, however, and its not exactly the New York-Pennsylvania border I’m trying to cross here after all, but the whole ordeal left me reeling in shame, and I was tired and upset: I was left visa-less, and that having been the object of my excursion into the city, object-less to boot. I was neither Israeli nor New Yorker, traveller nor insurance-man. Most of all, having been thoroughly relishing E.B. White’s letters for the past few days, I was not him, nor the man who “must have something to cling to.” The only thing I was, in fact, was a hopelessly trellis-less pea vine. His letter “The Years of Wonder,” written “by the sea, March 13th, 1961,” of which I have been citing, tells of a younger White’s forty day expedition to the Bering strait in the summer of 1923, and the tale accompanied me today on the Long Island railroad, subway, consulate waiting room, and library: perhaps today’s only reliable companion. White documents his trip through the lens of his own journal (the term journal—he mocks—lends a “literary and manly flavor to the thing,” that being what it is, a diary) at a boundless and uncertain time in his life in which he was without a job, income, home, direction, and certainly insurance. Still, he was with a conviction that he was indeed worthy of the title “literary man,” even if he was unsure of his own next meal. The essay is instructive, insightful, and of course beautiful in the way it could only be to a young man whose very existence has just been called into question by an Israeli desk clerk.
White’s directionlessness is at least consistent, while mine, on the other hand, needs to take the metaphorical shape of a metronome-hammer to make any coherent sense out of. And yet, out of White’s confusion he is able to hoist buckets of hot stew up inverted ladders, befriend a crew full of engine-men, all the while traveling towards the north pole without so much as a clue as to why he is going. Still, he emerges as a “mess boy in full gale […] drunk with power” I for one, have my affairs in order, live exceedingly well, and yet can’t so much as acquire a proper folder full of documents without barring myself from an entire country.
Perhaps this speaks to the times more than anything (E.B.White himself is no doubt a regular critic of his day), or perhaps it speaks to some deeper ineptitude at finding life’s most basic bearings straight. I would rather, however, have both worry and a head screwed on to write about it than to have neither.
Maybe I need the clarity of a man looking back, as White was, and it is more likely than not an unfair comparison between the two of us before I am his age when he wrote “The Years of Wonder.” He recognizes this too, and admits, “youth is almost always in deep trouble—of the mind, the heart, the flesh.” Whether or not I will be able to someday reflect on this entry is not the point. A reflection on a reflection of a reflection wouldn’t be worth its weight in ink. What I do know however is that many youth before me have been in this deep trouble, and will continue to be long after I am gone. My fellow library goers—some of whom, by the look of their faces have no doubt been here clacking away on their keyboards since dawn—can attest to that. I may for the present be more comfortable with cleaving than clinging, but somewhere in the formless, shifting expanse lies an invisible trellis to climb on, simply waiting to be discovered.