Even Plan.

Edna St. Vincent Millay has a sonnet I first stumbled across when reading Judith Guest's 1976 novel Ordinary People (and the successful film in 1980 (it won four 1981 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director (Robert Redford)). Some of it was filmed in Lake Forest, IL where Joyce and I had gone to teach at Lake Forest College during the 1978-79 academic year, so there was a bit of a thrill when we saw the film and recognized the places. (Link to film trailer.)

Anyway, the novel. I had my freshmen at Western Reserve Academy read it* in the 1979-80 school year (as part of their "outside reading"--one book/marking period), and I recall being struck by Millay's epigraph (see entire sonnet below):

But what a shining animal is man,

Who knows, when pain subsides, that is not that,

For worse than that must follow — yet can write

Music; can laugh; play tennis; even plan.

I remember thinking (I was in my mid-30s), Gee, that's true, you know? 

But what did I know then? Not a lot. (Though, of course, I believed I knew Every Damn Thing.)

The arrogance of making plans. The assumption that all will be well--that you will be able to execute those plans when the time comes. Now in my early 70s, I smile ruefully when I overhear people use phrases like next year or in a few years. Or even later this fall. We just assume that this Cup of Life from which we're drinking will never really run dry.

(I know that I shouldn't paint with too broad a brush here: Many people, even very early in their lives, learn the dark truth of Millay's lines--know the truth of them in the most intimate and painful ways.)

Since I've been struggling with cancer the past dozen years or so, I've realized the fatuity of my earlier thinking. Making plans, for me, is now an exercise in folly. I've learned in fairly harsh terms that whatever plans I make are about as stable as a pile of leaves in a fall windstorm. 

So many times in recent years I've had to cancel things I very much wanted to do. I just could not do them.

In late April this past spring, I found myself in the ER--faint--barely able to stand--profoundly dizzy. Joyce and I realized that this meant--if things did not improve (a lot!)--we could not make our annual journey to Stratford, Ontario, for a week of plays at the Stratford Theatre Festival--a trip we've made for fifteen consecutive years.

But I gradually got better, and at the last minute we decided to give it a try (we'd had our room and ticket reservations for months). And we did okay.

And promptly made plans (!) for next year--reserving the room we love at Mercer Hall Inn.

And just now? I have made some firm-as-can-be plans to go to Massachusetts in early September to celebrate my mom's 98th birthday. 

There's a chance--a good (bad?) chance--that I won't be able to do it. Between now and then are some medical tests and visits with physicians, etc. And--as I learned to my sorrow last spring--I could wake up one day between now and then and find I am incapable of carrying out the simplest tasks.

But I guess I remain a shining animal in some ways, daffily biting my thumb at the Grim Reaper, flipping him off, letting him know in every foolish fragile human way that I can laugh ... even plan.

And so I memorized that sonnet, certain that there would be countless occasions for me to recite it. In the future ...

*Which I can not find right now. (Curses! Foiled again!)

XIII

Read history, thus learn how small a space

You may inhabit, nor inhabit long

In crowding Cosmos — in that confined place

Work boldly; build your flimsy barriers strong;

Turn round and round, make warm your nest; among

The other hunting beasts, keep heart and face, —

Not to betray the doomed and splendid race

You are so proud of, to which you belong.

For trouble comes to all of us: the rat

Has courage, in adversity, to fight;

But what a shining animal is man,

Who knows, when pain subsides, that is not that,

For worse than that must follow — yet can write

Music; can laugh; play tennis; even plan.