Instead of a Letter

by Diana Athill

Once I said to a friend, ‘I shall kill myself when it starts,’ and she replied, ‘But that’s silly—to kill yourself to avoid death.’ It was not death I was thinking of avoiding, it was having to know this horror about life.

THE times when the pain was nearest to the physical—to that of a finger crushed in a door, or a tooth under a drill —were not those in which I thought ‘He no longer loves me’ but those in which I thought ‘He will not even write to tell me that he no longer loves me.’ For weeks his silence seemed no more than his usual unreadiness as a letter writer; then, for months, the result of his absorption in his work and in the place where he was working, both of which he had described with vibrating enthusiasm.

Some people take refuge from emptiness in activity and excesses. They are the ones, I suppose, who cannot sleep for it. Mine was a dormouse escape, a hibernation. Instead of being unable to sleep I slept to excess, thinking lovingly of my bed during the day and getting into it with pleasure.

Such pleasures can only be enjoyed alone and on foot. Earth, stone, water, trees must be touched and smelt in order to be fully realized. I have seen landscapes more magnificent from cars, buses, trains, and boats, and have been pleased to see them; but the ones I have learnt, the ones which have become part of the fabric of my memory, are those which have made the muscles of my legs ache, have scratched my ankles and caused sweat to drip off my forehead. Why I should still consider the conscientious hiker slightly absurd I cannot conceive. He is undoubtedly gaining a more intense and enduring experience than any other traveller.

From every journey I have made I have come home happier, and what I have gained from them has not vanished with time. It is not only that I have seen beautiful things with which to furnish my imagination, learnt interesting things, met interesting people, laughed a great deal. Something has happened as a result of all this: one by one, nerves which I thought to be dead have come to life.

It would be an absurd exaggeration to say that for twenty years I had been unhappy—I had enjoyed many things, and for most of the later years I had been contented enough—but it is the exact truth to say that if, at any minute during those years I had been asked to think about it, made to stop doing whatever was distracting me and pass judgment on my own life, I should have said without hesitation that failure was its essence. I had never really wanted anything but the most commonplace satisfactions of a woman’s life, and those, which I had wanted passionately, I had failed to achieve. That I would have answered in such a way is not speculation. I did answer exactly that, to myself, over and over again, in the minutes before falling asleep, in the worse minutes of waking up, when I was walking down a street, when I looked up from a book, while I was stirring scrambled eggs in a pan. The knowledge was my familiar companion. It had been, at first, hot coals of pain and grief, and had later grown cold; but cold though it had become, its lumpy presence had still been there. My only pride had been that having by nature an easy disposition, and a fund of pleasure in life stored up from a happy childhood and youth, I was good at living with failure. I did not think that it had turned me disagreeable or mad, and that I considered an achievement.

So I have not been beautiful, or intelligent, or good, or brave, or energetic, and for many years I was not happy: I failed to achieve the extremely simple things which, for so long, I wanted above all else: I found no husband and it is not likely that I shall ever have a child. There is plenty of evidence, then, that my existence has been without value: that if, like my grandmother, I approach death slowly and consciously, I shall be driven to ask the question she asked: ‘What have I lived for?’ All that I shall be able to answer is that I have written a little, and I have loved, and if I do not die until I am old, those things will have become too remote to count for much. I shall remember that they once seemed worth everything, but quite possibly the fact that by then they will be over will appear to have wiped out their value. It ought to be a frightening thought, but I am still not frightened. I was looking through a dictionary of quotations in search of a title for a friend’s play when I chanced on Carlyle and Ruskin, both saying something which caught my attention. Carlyle: ‘No most gifted eye can exhaust the significance of any object.’ Ruskin: ‘The greatest thing a human soul does in this world is to see.’

It may turn out that the throbbing was no more than the sound of my own blood in my ears. What I hope is that even if it does I shall not be afraid, because why should that blood have throbbed so steadily, for so long, in spite of so many reasons why I need not have lived, if it were not that I too have been, with the same intensity as any flower or matchbox or dog or other human being: all part of something which can only be expressed in the words ‘I am that which I am’, and which needs no further proof or justification?