Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me

by Bill Hayes

“Writing is more important than pain,” he says.

“I feel beautifully comfortable with you,” O says.

1-18-10: O: “It’s really a question of mutuality, isn’t it?” I: “Love? Are you talking about love?” O: “Yes.”

“I think not. Pleasure, even if it’s not dependent on an object, involves the senses—is sensuous. Pleasure can bring happiness, but happiness doesn’t necessarily give one pleasure. So which is of the higher order of the two?” “Happiness. Happiness is more complex.” “Agreed.”

O: “Are you conscious of your thoughts before language embodies them?”

Why is it hardest to write when there is so much to say? Let me rephrase: It is hardest to write when there is so much to say.

He reads it to himself first, savoring the words, and then aloud to me: “‘Reckon not upon long life: think every day the last, and live always beyond thy account. He that so often surviveth his Expectation lives many Lives, and will scarce complain of the shortness of his days. Time past is gone like a Shadow; make time to come present—’” “—So gorgeous,” I murmur. O skips ahead a bit: “‘And if, as we have elsewhere declared, any have been so happy as personally to understand Christian Annihilation, Extasy, Exolution, Transformation, the Kiss of the Spouse, and Ingression into the Divine Shadow, according to Mystical Theology, they have already had—’” He looks up, beaming. “—Ah, and here we have it: ‘an handsome Anticipation of Heaven.’”

I suppose it’s a cliché to say you’re glad to be alive, that life is short, but to say you’re glad to be not dead requires a specific intimacy with loss that comes only with age or deep experience. One has to know not simply what dying is like, but to know death itself, in all its absoluteness.

The same cannot be said of aliveness, of which there are countless degrees. One can be alive but half-asleep or half-noticing as the years fly, no matter how fully oxygenated the blood and brain or how steadily the heart beats. Fortunately, this is a reversible condition. One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause—to memorize moments of the everyday.

“I hope I get a good night’s sleep and then have a rush of thoughts, as I did this morning,” says O. “It is very delightful when that happens—all of them rushing to the surface, as if they have been waiting for me to become conscious of them…”

(Oliver often said that but was his favorite word, a kind of etymological flip of the coin, for it allowed consideration of both sides of an argument, a topic, as well as a kind of looking-at-the-bright-side that was as much a part of his nature as his diffidence and indecisiveness.)

At lunch, the husband of O’s niece tells me how he first met Oliver, some forty years ago, at the home of his future father-in-law, O’s older brother David: Nicky looked out the window, where he saw a large, bearded man lying on the grass in the garden. “What were you doing?” Nicky asked once he came indoors. “I was wondering what it is like to be a rose,” replied Oliver.

“I love it, I love reading to you,” I tell him. “I feel very close to you.” He nods. “It becomes another form of intimacy.”

3 A.M., walking into his room to check on him: O: “How did you know …? How did you know I’d be awake?” “I could hear you smile,” I say.

“I say I love writing, but really it is thinking I love—that rush of thoughts—new connections in the brain being made. And it comes out of the blue.” O smiled. “In such moments: I feel such love of the world, love of thinking…”