RACHEL HADAS
376
line of ''Thrush," which I've already quoted in part, doesn't end
with the houses being taken away but moves on to the temporal
dimension:
The houses I had they took away from me. The times
happened to be unpropitious: war, destruction, exile...
War, destruction, and exile are public events or conditions
that are experienced on an immensely private scale, a vast mi–
crocosm of suffering. And if one's private time is blasted by his–
tory, as by a war or exile, the house can be said to be one's private
place, equally vulnerable to all sorts of invasions, including the
invasion of time itself. The stripping in "Thrush" can certainly
be read also with regard to time; the houses that grow stubborn
when you strip them bare remind me of Hamlet's "Let her paint
an inch thick, to this favor she must come." Oddly enough, that
was the line that my mother said wouldn't stop going through
her mind when she recently visited a friend in a nursing home.
Trying to escape time, we manage only to heighten its ef–
fects. We can, of course, put every household item meticulously
back in place; leave things pristine; cover our tracks; erase evi–
dence of our passage. The ladies in
Cranford
tack little newspaper
paths onto their new carpet to prevent premature wear and tear
and thwart the destructive rays of the sun. As the sun moves,
they have to keep moving their paper paths along the floor.
Or we can be cavalier, overlooking wear and tear, giving
free rein to entropy. Alas, ignoring the passage of time doesn't
slow it down, any more than hoisting the past onto a pedestal
does. The house can go unswept; future archaeologists will hap–
pily excavate the complex squalor of layer upon layer of chicken
bones, shattered dishes, old coins. It's true that choosing not to
sweep the floor does give me a little more time today; but will the
house, sensing neglect, grow stubborn? Thoreau didn't think so:
A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare
within the house, nor time to spare within or without to
