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PARTISAN REVIEW
with ever more steeply slanting floors, leaky places in the roof, a
well that has less water every summer. Drought; entropy; the
forces of nature? Of course. Some houses have nothing to do with
nature; I sometimes envision this one as a cellar hole with gar–
dens around it, familiar trees, the lawn turned to meadow. No
catastrophe, I hope-just a gradual blurring of the boundary be–
tween indoors and outdoors. I hope it doesn't happen too soon.
Whatever Thoreau says, a certain kind of human endeavor
needs a modicum of shelter from the outdoors.
When time is in the foreground, as in Maine, and we be–
come spectators ourselves, we're modest and peripheral enough to
see ghosts, to tend the altar of the past and give our selfish con–
cerns second place. But whether we pay homage to the past or
not, how hard it is to live in time! To ride it without falling, to
balance as it moves, to hurry it or slow it down, to heed or ignore
it-nothing works for long.
