Keats' Buried Letters

John Keats always knew he would die young. I don't know how he knew, but his poems are overshadowed by that knowledge, haunted by his tragic end. Famously, Keats lies buried in a grave that doesn't even bare his name. He himself desired the words "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water" to be engraved into his tombstone. He died at the age of 25 with the belief that he would be forgotten, tormented by the knowledge that the only legacy he left was the anguish he would bring to the lover to whom he never returned.

 

 

Keats' letters to Fanny Brawne were full of musings concerning his own death, as were his poems. The fear of an early death sits ripe in them, rich as flesh is with blood. In one of the most haunting personifications of death I have ever read, Keats wrote "I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath". The theme of oblivion ripples deep only to be swallowed like an echo that hangs hollow in the air. Reading his works, one constantly feels like the shadow of a spectator watching as Keats stands alone, contemplating "on the shore of the wide world...till love and fame to nothingness do sink".

Keats knew he did not have long, and so, love for him was painful, impatient, and urgent. He was so haunted by the fact that he would have to leave her that at times he fled from her even when he did not have to. It was like he did not want to allow himself to live, to relish in things that belong to a full-lived life, with its experience, and its aging, its soft winding down. But death showed itself with that first drop of blood on his own pillow. Death fueled his exigency every night when he wrote to her desperately only to tame himself by morning. Thus, when his poor health drove him to the warmer climates of Italy, he knew already that he would not return. 

 

 

I recently read the letters that he wrote to her before his flight, when life still held some taste for Keats. 

He did not write to her after he fled to Italy. 

I read in the book's introduction that the letters she sent to him throughout those weeks were buried with him unopened. I also read that based on his friend's accounts Keats was tormented by visions of her on his death bed, visions fueled by the fear of what his death would do to her. She was so young, so new, and he had died a thousand times. 

 

Strangely, these horrid deathbed visions also seem prophesied in Keats' own writing. He wrote to her once that she should "suppose (him) in Rome", saying that he would see her there. "I should there see you as in a magic glass going to and from town at all the hours". Yet Keats never saw Fanny again. The Fanny he described in this early letter sounds like a ghost. Even the magic glass, at first described so lovely and innocently, turns out to be something ghastly and agonizing. 

Towards the end, Keats was haunted by her. 

As I read the works he wrote for her I tracked the lines with etchings, skimming his love letters as they slowly unraveled into tragedy. I could see my own lines even as I turned the pages, like half-healed scars shown through skin-thin paper. 

I did not think there was any particular purpose to the order in which the poems appear, until I read the final one. Not until, at the end, Keats wrote about drawing out her blood with his once live inky grasp into his now cold dead fingers. Like an image wrought straight from Shelley's Frankenstein, love and loss becomes a monstrous thing, vampiric in its ability to draw the heart out of you. 

It was there that Keats reached out to me completely, desperately, from death itself. "See" he says, reaching out his pale dead hand. "Here it is – I hold it towards you."

 

 

At the start of the book, an illustration of Keats slept in shadows, nestled between the pages, a silhouette of man of whom no photographs exist. By the end, the only thing the book leaves you with is the imaginary image of his cold corpse, sweat still drying, blood spots on his sheets from his coughing, fingers unmoving, laying where he last reached out. 

As I contemplated the collection I was left with an image of Keats on his death bed, surrounded by haunted mirrors reflecting the image of the woman he loved but could never marry. 

 

But the is truth, this is not how the story of Keats and his love ends. 

 

It ends with a twenty year old girl cutting off her own hair and spending three years dressed in black, dwelling in the Heath where she had once walked with him. It ends with Fanny's unnamed husband who came thirteen years later and a life lived into old age with no account of the passion with which it began. Finally, it ends with a woman remembered by time only for the greatness of her grief and the love she never got to hold. 

 

After all, it is Keats' anguish that we read about. We never get to hear about her suffering from her own mouth. Her own letters were never read, not by Keats, not by anyone. 

Instead, they lie unread and entombed, withered with her first loves corpse before the woman herself even breathed her last. 

Still, she must have had the gift of a poet within, for one can feel her agony when she asks by Keats' account: "Is there another life?... There must be, we cannot be created for this kind of suffering".

Some Oddities of Time

At the end of the day, the one thing we all need is more time. 

 

The café in which I work is open around the clock. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. We’ve got nothing but time. Which is why it’s kind of ironic that the clock on the wall doesn’t work. The levers frozen at 3:42. It’s been that way for almost as long as I’ve worked here, yet no one’s bothered to fix it. Not that it matters, we’re always open anyway. So, if you’ve got time to spare, so do we. 

Most people don’t stick around for long though. Actually, you’d be surprised how many people pass through in a day. They come, and they go, busy and bustling, hustling by, passing between errands and places unknown. Time keeps us all on our toes. We all have appointments to keep, people to meet and places to go; things to do and not enough time to do it in.

It seems we are always pressed for time in one way or another, which is why it does not surprise me how quickly time escapes us. It occurred to me once that perhaps if clocks counted backwards we’d realize how the hours count down throughout the day. Time is of the essence, as they say, and there are only twenty-four hours in a day, after all. 

Sometimes I wonder how a force so strong can be so invisible. How can people be so unaware of something so imminent? Perhaps if we had less to do, or if people took more time to take joy in simply doing nothing, we would notice how the days go by. Time is the great hassler, turning our lives into time lapses of responsibilities and deadlines to meet. Hours that turn into days and days that turn into weeks, and so, all too soon, life passes us by. 

But there are a few times a year when people become painfully aware of the passing of time. During the holidays for example; or when the first leaves begin to fall; when you wake up in the morning and the world is white; or when blowing out birthday candles that grow from a flicker to a burning flame too fierce to blow out in one breath. 

Other than holidays, birthdays, and the change of the seasons, the rest of the year we tend to believe that time never counts beyond its twenty-four-hour mark, always counting up to something that never seems to occur. But then we stand next to grown-up children, or catch glimpses of old photographs, and we are no longer fooled.  

You see, most people think time is constant; dependable; predictable; always the same. But those of us who really pay attention know that time is as varying as we are. Time is fickle and unreliable. And, just like us, time has its quirks and oddities. Even time can be dreary and lazy, at times. It can be eager and eccentric. Time can be exhilarating, and time can be aggravating, as oppressing as it is ambitious. Even time has its peculiarities. And, just like time becomes more palpable in moments when its fleeting, such as when you’re saying goodbye to someone you love, time changes its pace in some places. 

 

 

Take airports for example. Nowhere does the tempo of time march faster or with such impending velocity. Or consider how time works in classrooms, so tedious and lackluster. And then there are cafes, like the one in which I work, in which time stands still.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, it’s always 3:42, and that’s not just because the clock doesn’t work. Cafes are timeless places. I would know. I work in one. 

And I think I’m not the only one whose noticed this peculiarity.   

There is an odd young man who used to come here for lunch. He always tucked his pants into his socks and wore the same brown bowler hat. I heard he was a business student, and so I’m sure he knew the pressure of deadlines better than most. He always sat in the same booth, in the corner by the window. And with feet outstretched, a unique pair of socks each day, he sat and mulled over his laptop, just passing the time, or rather, trying to escape it, almost as if he knew that his responsibilities would not find him here in one of time’s rare loopholes.

I used to not believe in destiny, but I also used to believe in the reliability of time. But a young man, as odd as time itself, proved that sometimes there is such a thing as being in the right place at the right time. 

Destiny walked in one rainy Thursday carrying a polka-dotted umbrella, her strawberry blonde hair dripping from the rain. There was nowhere else sit. All the seats were taken. 

The young man rarely sat alone after that. They sat together in his sunlit booth by the window all throughout the golden summer. He wrote on his laptop, and she brought stacks of books to read from a never-ending to-read list. They sat for hours sometimes, just savouring each other’s company, unaware of the frantic and frenzied people around them who, unlike them, were always pressed for time; or perhaps, simply less aware of its peculiarities.

 
There will always be those who come in here to “kill some time” before an appointment or when waiting for a bus; those who order a drink and maybe a dessert and glance impatiently at the clock that doesn’t work, slaughtering time instead of savouring it. 

 

Then, of course, there are those who are always running late, like the composed looking gentleman who is always flustered by the lateness of the hour. Perhaps he just hasn’t realized that the clock on the wall doesn’t work, or maybe he just has a bad sense of time in general, but he can never seem to catch up with it. He comes in once or twice a week to have lunch with a colleague and they chat till eventually he rushes off to some appointment or other. Maybe time just goes by faster for some people.

But just because cafes are timeless does not mean that time does not work its tolls here. Sooner or later, something always changes. Outside the café window rainy spring days become sunny summer days, and soon the first leaves of autumn begin to fall in one of time's most prominent moments. The girl with the strawberry blonde hair doesn’t come here anymore and the young business student sits alone, though he too doesn’t come nearly as often as he used to. 

Time is relentless, and, sooner or later, it catches up to all of us. But at least we have cafes, so remarkably ordinary in their timelessness. Every once in a while, when I see old friends reunite over coffee, catching up and reminiscing about the past when life was young and time abundant, I cannot help but think that perhaps they should have spent more time in cafes, savouring time and drinking coffee. 

Of course, there are also those who have more experience with times ability to fly by. Many of the retired folk come here to idle away their afternoons. People think they come for the free refills, but I know better. They come because they know that here time will not escape them. 

I told you that a man in funky socks taught me about destiny. Well, an old woman in chunky jewellery taught me how to savour time. 

It was the winter in which I first started working here, in this timeless café before I discovered its timelessness. It was December 24th, one of the rare nights of the year in which we close. The clock read 3:25, and I was just mopping up to close at four. The café was empty, except for a tiny old woman in a vibrant green and purple dress sitting at a table alone. 

I had never seen her before, but I have seen her many times since. She comes in most nights, wearing every piece of jewellery she owns, from pearly necklaces to emerald earrings. But on her left ring finger she wears only a simple golden ring, as if to heighten its importance. She never orders anything but coffee, decaf, which she sips quietly as she stares pondering out the window, dwelling on the past as she fiddles with her golden ring. 

I did not have the heart to ask her to leave, so I asked her if she was waiting for someone. “No,” she said, smiling up at me with kind old eyes and blush coloured cheeks. “I’m just making up for lost time.”  

 

 
I sat with her that Christmas eve. I was new in town. I didn’t have anything better to do. I would not have admitted it then, but I was pretty lonely, not just because I felt alone but because I felt abandoned; left behind by time, regretful of the years I had lost and the time I had wasted.

We laughed that night, me and the old lady dressed in emeralds and purple flowers. We drank coffee, decaf, and we talked about our pasts, starring out the window at the snow which drifted slowly down into the silent night. 

I didn’t notice it then, but the clock stopped ticking that night. Maybe it was the time we savoured, or maybe it just ran out of battery. Though, looking back now, something tells me that clock isn’t broken at all. Maybe it’s just enchanted.

Because at the end of the day, we all need more time: time to savour, to read a book, or catch up with a friend; time to ponder; to relish in the moments; and, maybe, to enjoy a cup of coffee.

Bird Watching

C.S. Lewis compared his writing process to watching birds. For Lewis, writing came to him in pictures. Ideas settled before him like sparrows. 

 

To me it seems a very vivid way to describe the process because it suggests that there is something at work that is beyond you; a silent sort of being that lives on a different schedule, in a world so secluded from yours, it is like another world entirely. Picture it: you sight a bird, the very image of an idea, once there, up high or down low, then gone with the rise of the wind, the sound or smell of invention still in the air. But the bird flies away, moving at a pace apart from yours, flitting in and out of contact with you.

 

 

 

The more time you spend in a place the more you get to know the birds that live there. You see them often enough, if you look out for them. Other than the spiders, they might be your closest neighbours, for they build their nests in your trees and on your rooftop. Like ideas, birds weave their way in and out of our lives, aloof and stunning, but sometimes they make close contact, such as when they don't know you are watching them from a window. 

 

I made rather close contact myself this summer, but without the glass, for I spent some time napping in a hammock strung from two trees in the middle of August. It was wonderful, for even as I drifted into a light sleep, I could hear the world around me, the wind and the sound of the lake more real than the sun streaked black behind my closed eyes. Yet my favourite part of the nap was the end of it when I would awake silently and the birds, wholly unaware of me, were all around me, living their secret lives as if still completely unobserved.

 

 

 

Like bird-watching, writing comes on a schedule wholly disconnected from your own daylight hours. It awakes long before you do, and so, it sees so many things you do not, for it knows the world before it awakens. Writing feels that way sometimes: Like the start of a day or a story in which no one yet knows what might occur, and so it meanders, flowing slowly into happenings. 

Like a desire for writing, birds come and go, adorning our lives with their needlework each time they appear, for even throughout the day, they move through all the unseen corners around you, passing in and out of sight, slipping into tree tops you never reach, hopping into the shadowy kingdoms under brush and root where only the small critters live. 

 

Yet as with birds and pictures for writing, some people simply do not notice them. They are just mundane enough to not interest some, feeling so like a day dream that many do not take the time to speculate. Many do not ask: What if this was part of a story? 

 

 

 

Lewis saw such pictures. As a young man he saw a Faun with an umbrella beneath a snowy forest. He knew the Faun was carrying parcels, and though Lewis did not know why, he thought it looked like a story. Today almost anyone shown a picture of Mr. Tumnus walking through the snow would be able to tell you where it came from. 

Still, it is important to remember that at one point Lewis himself did not know. I suppose Mr. Tumnus was very much like a bird in that way, for Lewis did not get to see where Mr. Tumnus went after he'd been sighted (or who he met along the way). He had to come with that part himself.

 

Another author I greatly enjoy said something else about ideas and the art of having them that seems fitting to share. When asked how he gets his ideas, Neil Gaiman said that when it comes to having good ideas there is only one big difference between writers and ordinary people: writers notice when they're having them. It is like the gift of being able to remember your dreams; like an awareness for critters, some people notice it, and some people don't. But anyone can, if they try.

Indeed, like bird-watching, writing can at times be tedious and uneventful. After all, a Faun walking through snow with an umbrella is not a story in and of itself.

But it only feels that way so long as you are expecting something to happen. Birds do not lead lives of drama, not to the unimaginative eye. But when the bird takes off and flies away and you can no longer see it, some people simply keep dreaming and drifting. Few take the time to wonder where the bird goes and what it does before the next time it is seen.