Figuring, page 57
There would be no next year for Carson.
In October, she began a new course of testosterone treatments she hoped would alleviate her pain just enough to make transcontinental travel endurable—she had promised to deliver a lecture in San Francisco and was determined to keep her word. Marie Rodell offered to escort her. Flying over the Grand Canyon for the first time, Carson was filled with awe at this spectacular monument to the relationship between land and sea, carved deep into Earth’s geological record.
When Carson arrived, she gave her hosts the usual explanation of her wheelchair—acute arthritis. Ever since her cancer diagnosis, she had chosen not to let on that she was seriously ill—a fact only a handful of her intimates knew, and never to the full extent, for she habitually minimized her suffering. She even instructed Dorothy to tell inquiring neighbors that she was healthier than ever. Now, with not only her writing but her person the object of attacks, she took even greater care to conceal her illness, well aware that this, too, could be exploited in the merciless campaign to discredit her. Indeed, even arthritis was hurled against her. After Carson delivered an elegant speech on pesticides and ecology to a full house at the regal Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Francisco, a local newspaper breezed past the science and the significance of her points to describe her as “a middle-aged, arthritis-crippled spinster” who “hobbled off the platform” with her cane. Another paper, turning a deliberately deaf ear to the fervent ovation into which Carson had hobbled off, characterized her as “diminutive and extremely mild,” unable to “command attention in a bunch of Brownie Girl Scouts.”
After the lecture, Carson decided to realize her lifelong longing to see the California redwoods and set out to visit Muir Woods. “Between every two pine trees,” John Muir had written in the margin of his copy of Emerson’s essays, “there is a door leading to a new way of life.” That way was the way of grasping and actively inhabiting the inherent interdependence of nature, to which Carson had devoted her life. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” Muir had written.
David Brower, executive director of the Sierra Club and a longtime fan of Carson’s, offered to take her on a tour of the Muir Woods. He would later encapsulate her genius with perfect succinctness: “She did her homework, she minded her English, and she cared.”
As Brower pushed her wheelchair between the majestic thousand-year-old trunks, Carson savored what Whitman, on his own first journey west a century earlier, had described as “the bracing and buoyant equilibrium of concrete outdoor Nature, the only permanent reliance for sanity of book or human life.” Hiking through Muir Woods half a century after Carson’s visit, with a volume of Whitman in my backpack, I run my fingers over the coarse, fragrant bark of these venerable trees that have outlived her and will outlive me.
Shortly after Carson returned from California, President Kennedy’s assassination shook the nation. Carson was devastated, unable to think of anything else, unable to see it the way Whitman had strained to see Lincoln’s assassination a century earlier:
The soldier drops, sinks like a wave—but the ranks of the ocean eternally press on. Death does its work, obliterates a hundred, a thousand—President, general, captain, private—but the Nation is immortal.
Ever since her first writings about the sea, Carson had found the closest thing to immortality in the tidal cycles of change that continually destroy one element, one organism, and reabsorb its atoms into another. This had always been the way of the universe, nature’s way. But there could be no promise of immortality in Kennedy’s unnatural death, wrought by a cancer in the human spirit. She found herself “numb and dazed,” unable to write a single word for days. Sensing the source of her silence, Dorothy articulated what Rachel could not: “In these past days I think we have felt apart from the world—in time and in space, living within our homes and yet so close to world-shaking events.”
Seventy-some latitude degrees south, Jorge Luis Borges received the news at the National Library of Argentina. Stupefied, he walked out to wander the neighborhood in gutted disbelief, stopping in the street to share embraces with people he did not know who did not know him—a creaturely response to collective tragedy comparable only to collective joy, as on the day of the Kennedy-envisioned Moon landing. Borges found in both events “a sort of communion among men.” He would later recall the common fabric of the two experiences—the lunar, the lunatic:
There was the emotion over what had occurred, and there was also the emotion of knowing that thousands of people, millions of people, maybe all the people in the world, were feeling great emotion over what was occurring.
Kennedy had been invited to Gettysburg to give a speech commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, but he declined in order to travel to Dallas and mediate rising tensions within the Democratic Party. Dwight Eisenhower, a resident of Gettysburg, spoke in his stead and called for upholding Lincoln’s legacy of “a nation free, with liberty, dignity, and justice for all.” Five months earlier, Martin Luther King, Jr., had been violently arrested in Alabama on the charge of parading without a permit while leading a nonviolent protest. In his famous letter penned in the Birmingham city jail, Dr. King called for recognizing the ecology of justice:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Sixteen hundred hours before King’s assassination, 864,353 after Lincoln’s, and 72 after the Gettysburg speech he didn’t deliver, Kennedy was shot in Texas. What if he had gone to Maryland instead? Chance and choice.
Meanwhile, the great Catalan cellist and conductor Pablo Casals was on his way to the White House to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom—a rare honor for a foreigner. Two years earlier, just after Kennedy took office, Casals had visited the White House to perform a stunning cello rendition of “The Song of the Birds”—an old Spanish folk melody that he told the President symbolized his hopes for freedom and peace in the world. In an act of resistance to Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in his native Spain, Casals had been refusing for years to perform in countries that recognized the Spanish despot’s ultranationalist government. But he made an exception for Kennedy, seeing in him a beacon of democracy, art, and the human spirit. The day of the assassination plunged Casals, who had lived through two world wars and gruesome dictatorial violence, into an abyss of darkness he had never experienced, for he saw in the particular loss an ugliness reflecting on the whole of humanity. The “monstrous madness” of it would stay with him for the remainder of his life. It was alive as ever when he recounted at the age of ninety-three: “I have seen much of suffering and death in my lifetime, but I have never lived through a more terrible moment. For hours I could not speak. It was as if a beautiful and irreplaceable part of the world had suddenly been torn away.”
Three days after the assassination, as a devastated nation was processing its shock and grief, the United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York transformed its twenty-fifth annual fund-raising gala, “Night of Stars,” into a memorial. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had been scheduled to speak but canceled. Instead, Leonard Bernstein delivered the address to eighteen thousand of the country’s most distinguished artists, writers, and other public figures—a passionate tribute to JFK’s support of the arts and a piercing meditation on violence. At the New York Philharmonic the night before, Bernstein had conducted Mahler’s Second Symphony—the Resurrection—in tribute to the memory of JFK. He now addressed the broader significance of the choice:
There were those who asked: Why the Resurrection Symphony, with its visionary concept of hope and triumph over worldly pain, instead of a Requiem, or the customary Funeral March from the Eroica? Why indeed? We played the Mahler symphony not only in terms of resurrection for the soul of one we love, but also for the resurrection of hope in all of us who mourn him. In spite of our shock, our shame, and our despair at the diminution of man that follows from this death, we must somehow gather strength for the increase of man, strength to go on striving for those goals he cherished. In mourning him, we must be worthy of him….We loved him for the honor in which he held art, in which he held every creative impulse of the human mind, whether it was expressed in words, or notes, or paints, or mathematical symbols.
Bernstein quoted from a speech Kennedy would have delivered a few hours after the assassination: “America’s leadership must be guided by learning and reason.” The loss, he said, was only deepened by the awareness that it had been the product of the exact antipodes of learning and reason—“ignorance and hatred.” I can picture the undulating furrow of his eyebrows, which always provided their own animate score to the symphonies he conducted:
Learning and Reason: those two words of John Kennedy’s were not uttered in time to save his own life; but every man can pick them up where they fell, and make them part of himself, the seed of that rational intelligence without which our world can no longer survive. This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.
Almost exactly a year before the assassination, at a benefit concert titled “An American Pageant of the Arts,” Bernstein served as master of ceremonies and presented before President Kennedy a seven-year-old Chinese-born, French-raised cellist by the name of Yo-Yo Ma, who performed a 150-year-old concertino by Jean-Baptiste Bréval alongside his eleven-year-old sister, Yeou-Cheng, on the piano. The boy had been brought to Bernstein’s attention by Casals, who had heard him play and instantly recognized genius. Bernstein’s voice boomed with warm pride as he introduced one of the greatest musicians of the century to come: “Now here’s a cultural image for you to ponder as you listen: a seven-year-old Chinese cellist playing old French music for his new American compatriots.”
It was during that selfsame benefit, broadcast nationwide, that Kennedy rose above his moment, above all moments, to make his most enduring offering to culture:
I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.
* * *
—
When Carson finally composed herself from the shock of the tragedy, she told Dorothy that she was seized with a sorrowful sense of loss cutting so near the bone of the spirit that she felt as though a member of her own family had been murdered. But even with death so near, the will for life pressed on. Ten days earlier, Carson had glimpsed a strange spot of white in her garden. She had leaned down, a detonation of pain in each of her vertebrae, and gently pushed the withered late autumn grass apart to discover a pot of hyacinths, forgotten there since the previous spring. In late November, several improbable buds of this glory of spring had pushed up from the bulbs. Carson took the pot into her bedroom, where—against reason, against season—it was now abloom with white hyacinths. “White hyacinths for my soul,” she told Dorothy.
As she hungered for consolation in the wake of the assassination, Carson did something unusual. Lying distraught in bed one night, unable to sleep, she tried to find something to read that would soothe her into somnolence. She walked over to the bookshelf and, in one of those rare bolts of inspired desperation, pulled out a yellowed copy of Under the Sea-Wind, her own first book. Reading from it, she found herself slowly relaxing and in that loosening finally understood, not with the mind but with the marrow, what her readers found in her books—that dwarfing of human dramas against the perspective-dilating backdrop of geological and cosmological time. “O the cares of man, how much of everything is futile,” Kepler had inscribed as his motto three centuries earlier. She was reminded of a passage she had penned as an epilogue in an early draft of The Edge of the Sea, which eventually became a short, existentially hued chapter titled “The Enduring Sea”—Dorothy’s favorite of any of Carson’s writings. Perched at the window of her study long before cancer and Kennedy, with the sounds of the rising tide serenading eternity below, she had contemplated how space and time converge in the sea:
The differences I sense in this particular instant of time that is mine are but the differences of a moment, determined by our place in the stream of time and in the long rhythms of the sea. Once this rocky coast beneath me was a plain of sand; then the sea rose and found a new shore line. And again in some shadowy future the surf will have ground these rocks to sand and will have returned the coast to its earlier state. And so in my mind’s eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality—earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.
This contact with the timeless rose and fell in Carson as the shoreline of her mortality edged this side of the horizon. Some days she was buoyed by the potent elixir of tenacity and denial, soaring into the possibilities of what she still hoped to accomplish. Other days she plummeted into deep depression. Whitman had recognized this above-average ebb and flow of emotion as the blessed curse of the artist—all who reach “sunny expanses and sky-reaching heights” are apt “to dwell on the bare spots and darknesses.” “I have a theory that no artist or work of the very first class may be or can be without them,” he declaimed.
Sensing how troubled Rachel was about what would happen to Roger and Jeffie after her death, Stan volunteered that he and Dorothy would take care of both boy and cat. Stan had been a father figure for Roger—the only one he’d ever had—since the boy first began visiting Southport Island as a toddler. But touched as Rachel was by Stan’s large-hearted offer, she was not ready to face the question at all, gripped by that creaturely survival instinct of denial when confronted with the imminence of nonsurvival.
She asked Dorothy and Stan to meet her in New York, where she was to receive a constellation of honors. The first was the highest medal of the National Audubon Society for her incalculable public service to conservation. It had never been awarded to a woman before. Two days later, at the reception for the American Geographical Society medal, Stan photographed Dorothy and Rachel beaming in their elegant silk gowns—a joyous occasion Carson would recall the next day as “the 19 hours,” feeling more acutely than ever the flight of her time, their time. But the honor that most moved her that month was her admission to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, whose membership was limited to fifty artists. Among them were only three living women, including Pearl S. Buck—the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature—and the poet Marianne Moore, with whom Carson had shared a National Book Award table a decade earlier. Carson was honored by all the recognition she received for the scientific and civic dimensions of her work, but this she cherished in a different way. Typically bestowed upon novelists and poets, this honor was a recognition of her contribution as a literary artist—the childhood dream she had refused to surrender even as she turned to science.
But the jubilation of the month was blackened just before Christmas when Jeffie died. Carson was devastated. “I have found that deep awareness of life and its meaning in the eyes of a beloved cat,” she had written years earlier. But she also felt the dark relief of not having to worry about what would become of Jeffie—as she had to worry with Roger—once she returned her own atoms to the sea.
Christmas had always been Rachel and Dorothy’s special time. They must have known this would be their last. In the annual Christmas letter that had been their private tradition for a decade, Dorothy reflected on their years of love. She dated it “Christmas 1963 AC”—for “After Carson,” a testament to how profoundly Rachel’s love had changed her life. Her words streamed with the parallel currents of adoration and anticipatory loss:
Ten years, dar, since that first Christmas message. What can I say now, ten years later, that I didn’t say in 1953? The words may be different but the theme—I need you, I love you—is the same. As I needed you then for understanding, and for the kind of companionship that no one else has been able to give, I need you now as much, and even more. As I loved you then, for yourself, and for all you represent, I love you now—with warmth and earnestness and longing.
And so I give my Christmas thanks for this ten years—years that have enriched, yes, and even changed my life. Such years—of joy and sorrow for us both. As we shared the joys, no less have we shared the sorrows. Sometimes I wonder how I could have endured the depths without your sustaining love. Without you, in those shadowy days I know life would not have been worth living.
The sentiment harked back to the poem Dorothy had sent Rachel as she headed into her mastectomy operation three and a half years earlier, which ended with these lines:
My hopes were heaven-high,
They are fulfilled in you.
I am the pool of gold
When sunset burns and dies—
You are my deepening skies;
Give me your stars to hold.
Not knowing exactly when Rachel would discover the Christmas letter, Dorothy ended it with these words:
