Middle Age (79 page)

Authors: Joyce Carol Oates

BOOK: Middle Age

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(It’s in the presence of other people that I’m vulnerable to being lonely.

Aloneness and loneliness have very little in common.) In 1978, I joined the distinguished humanities faculty at Princeton University, and my husband and I bought our house—in a single, vertiginous hour—about three miles beyond the village, in a semi-rural, wooded area of Hopewell Township. The houses we love are relatively few in a lifetime, like the people we love; our emotional resources are limited. In each major phase of my life there was a predominant house which I admired, and idealized, from a distance; only in August 1978, house-hunting in the Princeton area, did I fall in love with a house at first sight and have the opportunity to buy it—almost immediately.

It isn’t invariably true that wishes, fulfilled, are apt to be disillusioning.

The “enchanted place” in which we live has never ceased to exert its spell on me, every day for over twenty years. (If there’s a disadvantage to living in an enchanted place, it’s that you are very reluctant to leave. And when you must leave, especially on obligatory trips, you feel a terrible melancholy and a longing to return as quickly as possible.

Our house, built in 1962, is single story, primarily glass. The main body of the house consists of eight “modules” with cathedral ceilings, each measuring twelve by sixteen feet; these surround an open atrium, or court-yard, set in idiosyncratically matched flagstones. The several entrances to the house, like the atrium, are hidden from the driveway, and the house itself is hidden from the road, behind a dense stand of trees and a six-foot redwood fence. By local standards our house isn’t large—we had not wanted a large house, in fact—but it has the feel of spaciousness, and it opens out expansively at the rear onto acres of township-owned land, a brook, a pond (which my husband, with varying degrees of good and ill luck, has stocked with frogs, snails, multi-colored carp), and woods.

Except for the more private rooms, the walls of most of our rooms are floor-to-ceiling glass, and each room has a sliding glass door to the outside. We’ve been accustomed to living, in a sense, outside; our former, more conventional houses would seem disorienting to us now. (As a girl, I’d admired English Tudor architecture, and fantasized about one day living in such a handsome, Old-World dwelling; now, I can’t imagine how people live with so few windows, so little natural daylight, or why. Surely the great discovery of twentieth-century house design was the discovery of natural light?)

There’s something very comforting about being surrounded on all sides by green. About watching rain like a waterfall against the domed glass of a skylight, and hearing rain drumming by night. I am not an ascetic who works facing a wall, but rather a romantic individual who takes comfort and nourishment from gazing for long minutes out a window, losing myself in the contemplation of trees, sky, birds, the continuous play of light and shadow on the grass. In houses constructed primarily of glass, the eye is always drawn outward, away from the interior (and away from the self ); there is a fascinating panorama
out there
, and
in here
is less demanding. Deer pass close by our windows, and in season, speckled fawns on long shaky legs, with enormous eyes gazing toward our windows. There’s a constant drama of birds and squirrels. I seem to have stepped into a dream of my lost childhood, yet one from which the anxieties and the sheer hard work of the farm have melted away. (People think it strange, even perverse, that I continue to write in long hand, and then with an electric typewriter. But I had a word processor for two intense years, and became somewhat addicted to it, hypnotized by its glassy screen into working twelve hours a day, and I so missed daydreaming out my window, I gave it up forever. Computers are certainly ideal for most people, but not for me. Life is too short and contains too much natural beauty, I thought, for me to be mesmerized by shimmering words on a glass screen.)

What of the old, lost life of the farm have I retained, or replicated in this new life? I realize, preparing this essay, that consciously or unconsciously I have surrounded myself with images of the countryside. My husband and I collect American art, and on the walls of our larger rooms are: two oil paintings and two pastel drawings of landscapes by Wolf Kahn; a delicately executed watercolor barn by Charles Burchfield; an impressionistic watercolor of rocks, sky and water by John Marin; a small gem of a watercolor titles
Summer Squall
by Matthew Daub; a boldly enlarged photograph by the surrealist photographer Gregory Crewdson. There are watercolors and drawings of landscapes sent to me by lesser-known artists who have read my fiction, and feel a kinship with it, or with me. On the white walls of my study I’ve taped reproductions of dramatic landscapes (Albert Bierstadt, Caspar David Friedrich, Martin Johnson Heade, Winslow Homer, among others). There are nineteenth-century clocks throughout the house, their pendulums solemnly ticking with no relationship to real time. I no longer collect glass animals but somehow I’ve acquired, as gifts, quite a few stylish cats. And my father’s violin, an exquisite work of art, is hanging on a wall at my back.

Our house was designed by Phillip Sheridan Collins of Princeton, whom my husband and I never met; since then, other architects have been involved in its expansion. Two years ago my study was extended, a second skylight added, and more large windows installed. Before that, we added a solarium at the rear of the house, overlooking the pond. Even as I compose this, cement is being laid for the foundation of the extension of our guest wing, itself converted from a garage. We seem to have become Americans of the sort who continuously “improve”—
reimagine
—their property, as if pursuing an elusive dream.

The old farmhouse in Millersport, New York has long since been razed.

My father who’d been a young, handsome, vigorous man for so long, died last May at the age of eighty-six. The first “enchanted place’ of my life, my child’s bedroom, exists now only in memory, and comes alive only in dreams. There is no other entry, and there is no way back.

– Joyce Carol Oates

About the Author:

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member since 1978 of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Credits

Jacket design and imaging by Honi Werner,

based on a photo by Jennifer Cheung

About the Publisher

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