Читать книгу The Inventors - Peter Selgin - Страница 26

LAST FEBRUARY, A WEEK AFTER MY FIFTY-SIXTH BIRTHDAY, having rented it for a year and a half, I bought the house I’m living in. To celebrate, I made my first major capital improvement: I hung a set of wind chimes from the railing of my deck. Having accomplished this Herculean feat, I stepped back and, gathering in the fruits of my labors, said to myself: Gaze upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

Though raised in a Connecticut town where I mowed the lawn and raked the leaves like any other good suburban boy, thirty-five years of New York City apartment dwelling erased whatever handiness was once in me. Days after I bought this place, an ice storm broke three branches from one of the pine trees fronting the lake. I needed a saw to cut them up with. Confronted with an array of saws at the Ace Hardware store, it occurred to me that I’d never bought a garden implement before.

Since then, I’ve risen to the occasion and made other improvements. Along my home’s naked foundation, I planted a variety of shrubs: red-tip photinia to the north, a mixture of hydrangeas and forsythia to the south, azaleas and arbor vitae to the west, a pair of camellia japonica to either side of the foundation facing the lake. Potted geraniums (that I water in my underwear, since my neighbors are never around) adorn the deck.

Recently I’ve been painting walls. Yesterday I painted the bannister leading to the loft and the railing fronting my desk, choosing a different complementary color for each: a sea blue for the bannister leading up, and an equally rich terracotta for the loft railing. Like voices harmonizing, the two colors interact, gliding in and out and over and under each other. On the central wall rising from the stone fireplace to the rafters I’ve hung two large paintings, a verre églomisé of the Titanic in its fateful approach to the iceberg, and a self-portrait of the artist in splotched painter’s smock, wielding a brush, looking angry and/or frightened. To either side of the paintings, in the space dividing the triangular windows from the French doors opening out to the deck, I’ve hung a set of weathered oars, complete with rusty oarlocks, courtesy of eBay. A painted Moroccan vase (an urn, actually) sprouting dry eucalyptus twigs in autumnal shades at the center of the mantelpiece completes the effect, scenting the room with a delicate, mentholated musk.

More recently I purchased a hundred assorted daffodil bulbs. When fall comes around I’ll invite some of my students to help me plant them. I’ll serve them mimosas and brunch.

Yeats spoke of the choice artists face between perfection of the art and perfection of the life. At times I wonder if by making my new home so attractive I’m jeopardizing my art, lessening the impetus toward creating – let alone perfecting – this or any other work of art. If all’s fine in the present, why, oh why, delve into the past?

The answer, of course, is that with all its imperfections the past lives in the present, that before we can live peacefully in the latter, we have to make our peace with the former. Yeats was wrong. For an artist, perfecting the art and perfecting the life go hand in hand. So I keep working on this memoir, reaching back into the past to try and grasp my former self.

This is what I’m trying to write about: how, one way or another, by hook or by crook, often with the help of others, we all invent or reinvent ourselves. My father helped invent me by bringing me into the world, the teacher by bringing me into his cottage and his classroom.

U.S. Patent Number 27,270, “NULL TYPE COMPARISON REFLECTOMETER WHEREIN NULLING IS ACCOMPLISHED BY MOVING THE LIGHT DETECTOR.” Originally filed March 9, 1966. Reissued Jan. 11, 1972. “A device for measuring light reflectance or light transparency in order to obtain color data on both opaque and transparent surfaces. The device utilizes a single photocell or photosensitive element which is activated by the entire light beam reflected from the standard and the test surface in alternate sequence.”