Ana's Home

On the morning of his 51st birthday Samuel Verner left his house and climbed on the top of his favorite hill. He had the habit of often observing the surrounding fields, naked and practically tree-less, lazing under the horizon. That day a thin layer of clouds draped the sky and the sun seemed to have given up trying to warm up this unchanging cold clod of earth. The wind swept below, still wintry despite the long-announced spring, while the chilly air was crisp and persuasive at the top of the hill. In the semi-shade of the clouds the few pines perching in the fields spread dark green, almost mystical color. They pointed out from the monotony of crops toward the onlooker like weak and angry fingers of scold for some ancient and ongoing error.

Samuel Verner was a solitary man, and to say that is to describe him in vague words. He made a project of his solitude, a profession he did not earn his living by, nevertheless it pleased him to consider it that way.

“What a day!”, he exclaimed, although another would discern nothing unusual in the landscape. Samuel was quick to catch the impalpable movement of grass, the few tiny shapes of animals and men in the distance moving on the sandy roads. He watched on, until he caught a sight of all that was moving, and then satiated, he exhaled deeply, and lowered himself on top of a flat block of rock.

He was sitting down quietly; time passed. It was not a glorious day to have special thoughts or need to make big decisions. His spirits were strangely not running high but went slowly down, like birds approaching the ground in circles. They landed on the icy-humid brown earth. He was still sitting motionless.

“My birthday… How have I changed?”, he observed slowly. “Where have all my passions gone? Am I happy? Is this all? … Is this all the happiness I am capable of?” he asked himself. He could have spoken the words out loud, no one would have heard him nonetheless. In his mind the words echoed louder than the blackbirds’ chirping. He had no answers to that, and he did not like the thought anyway.

The distant view did not seem to compel him anymore; he turned around and slowly took a view of the village he had come from. A nearby insect could discern a twitch in his face: a mixture of disdain and surfeit, a general unwillingness to look at the village. Samuel observed his house in its awkward position in the centre of the settlement. It stood at the bottom of the hollow the village occupied, its door path leading straight to a well across broken ground covered with overflowing underground water the well was positioned on. It was a wet patch of soil, and he had felt it for many winters in the bones. He bought the house not on his own accord: it was simply the only available one in the neighborhood at the time when he needed to settle somewhere. He did not mind its awkwardness after a while. The strip of land where the village well stood officially belonged to him, but he never took a step to mark the land or put a fence around it. The villagers treaded their path every day to and fro through the mud. He did not mind it. They quietly minded the mud though.

The fences of the village caught his attention: they were brand new, the wood vigorously, youthfully red, shining as if just now taken out from the trees’ hearts. The villagers had put the new fences by mutual agreement and shared labor; he himself took part in it, as he liked to think of himself as of a man with a good and generous nature. It was his house only that stood in the middle of the village, strangely alone in the central position, bordered by the mud of the well, and had its fences dark and unmended. Samuel resented walls in his heart and he despised a bit the villagers who took so much care of putting fences in-between them and the world. He did not like fences. The color of the new planks irritated him.

Where were his passions? He took time to remember if he had passions at all in life. He did. First, it was his passionate solitude; he sacrificed so much for it, declined such a plenty of the world to tend his solitary spirit. Nature was his passion as well. Then, why his heart was so cold now, and why he could not revive the spirit in his fingers, the old joys of touch, of sensing, the very feeling of being alive. He did not know. The only thing he did know was that he could not feel himself anymore as alive as he used to.

Samuel Verner was a hermit in spirit by his own choice, and he never regretted that he did not join the church, although he considered it seriously in his youth. There was too much community and communion in the brotherhood of the monastic life. It seemed to him that the monks were faking solitude, exchanging one unchosen and unwilling community for another. He rejected discipline imposed by other persons. He disdained the possibility that a pledge would hold his life on a certain path, and not his day to day decisions, confirmed each time as of anew. This is how he tried to live, and he lived thus in all his honesty. It was, what he called, an interior monasticism.

Not that he declined the bounty of life, the wine, the pleasures of good cuisine, and the charms of women. He was in love once, with a fresh maiden named Madeleine. He used to take her for solitary walks in a more solitary landscape of the nearby dried marshes; he would hold her hand and talk to her about the sheen of nights away from human settlements, about ideas and images that can emerge only in speechless communion with the stars. Her eyes blazed and she listened silently. She believed in him, Samuel felt it. At that time he believed that he could draw out, like the sculptor draws out elongated limbs from the granite, her being of solitude from the mold of the village. Still, her father rejected him quietly, and under his soft but continuous persuasion she gave him up to marry a young man from a neighboring village. The few times he saw her in the subsequent years, she was too imbibed into being a mother, that none of that solitary being he used to make love to shone through her silhouette anymore. And now, she was ashamed, not of him, but of her former passion and faith in him – he could see that in her eyes, in her quick embarrassment when they would meet. In his mind she was lost into her womb of community, but he found no fault in her choice. Someone had to give birth to beautiful children and to bring up the future of humanity. And she was a beautiful mother to do so.

There was another woman, a widow still in youthful spirits; he loved her deep laughter, and her sensual muscles. Samuel cherished her sunny company, and he spoke again of solitude as a guiding light. She was amused, aroused, impassioned, she lay close to him as no other women had, but after few months she started to grow impatient, she acquired a new habit of quickly dismissing all his musings, until one day she sent him away, with a childishly tired look in her eyes. He could understand why his first love put him aside, but not the second.

From both relationships Samuel emerged the same man as he entered them. There was no truthful question he could find to the answers he got.

There were times when he would ask himself if he could be loved at all and wholly. But these were merely few moments of weakness, which he ascribed to the reversion of a youth in passing. He was secured in his late middle age, predicting and fulfilling his project of solidifying solitariness. He felt comfortable and good in his shoes now. His age was a confirmation of his past dreams.

Yet today he was sitting on a rock observing the village, and a strange thought passed his mind for the first time: “Was I wrong? Is there something basically misplaced in my thinking that I took a wrong turn on what seemed like so right path? Have I been wrong all this time?” And the chill of old age passed through Samuel’s heart for the first time, entered it and spread through his body. For he knew, if he had been wrong, there would be not enough time to mend the mistake and relive life again. There, looking at the edge of the village, he faced the limits of his own span.

He stood the first blow. Warmth slowly ascended into his heart as he took in the thought of a possible mistake. Yes, he could have been wrong. He was able to face such a thought, if truth it was. He spent all his spirit facing the consequences, so he stood up and walked back home to postpone thinking further, suddenly having decided to fix up the fences of his house. There was something wintry in the air that day. The last thought before falling asleep was a prayer to the gods that he might not have been mistaken.

The next day he woke up tired and bewildered, not remembering any image from his dreams. He did not take to mending of his fences. The turmoil continued for few days, and then he regained peaceful sleep. He was waking up more certain, but certain in what he could not tell. He felt that something was changing. And he felt that something had been indeed missing in his life, yet he could not put his finger on it.

Samuel was lying in bed one morning, floating in that zone between dream and wakefulness, musing and sensing and reflecting like a drifter in the sky. His heart broke when a thought came to him, that it may have been his cherished solitude that might have misled him. He thought he could see with a little more effort what was greater than solitude, he imagined that a huge black curtain slowly opened before his eyes. Something shiny and brutal was coming to blast his sight, but prior to seeing what this was, his eyes blinked and his strength failed him. He laughed quietly, as tired runners laugh when they approach the end of the race, he reached out his hand in the air, and never finished the movement. He lay quietly in peace and sank in what seemed like an overwhelming dream coming from a place that was neither a past nor a future.

In his dream he sprang forth from the earth, driven by what seemed like a movement away from the black curtain; as if some inner gravity was taking him behind his eyes. He caught a glimpse of an infinitely cold cosmos around him, just prior to the sun filling in his vision. Drawn to it by powerful force, he looked at his flying self: his body was a fleck of light and it was rushing toward the sun. The sun melted many such flecks, and yet they still retained something like identity, although flat, although amazing and continuous like facets of a gigantic unblinking eye. He looked around and managed to discern, or imagined to have done so, distant suns made of the same matter – assemblages of flecks of light similar and strange to him. “What a little sun I am,” he thought. And then he plunged into the infinite motion of spectral flames.

The villagers found him dead in his bed, with a twitch on his face that could have been extreme pain or delight. In the yard, the well was running high with water and the mud was glassy the morning they took him away.

Samuel Verner was a solitary man, and to say that is to describe him in vague words. He made a profession out of his solitude; a profession he did not earn his living by, nevertheless it pleased him to consider it that way.

"What a day!", he exclaimed, although another would discern nothing unusual in the landscape. Samuel was quick to catch the impalpable movement of grass, the few tiny shapes of animals and men in the distance moving on the sandy roads. He watched until he caught a sight of all that was moving, and then satiated, he exhaled deeply, and lowered himself on top of a flat block of rock.

"My birthday. Time. Age. Change. How have I changed?", he observed slowly. "Where have all my passions gone? Am I happy? Is this all? Is this all the happiness I am capable of?" he asked himself. He could have spoken the words out loud, no one would have heard him nonetheless. In his mind the words echoed louder than the blackbirds' chirping. He had no answers to that, and he did not like the thought anyway.

The distant view did not seem to compel him anymore; he turned around and slowly took a view of the village he'd come from. A nearby insect could discern a twitch in his face: a mixture of disdain and surfeit, and a general repulsion to look at the village. Samuel observed his house in its awkward position amidst the settlement. It stood at the bottom of the hollow the village occupied, its door path leading straight to a well across the broken ground filled with overflowing underground water the well was positioned on. It was a wet patch of soil, and he had felt it many winters in the bones. He bought the house not on his own accord: it was simply the only available one in the neighborhood at the time when he needed to settle in somewhere. He did not mind its awkwardness after a while. The stripe of land where the village well stood officially belonged to him, but he never took a step to mark the land or put a fence around it. The villagers treaded their path every day to and fro through the mud. He did not mind it. They minded quietly the mud though.

The fences of the village caught his attention: they were brand new, the wood vigorously, youthfully red, shining as if just now taken out from the trees' hearts. The villagers had put the new fences by mutual agreement and shared labor; he himself took part in it, as he liked to think of himself as of a man with a good and generous nature. It was his house only that stood in the middle of the village, strangely alone in the central position, bordered by the mud of the well, and had its fences dark and unmended. Samuel resented walls in his heart and he despised a bit the villagers who took so much care of putting fences in-between them and the world. He did not like fences. The color of the new planks irritated him.

Samuel Verner was a hermit in spirit and by his own choice, and he never regretted that he did not join the church, although he considered it seriously in his youth. There was too much community and communion in the brotherhood of the monastic life. It seemed to him that the monks were faking solitude, exchanging one unchosen and unwilling community for another. He rejected discipline imposed by other persons. He disdained the possibility that a pledge would hold his life on a certain path, and not his day to day decisions, confirmed each time as of anew. This is how he tried to live, and he lived thus in all his honesty. It was, what he called, an interior monasticism.

Not that he declined the bounty of life, the wine, the pleasures of good cuisine, and the charms of women. He was in love once, with a fresh maiden named Madeleine. He used to take her for solitary walks in a more solitary landscape of the nearby dried marshes; he would hold her hand and talk to her about the sheen of nights away from human settlements, about ideas and images that can emerge only in speechless communion with the stars. Her eyes blazed and she listened silently. She believed in him, he felt it. At that time he believed that he could draw out, like the sculptor draws out elongated limbs from the granite, her being of solitude of the mold of the village. Still, her father rejected him quietly, and under his soft but continuous persuasion she gave him up to marry a young man from a neighboring village. The few times he saw her in the subsequent years, she was too imbibed into being a mother, that none of that solitary being he used to make love to shone through her silhouette anymore. And now, she was ashamed, not of him, but of her former passion and faith in him - he could see that in her eyes, in her quick embarrassment when they would meet. In his mind she was lost into her womb of community, but he found no fault in her choice. Someone had to give birth to beautiful children and to bring up the future of humanity. And she was a beautiful mother to do so.

There was another woman, a widow still in youthful spirits; he loved her deep laughter, and her sensual muscles. Samuel cherished her sunny company, and he spoke again of solitude as a guiding light. She was amused, aroused, impassioned, she lay close to him as no other women had, but after few months she started growing impatient, acquired a new habit of quickly dismissing all his musings, and one day she sent him away, with a childishly tired look in her eyes. He could understand why his first love put him aside, but not the second.

From both relationships Samuel emerged the same man as he entered them. There was no truthful question he could find to the answers he got.

There were times when he would ask himself if he could be loved at all and wholly. But these were merely few moments of weakness, which he ascribed to the relapse of a youth in passing. He was secured in his late middle age, predicting and fulfilling his project of solidifying solitariness. He felt comfortable and good in his skin now. The coming of the age was a confirmation of his past dreams.

Yet today he was sitting on a rock observing the village, and a strange thought passed his mind for the first time: "Was I wrong? Was I wrong all this time? Is there something basically misplaced in my thinking that I took a wrong turn on what seemed like so right path? Have I been wrong?" And the chill of old age passed through Samuel's heart for the first time, entered it and spread through his body. For he knew, if he had been wrong, there would be not enough time to mend the mistake and relive life again. There, looking at the edge of the village, he faced the limits of his own span.

The next day he woke up tired and bewildered, not remembering any image from his dreams, but feeling somewhat exasperated. He did not took to mending the fences. The turmoil continued for few days, and then he regained peaceful sleep. He was waking up more certain, but certain in what he could not tell. He felt that something was changing. He felt that something had been missing in his life, yet he could not put his finger on it.

Samuel was lying in bed one morning, moving in that zone between dream and wake, musing and sensing and reflecting like a floater in the sky. His heart broke when a thought came to him, that it may have been his cherished solitude that might have misled him. He thought he could see with a little more effort what was greater than solitude, he imagined that a huge black curtain slowly opened before his eyes and something shiny and brutal was coming to blast his sight, but prior to seeing what this was, his eyes blinked and his strength failed him. He laughed quietly, as tired runners laugh when they approach the end of the race, he reached out his hand in the air, and never finished the movement. He lay quietly in peace and sank in what seemed like an overwhelming dream coming from a place that was neither a past nor a future.

In his dream he sprang forth from the earth, driven by what seemed like a movement opposite of his earlier attempt to open the curtains; as if some inner gravity was taking him behind his eyeballs. He caught a glimpse of an infinitely cold cosmos around him, just prior to the sun filling his vision. Drawn to it by powerful force, he looked at his flying body: his whole existence was a fleck of light and it was rushing toward the sun. The sun was melting that speck of life and yet it still retained something like identity, although flat, although amazing and continuous like a gigantic unblinking eye. He looked around and managed to discern, or imagined to have done so, distant suns made of the same matter - assemblages of flecks of light similar and strange to him. His last thought was: "What a little sun I am." And he plunged into the infinite motion of the flame.

The villagers found him dead in his bed, with a twitch on his face that could have been extreme pain or delight. In the yard the well was running high with water and the mud was glassy the morning they took him away.

Febryary 2005, Copenhagen