June
27 FEAST OF THE SACRED HEART
Yesterday afternoon
I went out to the woods. There was a wall of black sky beyond the
knobs, to the west, and you could hear thunder growling all the
time in the distance. It was very hot and damp but there was good
wind coming from the direction of the storm.
(Before None, during
the meridienne in the dormitory, I dreamed of going out: and in the
dream I crossed the field where the platform still remains, from
the centenary, and walked up toward Aidan Nally's. Before I got to
Nally's, in the dream, the wagon road developed sidewalks and I
came not to solitude but to Jamaica High School, which we used to
pass going up a hill on the way to the movies at Loew's Valencia in
the old days.) But when I woke up and really went out it was
nothing at all like the dream.
First I stopped
under an oak tree on top of the hill behind Nally's and sat there
looking out at the wide sweep of the valley and the miles of flat
woods over toward the straight line of the horizon where Rohan's
knob is.
The wind ran over
the bent, brown grasses and moved the shoulders of all the green
trees, and I looked at the dark mass of woods beyond the
distillery, on those hills down to the south of us and realized
that it is when I am with people that I am lonely, and when I am
alone I am no longer lonely.
Gethsemani looked
beautiful from the hill. It made much more sense in its
surroundings. We do not realize our own setting as we ought to: it
is important to know where you are put, on the face of the earth.
Physically, the monastery is in a great solitude. There is nothing
to complain about from the point of view of geography. One or two
houses a mile and a half away and then woods and pastures and
bottoms and cornfields and hills for miles and miles.
I had a vague idea
there was a nice place beyond the field we call Hick's House
although there has been no house there for years. I went to the
calf pasture beyond St. Malachy's field at the foot of the knob
where the real woods begin. It is a sort of covawhere Our
Lady might appear. From there we started walking to get to the
forest fire we went out to fight on All Saints Day two and a half
years ago.
It was quiet as the
Garden of Eden. I sat on a high bank, under young pines, and looked
out over this glen. Right under me was a dry creek, with clean
pools lying like glass between the shale pavement of the stream,
and the shale was as white and crumpled as sea-biscuit. Down in the
glen were the songs of marvelous birds. I saw the gold- orange
flame of an oriole in a tree. Orioles are too shy to come near the
monastery. There was a cardinal whistling somewhere, but the best
song was that of two birds that sounded as wonderful as
nightingales and their song echoed through the wood. I could not
tell what they were. I had never heard such birds before. The echo
made the place sound more remote, and self-contained, more
perfectly enclosed, and more like Eden.
The black clouds
meanwhile piled up over the glen, and I went to where there was a
shed, down at the entrance to the wilderness, a shed for the calves
to shelter in, in cold weather in the fall. And yet it did not
rain.
I looked up at the
pines and at the black smoke boiling in the sky: but nothing could
make that glen less peaceful, less of a house of joy.
On my way home I
turned to the storm and saw it was marching northeastward following
the line of the knobs, over on the other side of them, following
the line of the Green River turnpike that is far over there beyond
the property in the woods, going from New Haven to Bardstown. I got
in just after the first bell for Vespers. Only when we were in
choir for first Vespers of the Feast of the Sacred Heart did it
begin to rain. Even then it did not rain much.
Back in the
refectory one of the novices read to us at supper an article, taken
from the American Ecclesiastical Review, on the privileges
of a minor basilica and all the monks were laughing themselves
silly at the description of the half-open parasol and the bell on
the end of a pole and the other incidentals which go to make life
unusually complicated in a minor basilica. Today we are back in the
middle of a book about Russia called God's Underground,
parts of which I almost but not quite believe.
