2020: Perhaps, Perhaps....But All Things Are Perhaps

Edith Wharton, 1881

 

 

 

 

New Year's Day and back in the roaring '20s once more. I've been in love with the original roaring 20s since I first read F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise. So I'm regarding the new '20s as a beginning of possibilities.
 
I used to claim that 1988 was my favorite year. That year the Lakers won the NBA championship and the Dodgers won the World Series. Though I never picked a least favorite year, there's been some contenders, including 2019. This past year began with my car being t-boned in front of the Kaiser Permanente clinic where I was about to go in for a blood pressure check. One positive outcome...I've at last come home to Toyota after a couple of decades of Nissan.

Other calamities befell me, lawsuits, the sale of my family-owned senior living apartment complex to a huge corporation, intermittent writer's block, and several injuries, both emotional and physical. Nonetheless, 2019 brought me some treasured moments, too: a jazz seminar in New Hampshire, a visit to Emily Dickinson's home,  making some new friends, the chance to serve on the Orange County Grand Jury, seeing more of my son and daughter-in-law and brother and his companion, a third trip to Paris...and this time to Normandy and Versailles.

It's at Versailles where Edith Wharton is buried. Suffering a heart attack in Paris in June, 1937,  a couple of weeks before I was born, she had been bundled off in an ambulance. Nearly her last words were, were, "This will teach you to ask decrepit old ladies to stay."'

On my November Paris stay at the wonderful Saint Germain Hotel on the Rue du Bac, I wandered around the corner one day and found myself in front of what had been Wharton's home there at 58 Rue de Varenne. The door is now painted green

It's been a while since I last read Edith Wharton, but I plan to revisit her this year. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1921 for The Age of Innocence, the first woman to do so. Though she never won it, she also was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. A true giant...and a friend of Henry James, another of my favorites

Edith wrote a poem of unrequited love, "Some Woman to Some Man," when she was only 16. These lines continue to haunt me:

Whichever way the difference lies between us,
Would common cares have helped to lessen it,
A common interest, and a common lot?
Who knows indeed? We choose our path, and then
Stand looking back and sighing at our choice,
And say: " Perhaps the other road had lead
To fruitful valleys dozing in the sun. "
Perhaps — perhaps — but all things are perhaps,
And either way there lies a doubt, you know.

So as this new decade begins, I wonder about possibilities. Perhaps, perhaps.