The Room Lit by Roses: A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth

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FOR A LONG TIME I HAD wanted a child, but the desire, attenuated, had passed, and other feelings had taken its place. I had become so entranced by the utterly hypnotic path I found myself on, so bleary, so consumed by my work, that I had lost track of whatever else I may have once wanted. I had wandered away into a kind of otherworldly bliss, a joy like no other, and the child further and further off on some remote horizon had become a shadow — like almost everything else in my world. From those weird, windy, solitary heights from which I worked now I watched the child wave, wave, and then finally vanish. Disappeared on a beautiful, curving planet — utterly out of reach. A distant, infinitesimal music.

The Bay of Angels, a book I had just begun composing after ten years of note-taking, was to be the project for the rest of my life; I was quite certain of it — and the prospect of a life of such possibility and pleasure and challenge was more than I had ever dared ask or hope for. Over the years it had slowly grown in me — each book I had written was preparation for it. Time was passing and the urgency, as Stein said, “to write something down someday in my own handwriting” was pressing. The chance to get closer to the eternity in myself. I was ready at last. It was clear to me that in order to even attempt such an endeavor more sacrifices would have to be made. But they were well worth it — had always been worth it. The accompanying melancholy was just part of the bargain, the demands such work makes, the tolls it takes, simply part of the deal. I thought of Beckett’s “sadness after song.” Sadness because it was so imperfect and inadequate and fleeting, because it demanded absolutely everything. I watched the child recede.

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