Winter in Taos

There is nothing that makes a room so interior, so domestic and cozy and full of contentment as a nice cat beside the fire in the winter, or sitting in the open window in the summertime.

Paper! Paper! Paper! And how I hate paper. One of the things that sets all my nerves jangling, is to handle paper.

This is what the Big House is made up of. It is my home, it holds me, works me to death, bores me and will not let me go!

There is nothing on this bare, blue-painted floor but some serapes, and up here under the sky, winter and summer, one can lie in the sunshine and bathe in it until "untied are the knots in the heart," for there is nothing like the sun for smoothing out all difficulties.

For thirty years I've been meaning to read Boswell's "Life of Johnson." Today I would really start it, but just at the moment I had that little drop in my heart that I always have when Tony leaves, even for a few hours. There is a certain fall in the emotional temperature of the place, at least for me, in his absences. The house is less alive, and things look less significant when he is gone. But heh says the same thing happens when I am not there. So it must be all in our imaginations. But where he was, I thought, speeding along the road to Arroyo Seco, everything looked more vivid and real than this place where I was left alone.

The room has dark corners; it has warm, vitality, and the sense of being that places have where someone works and likes it.

When one thinks of the people who float around the world in hotels and boarding houses, the aging women, and men of all ages, who are looking for climates or distraction or something, they don't know what, who are without roots, and without the small household gods that give a person more heart-warming than theaters, art galleries, or any public festivity in the world, it is inconceivable that they don't know enough to find a little house somewhere that will be their very own, where every corner means something intimate and special, something planned for comfort and convenience, where the kettle sings on the hearth and the flower blooms in the window.
It is, probably, because they are afrad to be alone, but if aloneness is once confronted with courage and a final giving up and then relaxing into submission, acknowledging the perpetual and essential loneliness of life, whether in crowds or in deserts, there emerges a peaces and contentment in one's own small domain, and an almost intangible atmosphere of well-being thatpervades it, which emanates, really, from one's own heart, coming at last home to rest.

My house can always mollify me when I feel cross; just to walk through it again and find it so sweet and clean sets one in order when one is thrown out of gear. So a disorderly and neglected house must put one down, I think, and untune one, no matter how happy one might be, and make one feel life is not worth living for its dreariness and effort.

I just don't know one thing about heating systems, plumbing systems, cesspools, septic tanks, or why electricity makes things run! There must be many who would see a fearful symbolism here, for I do myself. However, before I am through living, I will doubtless be forced to catch up with this aspect of life and complete myself as I believe I have in some other ignorances I was born with. If not, perhaps I will have to return to this earth and be a plumber.

Something like a shiver went over me at the thought of the winter thickening still more, covering us, clamping down, until I remembered what I learned long ago, but always forget and have to learn anew each year: that if one gives up and lets it come right down over one, if one sinks into the season and is a part of it, there is peace in this submission. Only in resistence (sic) there is melancholy and a sort of panic.

But when the sun is gone, the earth looks widowed and drear. The winter fields seem shabby and dirty, splashed with manure and trodden into dinginess by the horses. The Mountain shrinks and crouches until it seems only half as high as usual, ad it loses all its majesty. The landscape might be in New England instead of on a high and halcycon tableland in a region of magic.

For every single time I have to attend to anything, whether it's a horse, or a telegram from goodness knows who, or a hole in the wall, or getting the windows washed, it is a distinct effort, like climbing a hill; and I suppose that is why I'v ebuilt up all these rooms and gathered all these animals around me, for one lives by instinctively creating the means to develop the weak places in oneself, and out of the effort to deal with the in continuity comes order and peace and the feeling of relationship, without which one may as well be dead and, in fact, is dead.

Let the pale smoke from our chimneys cling to the ground, and the mist deepen on the hills' and do not think in worldly terms of the birds' hushed song. Nothing in nature is sad-that is only a word. But let us beware of naming the day, lest we confine ourselves to the limitations of a language. If we are part of the color or tempo or rhythm the world is in at any time, we are alive and there is nothing of any greater significance than that, no matter what the books say ....

These tourists are dressed with the indifference of appearance of those who sacrifice vanity to convenience in places where they will only see people they will never see again. The women are usually fitted out in long trousers or beach pajamas, and either boudoir caps or large hayfield straw hats. Frequently they wear glasses and wrinkle their noses in the bright sunshine. Their men are in their shirt sleeves with odd suspenders over their shoulders, and they carry coats on their arms. Their shapes are formed by sedentary occupations and they seem to miss their accustomed routine as they wander aimlessly about behind their women.

We have brought books, but we never read them, there is so much to watch and hear, and presently the long afternoon fades away, and when it is dusk, with the sun a gold rim on the uppe edges of the slopes, and the sky all full of rosy clouds floating across the highest peaks above us, the fishermen return and throw themselves down beside us and give a detailed account of the behavior of every fish they saw, and we must be patient with them. And we are.

After dinner, coffee and liqueurs back in the big happy living room, and in the evening what? Someone turns on the radio, or someone returns to the dining room to play the piano; when the company is that way, childish games are produced, though, thank God, not often. I hate all games so!

Then there are people who aren't talkers or listeners either, who just sit. I must admit I have numbers of these whom I love, who have no words, and no interest in abstract ideas or theories, but who have their own being. These people can sit in a room and give out a vital emanation so that one feels enriched by their presence. They are alive, they feel or sense life passing through them and they deepen one's own being. But there are others who don't exist at all in their own bodies, whoa re merely shadows. These I do not have around, or not for long. Just as there are two kinds of places where I do not go, places I do not like and to those who do not like me, so there are certain types of people I will not have near me, those who are insignificant in their being, and those who are trivial-minded and who neutralize other people's values.