I really need to read some John Keats, specifically the piles of letters he wrote alongside his poems.
For now, I’m reading Stephen Batchelor writing about Keats, describing his concept of “negative capability.” That sounds like something I’d rather avoid, especially in a season when I am simultaneously still sad over the end of a too-brief affair and feeling fresh sorrow over an angry snub from a dear relative. As Batchelor describes the trait in his new book The Art of Solitude, Keats said negative capability exists when a person “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In other words, someone who is comfortable with ambiguity, someone who dwells in equanimity. These are traits I prize and try to live by, but with my emotions running more ragged than usual this autumn, I’ve fallen short.
Why did my summer lover pursue another despite our transcendental times together? It’s a mystery I can’t solve. Why did my relative lash out at me? I may never fully know. Batchelor writes, “In letting go of — ‘negating’ — reactivity, one discovers a greater capacity — ‘capability’ — to respond to life.” In Buddhist terms, Batchelor adds, “to experience nirvana is to experience freedom from those attachments and opinions that prevent your own imaginative response to the situations you face in life.”
Freedom from attachments. In retrospect, I wish I could have more readily acknowledged my friend’s fickle nature so I wouldn’t have spent two months bereft and berating myself over the loss of a liaison that barely lasted that long.
Freedom from opinions. I wanted so badly to explain my passion for open-hearted travel to my relative, but he wanted none of it. Had I accepted that instead of trying to press my case, it may have saved us some serious heartbreak.
Each of us has our own narrative. As a journalist, I’m naturally interested in helping people share and even craft their stories, and I usually do so skillfully and with great care. Yet as an essayist, I ought to know that my tale is the only one I can tell with any hope of authenticity — and that much as I may want to edit someone else’s experience, I simply can’t do that. I am grateful for the recent life lessons that illuminated this truth for me, painful as the instruction has been.
Speaking of solitude and of travel, I am midway through a 10-day stay in Tijuana, happily ensconced in a cheap Airbnb near the ocean, easily forgetting what day it is. It is good to be here, good to have even more unstructured time than usual to read, write, think, sleep, and walk (but not sleepwalk). I’d hoped to have company for a few days and nights when I booked this spot in September, but it is fine, if sometimes lonely, to be alone. We live, we love, we learn, each of us ever-evolving, if we are lucky.
