The Hermit
Roy Lazarus
26 April 2009, 17:20
So I am sitting with the lovely Stine (Rasmussen), just outside our rooms at Anoop’s Hotel, discussing American Transcendentalist poetry in particular and poetry in general. I had just started reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (”I celebrate myself / And what I assume you shall assume / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.“), and was telling her about it, and she was listening patiently, the playful smile never once leaving her face. And then she does the most incredible thing: she whips out a pack of cards from her bag – a pack of over-used, dog-eared Tarot cards – and asks me if I want to know where my path as a writer would lead me to.
I nod my head in approval, though not without some degree of anxiety – predictions about the future always make me nervous. She starts shuffling them up, choosing the ‘King of the Pentecostals’ as my voice card, and then after a great deal of shuffling while concentrating on the question in hand on both our parts, she finally lays down the cards on the table – the cards that are supposed to tell me stuff about my future.
So now she tells me that there are two sets of cards: Lower Hierarchial (Minor Arcana) and Higher Hierarchial (Major Arcana), with the latter ones being more powerful than and predominant over the former. And how do you know which is which? The Lower Hierarchial cards have numbers in Roman Letters written on them, while the Higher Hierarchial cards have a big bold caption in english written on them.
The card that represents my future is a Higher Hierarchial card: It has the picture of a man wearing a long, grey hooded robe, carrying a yellow staff and an oil lamp in the blue darkness of the picture – the darkness that envelops every thing else, but his bent face – the face of a man prematurely aged – flowing white beard in a wrinkeless face. Below the stooping figure it reads :“The Hermit”. With an apologetic smile, as if it were her fault that such an ominous card had come up, she goes on to interpret what it means – social withdrawal, loneliness, disgrace, madness, profligacy and death.
I’m awestruck by it. I don’t know what to say. My romantic side says: Isn’t this what you always wanted? Didn’t you always worship Christopher Smart as your hero? . But on the other hand, my pragmatic side is stiff with fear: I do not want to end up as another H. L. Humes. Stine feels she needs to do something to cheer me up. She opens her diary and reads me out a poem:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
“Road Not Taken”, by Robert Frost. At that moment, I cannot stop myself from falling hopelessly in love with her. I look at her, drinking in the beautiful sight – the short blonde hair, the pale grey eyes with the dark blue irises, the slightly upturned nose, the thin red lips, the front teeth that meet forward angularly in a V, the amber necklace around her neck, the calm green of her top from which I can see the shadowy vale of her cleavage, and her legs – she has propped them up on the table, and I can see clearly the red swollen spots where the mosquitoes have bitten her. The mosquitoes are racist, I think to myself. They prefer to bite her and drink her Danish blood, than bite me and drink my Indian blood. I always knew it – the world is racist, Nature is racist, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is racist. Speciesism, Monika had said the night before. Or maybe they’re just as bored of everything Indian as I am.
Anyhow, the parting is short and sweet. She invites me to her room. We’re eating watermelons, she says, Come join us. Lærke, Monika and Cecilie are there too. I eat up my slice while they’re talking about Monty Python. I grab the peeling knife, and make some joke. I’ve a confession to make…I’m a serial killer…I’m gonna slit your throat…. She laughs, and says that with that knife I’d take ages to slit her throat. Goddamnit, Kill me already!!! She grasps her throat and shakes her head in violent spasms, mimicking a frenzied human with a slit throat. Ugggh, ugggggh, ugg ugg…silence… (Note to self, she should go to drama school). I give her my battered copy of Birds Without Wings, somewhat shyly and with a fairly cheesy inscription on it. (However much I say I love Marquis de Sade, I am after all a hopeless romantic at heart.) She hugs me tightly, and then bends down and takes out her copy of Paul Auster’s memoir Hand to Mouth. It’s the perfect book for me. That’s why I love her.
In the train I flip it open. The first page reads: Paul Auster, Hand To Mouth, A Chronicle of Early Failure. And below it:
To Roy
Remember, no man is an island! Or should be a hermit…
Good luck!
Stine.
I look out of the window. Somewhere in the background a man is shouting Chai, Garam Chai in the sweltering dankness of the General Compartment; a beggar keeps pulling at my jeans hoping for some alms, and the man sitting beside me is dozing serenely off on my shoulders. On other days I would have frowned and turned up my nose in disgust and frustration, or would have put my hands to my ears trying to cut out the racket that has been steadily poisoning my soul for the past twenty years. But tonight I am calm. Tonight Stine is gone. Tonight I am an island. Tonight I have become the Hermit.
