Our Arcadia - Softcover

I Arcady

WRY

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Heaven-Haven" How to Live? WRY

Lark hovers in the little rowboat: it is just past dawn and the lake is still cast in fog. Obscured and surrounded by what might as well be masses of gas, he could be anywhere-on the moon, even. The thought makes him shiver; he tucks his hands into the sleeves of his red jacket and then tosses out the question he has been pondering, imagines it as a solid object that hits the water's surface, causing first ripples, then concentric circles to form and float. That is where I live, he thinks, within those circles; with my friends. But the thing that formed the circle, the question itself? It is the question, the question of the day and, as Nora would remind him, of the great Russian novel: How to live? He still does not know. But does anyone? It has long seemed to him that Nora knows, but he guesses, too, that the answer is not really something one person can impart to or share with another; it is ineffable, personal, individual: one has to answer it for oneself. He has been searching, casting about, even flailing for the answer for years-to no avail.