To Capture Transience

"The Crane Wife," by The Decemberists.

There’s something sad about vacations. They bring such joy that it stings when you step back into the real world. That familiar grind which you tolerated apathetically before your departure becomes an injustice, an assault on your freedom. You’ve experienced what it is like to be unbridled by obligation, and the passing of time hasn’t yet clouded this memory.

I have the tendency to cling to things. As a kid I was fond of souvenirs; any joyous moment deserved a token of commemoration. I must have been trying to prevent the inevitable: that moment of mourning I’d feel years later, surrounded by piles of rocks and seashells from beaches, trinkets from museum gift shops, a little box full of fortunes from fortune cookies—vague clues of forgotten memories, encoded in piles of junk.

I’ve since realized the futility of material safeguards against the passing of time. Still, my desire for retreat often outstays its welcome, my mind somewhere off the cliffs of Maine, subduing itself with dreams of unrestricted movement and salty ocean air. It is a popular concept that happiness only exists by contrast.¹ We are incapable of imagining a proper utopia. We tend to populate our “perfect” worlds with illustrations of luxuries which are scarce in our day-to-day lives. We dream of crude representations of heaven. Unlimited food, unlimited rest, unlimited sex—these things lose their luster in excess. Incidentally, the word “utopia” does not mean “a perfect place,” at all, but instead, “a place which does not exist.” Still, I find myself enchanted by the concept of permanent joy. Surely there are some things with inherent, permanent allure. Maybe unlimited food and drink would get old, but what about unlimited freedom? Unlimited peace? Unlimited beauty?

If you’ve heard the silence of a desert canyon, of the meditative cracking of waves upon New England rock, if you’ve taken a seat on a rock in the woods and emptied your mind, feasting your soul upon natural wonder, you likely believe in inherent beauty. But perhaps we would not appreciate these things if they were all that we’d ever known. Rest is only relief if you’ve previously been moving, emptiness only relaxing to a previously reeling mind. To someone who has been caged, movement would be the sensation which provided the greatest joy. To a mind clouded by illness: clean, sober thought. What stimulates us is dynamism—any staleness, even staleness amongst beauty, will lead to despair.

This concept of joy through contrast can be viewed bleakly. It seems dark, to suggest that pleasure exists merely in the alleviation of pain. We do not have to look at it this way, though; this is merely the most cynical conceptualization of something that could be quite beautiful. It is natural for us to be in movement, natural for us to rest when we are tired. Natural for us to think, and, if we are lucky, natural for us to stop thinking and soak in experiences of perceptual wonder. It is true that becoming accustomed to any sight will strip it of its magic. This is why we seek beauty when we travel, but miss the profound sensory joys available to us right at home. But there is something inherently wonderful about a land or seascape, something which exists independently of its observer. We don’t gravitate towards these places merely because we are told to, or because we feel that we’re supposed to enjoy them. We gravitate towards nature because we find within it that aspect of ourselves that is tethered to and made up of the entire universe. It acquaints us with the most fundamental and effortless joy—clean air and aesthetic wonder.

We gravitate towards nature because we find within it that aspect of ourselves that is tethered to and made up of the entire universe.

What is beauty, anyway? Our linguistic conception of it rests upon its contrast with ugliness. And perhaps we do need to have experienced ugliness in order to appreciate beauty. This is a moot point. Who hasn’t experienced ugliness? Even the wealthiest, most sheltered person in the world has witnessed a sight which has appalled them, even if this sight may seem benign to some. Saying that one has to know ugliness to know beauty is as true and as pointless as saying that one has to know night in order to know day. Of course we do. If both did not exist, we would not have a name for either. Everything would just be. It is the same with beauty.

Let’s consider this line from Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha:

“[A] truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided. Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity… But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided… This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real… And if time is not real, then the dividing line that seems to lie between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.”²

We create words for things because we experience them separately. Our moments of pleasure are distinct from those of pain. Both exist simultaneously in the totality of the universe, but to us they are distinct and all-consuming. Resenting one because it necessitates the other is rejecting reality in favor of a misguided utopian dream, a lunacy that will only lead to despair. Joy does exist in contrast, when we choose to label it. Labels are imperfect in this way. Viewed in totality, joy simply is.

This is what makes longing for vacation past its conclusion such a desperate act. You are chasing a fantasy—not just because you desire an end to your job or to obligations which you may look upon with resentment, but because you wish for the world to be something that it isn’t: a place where light exists without darkness, and pleasure without pain. We are animals; we chase pleasure as a survival instinct. Our rational thought which conceptualizes experiences such as suffering and bliss is an added layer of sophistication upon our animal instincts. It does not always serve us. Burdened with a complex awareness of pleasure’s departure, we may long for its return at the expense of reality. Blessed with our heightened understanding of the necessity of our own suffering, we can appreciate reality with a clarity that only deep thought can bring. The universe tends towards balance. If we choose to work with this balance instead of against it, we can find peace even in the darkest moments.

Still, we cling, weight our scales towards joy, despite the rational futility of it. We burn ourselves out, necessitating weeks of depressed recovery. We fear rejection, abandonment—so we strike first, ensuring the fate that we most wished to avoid. We fight change, crave certainty, willfully blind to the knowledge that change is the only certainty that exists.

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I took a trip to Portland, Maine, and then Newport, Rhode Island. It was beautiful. Often, you don’t understand how badly you’ve needed rest and the extended company of another person until these things arrive. On this trip we discovered an album: The Crane Wife, by The Decemberists. It was the first either of us had heard of the band, and we experienced its music for the first time together. It became the soundtrack to our vacation. Driving through New England, soaking in the sights that it had to offer, we exhausted the band’s entire discography. At this point I was mostly focused on the beauty of the music, the transcendent joy that it brought me. I wanted to hold onto those moments forever, to take residence within a snapshot of one of them, cradled by pure happiness.

This is a foolish thought. Music is the most ephemeral of art forms. It requires the passing of time to be heard, and its true beauty exists not in the notes themselves, but in the way that they interact with one another. A song is more than the sum of its parts. It is the dance of our minds as we remember the sound which came before, attend to the one playing currently, and anticipate what will come next. It cannot be held in your hand, cannot be conceptualized within one single moment. Its domain is the invisible, its home the dynamic waves of sound moving through the air into us. Consider the complexity of perception, the miracle that a series of sound waves can hit our ears and be translated into a sensory experience evoking real emotion. So many interconnected little wonders have to occur in order for such an experience to take place. It is one of my most reliable sources of joy, and it is made up of the same transience that I am often terrified of.

Music is the most ephemeral of art forms. It requires the passing of time to be heard, and its true beauty exists not in the notes themselves, but in the way that they interact with one another.

It wasn’t until John and I got home that we realized the full range of emotions that the title tracks could bring us. “The Crane Wife” comes from a Japanese folk tale. There are apparently many different variations of this story, but the one that I read goes like this:

A man who lives alone finds a crane sitting on his doorstep, hurt and bleeding. He takes her inside, nurses her back to health, sets her free. Suddenly, a beautiful woman arrives at his door. They fall in love, get married. They are happy. Eventually, though, their fortune turns sour. They are in desperate need of money, and the woman tells her husband that she can weave beautiful fabric for them to sell, on the condition that he never sees how the fabric is made. The fabric brings them some wealth, and the man gets greedy. He demands more and more from her, and she produces it without complaint. Then, one day, when she is gone for a while, he walks into the room where she is working and sees a crane atop a loom, the same crane that he once nursed back to health, plucking feathers from her own body and weaving them into the cloth that he demanded from her. Upon seeing him there, in violation of the one thing that she asked from him, she flies away. He is alone.

It is an odd story, a bit puzzling. In my tendency to overanalyze, I did not absorb the story right away, asking instead what each of its constituent parts could mean. John’s response was wiser. He simply said that it made him sad. After repeatedly listening to the Decemberists’ retelling of it, I understand what he meant. The music strips the story down to its essence. Two souls are brought together. They heal one another, the man nursing the woman’s wounds and the woman assuaging his loneliness. Then one becomes greedy, takes the other for granted, and they part.

“And all I ever meant to do

Was to keep you.”³

These words pierce something deep within me. To me, the song is a horror story which acquaints me with my worst fear. I’ve always been terrified by loss. There are perils everywhere which threaten love. Death, betrayal. It is an act of trust, giving someone the power to hurt you, resting your heart in their hands and taking theirs in yours, with the full knowledge that one day, no matter how reliably each of you hold on, nature will render these sets of hands limp, sending their contents crashing to the ground.

I used to think that death was the most terrible ending that could be imagined. Now, though, I can imagine an eventuality far worse. One in which a heart is crushed and destroyed by the very hands which it had entrusted its safe-keeping, one in which I am the one doing the crushing, in an attempt to hold on as tight as I can, the mangled heart oozing through my fingers and desperately fleeing my grasp.

“And all I ever meant to do

Was to keep you.”

The song is a cautionary tale. I guess all horror stories are, in a way. Its lesson is simple. Relax, value what you love, see it for what it really is, not what you want it to be. Hold on—but not too tight.

Relax, value what you love, see it for what it really is, not what you want it to be. Hold on—but not too tight.

This truth occurred to me soon after my return from vacation, yet I still found myself clinging. I wanted to escape the truths contained in these lyrics, grasp love tightly in my arms as a form of rebellion. I wanted to extend my escape from reality, return to the comforts of unadulterated pleasure. I listened to these songs on repeat, excitedly, and each time I did I was reminded of Maine. What I could have regarded as a pleasant memory I instead met with anger—it was not fair that we had to leave this place that we loved. My equilibrium had swung so far, so fast into unfettered joy that it had snapped backwards into despair. Drowning in escapist fantasy, I became stagnant, forgot how to create my own sustainable joy. The few words that I wrote in these weeks were ripped out of me defiantly like feathers plucked from skin, and without any passion behind them they fell flat, as lifeless and unremarkable as a thing with no opposite or a heaven made up of stale pleasures whose allure comes only from their scarcity.

Perhaps these moments of despaired stagnancy are necessary, sometimes. The phrase “growing pains” is not a trite colloquialism. It encapsulates a difficult and very real process that must be endured in order to avoid spiritual death. It can become an addiction of sorts, forcibly blinding yourself to your own fear. It is the vice which fuels all others. But experience makes you wiser, braver. Acquainted with the true source of happiness, it is possible to make peace with the transient nature of life, to realize that it bears gifts as well as threats.

In Maine I was granted the courage to accept these gifts, even if I had to be home for a little while to realize it. I am grateful for this. I am also grateful for the music of The Decemberists.

Let’s start a dialogue. Feel free to comment your thoughts about this music or any other ideas contained in this essay.

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1. George Orwell speaks about this extensively in his essay “Can Socialists Be Happy?” I’ve borrowed my ideas regarding ineffective utopian imagery from him.

2. This quote appears on page 115 of the New Directions Paperback edition.

3. These lyrics appear in “The Crane Wife 1&2.”