Can we discover truths we can live with? Thoughts on using the personal essay to mull imponderables—

The Art of Mulling

by Steven Harvey

When I wrote, “A Vow of Poverty,” the second essay in this collection, I ran into an impasse that became a spiritual crisis, until a memory of my grandmother came to the rescue. I was looking at the consolations we offer each other in the face of death. I could not accept traditional religious conceptions of the afterlife, especially a perfect heavenly existence in an endless, cloudless, and—to me—joyless eternity. I was not about to exchange my banjo for a harp. So, with heaven more than a sin away, I needed a back-up plan.

I tried on the idea that we keep our spirits alive in the minds of others, glowing forever in their memories. As soon as I jotted the idea down, though, I began to have second thoughts. Such an afterlife would be strange indeed. Plastered into the brains of my loved ones, I could not have a new idea or utter an unexpected word. My loved ones would shave off my rough edges, leaving much of who I am behind, and my enemies—who knows what they would do to the voodoo doll of me that glared from the dark recesses of their minds?

So I turned to the great secular consolation of Wallace Stevens, the poet who in the absence of heaven created an earthly paradise of words. “Death is the mother of beauty,” he declared famously in the poem “Sunday Morning.” The fruits of life—gathered on the platters of our days—are brought to us by death. Death reddens the rose and sweetens the peach, clearing out the old and ushering in the fresh, the panting, and the delicious. It may be true, but, I wondered as I wrote, is it really a consolation? It means that every moment, as Stevens says in his poem “Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu,” we are waving goodbye, offering a bittersweet salute to its passing as we enjoy it. So what happens when the last goodbye arrives? According to the Archbishop of Hartford, Stevens chucked his secular views and asked for last rites at his deathbed.

All of my life I had accepted these two consolations in the face of death. I had not thought hard about them, but simply accepted them because they had a grain of truth and provided comfort. But now, as I began an essay on the subject, I found I could not believe either of them. I create outlines for my essays by clustering, putting ideas down and circling them, with lines showing how any new thought fits in with the others. The finished product looks like a handful of balloons released on a happy day, each bearing some thought aloft, but on this morning, when I discovered I had no idea about how to face death, the last balloon, tethered firmly in my mental fist, sat empty. I had reached an impasse.

That is when my grandmother chimed in with her irritating habit of responding to every choice with the phrase, “That’ll be fine.”

“Grandma, do you want to go to the bank first or the grocery store?”

“That’ll be fine.”

“Do you want to visit Keith and Elizabeth or go to town.”

“That’ll be fine.”

“Do you want arsenic for lunch or strychnine.”

“That’ll be fine.”

I recall that I had given up on the outline completely and was shaving at the mirror when the phrase struck—and I knew it was my answer. With shaving soap on my face, I marched to my study and wrote down the phrase “that’ll be fine,” filling in the last balloon.

The personal essay is, for me, a way to think out loud about life’s imponderables. Writers of fiction, poetry, and memoir do this too, but not so directly. They are busy creating experiences—making the page come alive in stunning language or engaging narratives. “No ideas but in things,” is, generally, their motto. “Present, do not explain.” But in the personal essay we have room—an indulgence, some would say—to explain a thought. My grandmother’s phrase “that’ll be fine” was, I realized in the course of writing the essay, her way of not waving goodbye. I can take or leave this beauty—this particular fruit of death—she was saying, in the same way that you and I might cover our wine glasses and tell the steward, “no, I’m fine.” In my essay I felt free to play with the idea—flip it over in my mind—in a way that fiction writers and poets generally don’t. The word “fine” means “the end”—it shares the same root as ‘finite’ and ‘final’—but it also means “okay.” I’ve had my share. I’m fine. The fact that some of us can reach that level of maturity, can accept our finite natures and be fine about it offers hope and is a true consolation.

The personal essay not only allows us to mull over our ideas in public, it also provides ample room for the writer to supply the conditions of the discovery. Unlike the philosopher, the personal essayist generously renders the thoughts, feelings, and events that gave rise to the questions in the first place. That context—the shaving soap on my face—lends authority to the writer’s words by revealing the way the idea came about. In this situation, the essayist says, this truth appears to me to hold. It may not hold for all time, but under these conditions it honestly did for me. Essayists do not ask readers to assent to their ideas. They don’t have to. They only need to create with honesty and a little grace the conditions under which the truth momentarily fluttered into view, and the case is made. In the end, that is all we get of the truth. I hope it is enough. My grandmother would say, “that’ll be fine,” and she would, of course, be right.