Speaking of Risers

    One day while the house was under construction, Ela called with an idea. Why didn’t I woodburn quotations onto the risers for the stairs? It was a brilliant idea (so “me”). I started thinking at once what to use.
    My favorite Shakespeare quote is Hamlet’s dying words to Horatio: “Absent thee from felicity a while,/And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/To tell my story.” It’s so beautiful, with its first line of lofty Latinate words falling into the monosyllabic, concrete-reality Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. But I didn’t want to be reminded, every time I walked up the stairs, that the world is too harsh for felicity, so I let Puck speak instead: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
    Another favorite author, Vladimir Nabokov, fared no better. I love Pnin’s words: “Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam,” but they sounded as gloomy as Hamlet’s. I love the beautiful paragraph on the last page of Lolita, when Humbert hears the children on the playground far below, but its searing beauty comes from the agony of the novel. It wouldn’t do.
    I looked for something from T. S. Eliot, a poet once meaningful to me, but Prufrock (“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”) was too dismal and The Four Quartets (“Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past”) too abstract. Other quotes were by now clichés (Muir: “Going to the mountains is going home”) or fine thoughts but lacking in music (William Morris: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”). I agree with Aristotle that “There is something of the marvelous in all things of nature,” but who is Aristotle to me? I don’t love him the way I love Thoreau (“There are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout”), Gerard Manley Hopkins (“There lives the dearest freshness deep down things”), and Edmund Spenser (“For sure a foole I do him firmely hold/That loves his fetters though they were of gold”).
    Because I was writing a dissertation on Old English poetry, I wanted a quote from Beowulf. “Gaeth aye wyrd swa hio shal,” was recognizable enough, I thought, if you knew that “wyrd” meant “fate,” but I would translate it on the step anyway (“Goeth always Fate as it must”). I chose something my father used to say – “I feel a lot more like I do now than I did when I got here” – as a Coogleism from my childhood, and a quote from Carl Larsson, a nineteenth-century Swedish painter whose house I had visited in Sweden, as descriptive of my own house: “That unspeakably sweet feeling of seclusion from the clamor and noise of the world.”
    When I had finally winnowed my list to fourteen quotes, I unfolded a card table in the unfinished upstairs bedroom and practiced my wood-burning calligraphy, making mistakes, starting over, until gradually I accumulated a stack of bamboo flooring with quotes. Later, when the floor was being laid, I nailed those boards into place as risers. 

    Now, day after day, night after night, I read my way up my steps, stooping to read the bottom quote, from Rumi: “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” reminding me of the low doorway in a Japanese house that surprises a guest, when he stoops to enter, with a view of the mountain. After Rumi, I step up with Beowulf, the Coogleism, Thoreau, and Shakespeare, then, after rounding to the left on a landing, go up three steps, with Hopkins and Larsson and, between them, fourteenth-century William Langland with two lines from a longer passage from Piers Plowman I had memorized for a graduate seminar: “‘Conseille me, Kynde,’ quod I. ‘What craft is best to lerne?’/Lerne to love,’ quod Kynde, ‘and leve alle othre.’” It’s a good reminder, every time I read it.

    After another landing, curving to the left, I read on the next step a Zen saying I have repeated for years: “Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water./After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water,” which never had more fitting application than when I came home three and a half years ago with a Ph.D. Past the Zen saying is Spenser, then Robert Frost, reminding me that my life in the woods is also good, for “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” Next I relish Chaucer’s exuberance (“Lord, this is a huge rayn!/This were a weder for to slepen inne”); then I soar skyward with the quotes on the top two steps: W. B. Yeats’s lyrical poetry – “When have I last looked on/The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies/Of the dark leopards of the moon?” leading to Robinson Jeffers’s beautiful sentiment: “Things are the hawk’s food, and noble is the mountain.”

    From there I turn either into the bedroom or into the library, repeating to myself, “Things are the hawk’s food, and noble is the mountain.”