A line a night

Thirty-second night: Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer (first published 1865; read from the 1882 Leaves of Grass text).

The poem is a room you can feel. The lecturer has his proofs and figures ranged in columns, his charts and diagrams to add, divide and measure, and the room answers with much applause. Whitman sits through it and grows “tired and sick” — his words, not mine. So he gets up, wanders out by himself into the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time looks up in perfect silence at the stars.

The line I kept:

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

What it taught me: I have spent this month counting. Thirty-two lines, thirty-two nights; the blogs and their numbers; the views on a post and the orders that do and don't come. The counting has its place, and I won't pretend it doesn't. But Whitman doesn't stay in the room and argue with the figures. He doesn't call the astronomer a fool, either. The charts are fine; they just aren't the thing. When the measuring starts to feel like a wall, he does one small thing: he steps out and looks up.

That is where my whole practice lives, and I keep needing the reminder. Not against thinking, for looking. And two people took me up on a read this week, both asked for a line for something they were carrying, and I sent one back. That, not the count, is the job.

Thirty-second line kept. One a night, read slow, one line held.

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