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A Life in Perspective

As the host of Kitchen Stadium says, "If memory serves me right . . .",
Friedrich Nietzsche said something like this: 

"I should not build a house, but were I to do so,
I should build it right into the sea. 
I should like to have some secrets in common
with that beautiful monster."

I woke today, my head filled with building such a house,
thinking it to have huge stones to create a foundation
two meters thick, anchored to something like granite--
none of that sand- or limestone--with oak and iron shutters
to protect the seaward windows, and that even so,
were that beautiful monster to heave itself, thirty feet tall,
against such stone, that the house might not stand.

It has not been my fortune, or fate, to build such a house,
but I know why my head was filled with such dreams:
I spent yesterday at our log house, cutting old wainscoting
to make door, window, and baseboard trim for our outhouse.

I am not protesting too much, or at all!
I read Nietzsche too late to build into the sea.
I hesitate even to admit it, but I am content
to have built an outhouse into the hillside. 

More than a quarter-century ago, when I hired someone
to carve a place for a log house on the hillside,
between the cedars, I asked him to dig a hole with the backhoe
as deep as the stone would allow, there where one day
I would build a two-story outhouse; the top floor
at a level with the second/main floor of what was still
an imagined log house, too.  They are both there, now. 

Friedrich Nietzsche might not have been able
to scale his aspirations back to ordinary mortal size,
but I have, and I do not worry about tsunamis. 

There is stone, there--old stone--older than Eden
and the Garden and Adam and Eve, older even than
the first creation of gods and apples, compressed by a sea
neither we nor Nietzsche have ever seen, that reached
from New Orleans to Canada, a great inland sea,
that left behind sand- and limestone, once mined for barn
foundations and stone walls, which line the excavation,
laid without mortar in the shape of an upside down cone,
on top of which a concrete cap supports the outhouse.

A quarter century of use, down there, a free-fall away,
suggest that another half-century of modest use
can be accommodated without complaint.  Someday,
the upper floor will become a writing studio for a writer
with more aspiration than talent, and the lower floor
will continue on as storage for forgotten treasures.

It is a fine outhouse, worthy of an admirer
of Friedrich Nietzsche scaled to mortal ambition. 
It is now insulated, electrified, painted, and possessing
a serene view of the woods aside and down the hill. 
It may be that someday, a guest there may be relieved
to admire the facility, granting that Conrad knew his shit.

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