View from the Pier

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

Blaise Pascal, 1623 – 1662

Middleton Place, South Carolina

This image was taken at Middleton Place, 14 miles northwest of Charleston, South Carolina.  This low country plantation is home to America’s oldest landscaped gardens, which span 65 acres.  I visited on a steamy spring day, and after winding my way through a maze of walkways, I was delighted to discover this cool, shaded sanctuary.  The glistening white stone against the lush greenery was peaceful and refreshing.  This graceful statue exuded a calming ethereal timelessness.  At the same time, the marble wood nymph was clearly a firmly planted fixture here, long rooted to this spot, symbolizing an earthy oneness with the landscape.

This statuary surprise, which has surely charmed countless strollers, is a feature common to formal landscaping of the times in which Henry Middleton began cultivating his estate’s grounds.  The President of the First Continental Congress, he started creating the gardens in 1741 and it took 100 slaves close to ten years to complete. The Gardens reflect the grand classic style in vogue in that era in Europe, and follow the architectural garden design principles of the Palace of Versailles, with great attention paid to rational order, geometry and balance.  Decorative canals and reflecting pools were constructed with mathematical precision.  Statues were placed at strategic viewpoints, often in small galleries formed by closely-trimmed hedges, such as the one I found myself in, contemplating the classical lines of this figure. 

I had come to Charleston on somewhat of a whim, without having done the thorough research and meticulous planning that I actually normally  enjoy as an anticipatory extension of my travel.  Oddly enough, it was not for lack of ample time to dedicate to the undertaking.  I had recently left a 25-year career, with vague ideas both trivial and grandiose of how I would spend my days, ranging from alphabetizing the spice rack to writing my own version of “Eat, Pray, Love,” and from losing 25 pounds to saving the world.  And, sandwiched in there somewhere, I would at long last luxuriate in utter, complete and decadent relaxation, a blissful state of being of which I had been deprived by my “24/7” job.

Yet, a few months into my fantasy life, I was what I believe is referred to in clinical circles as “cuckoo.”  Of course, it didn’t help that I was newly home alone in the dead of New England winter.  Or that just a few weeks before leaving corporate America, my body chose to revolt against a nicotine habit of more than three decades. Had I not ended up in the emergency room on oxygen and an IV, it’s safe to say that I would not have picked this particular timeframe to arm wrestle with an ugly addiction.  Then there was the fact that the stock market reacted to me stepping down from my position as Ms. Indispensible by plummeting to a new low.  And, within a fortnight of my new freedom, my mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Needless to say, I was primed to pack a bag and hit the road, destination, “Anywhere But Here.”

The “Here,” of course, was my head.  I had been a Human Doing for so long that the prospect of becoming a Human Being, which requires a fair amount of, well…“being,” was downright uncomfortable.  I had a lot of interests, yet, nonetheless, without an overcrowded schedule of meetings to take, calls to make, planes to catch, puzzles to solve, opinions to sway, and products to promote, I had a lot of time to think, and to feel, about subjects like life and death, meaning, purpose, resentments, regrets, relationships, God.  A lot of these subjects were ones I hadn’t touched with a ten-foot pole since I was knee-high to a tadpole.  And I was finding out why. 

These sensations were capricious, confusing, and foreign.   While my worklife had certainly entailed variety, after 25 years, even the phone call from Hell had a certain predictability to it. The disaster du jour had become leftovers.  I did expect the thrill of terra unfirma when I went on vacation to strange and exotic lands, but I prefer my unexpected surprises only in very tightly-controlled and well-planned dollops, thank you very much.  Heart-stopping fear?  Check, hairpin turn on mountain in southwestern France.  Eerie loneliness?  Check, remote road along the perimeter of Icelandic volcano.  Overwhelming frustration?  Airport in the Philippines.  Pangs of remorse?  Forgot to pack black strappy sandals.  Utter confusion?  Menu in Czech Republic.

Now, stripped of a 25-year identity and a long-held raison d’etre, my own garden, the place I go to sort through my unruly emotions as I weed out nuisance plants, was still blanketed under snow.  Purchasing a plane ticket to someone else’s patch of Eden was preferable to me to sitting in a quiet room alone like the wood nymph.     

Blaise Pascal, quoted above, is credited with the religious doctrine known as intuitionism, which taught the experience of God through the heart rather than through reason. Apparently, he knew a thing or two about the trouble that can come of an inability to sit down to a long winter’s night in front of the fire with your innermost thoughts and feelings. 

A child prodigy, Pascal wrote a significant treatise on geometry at sixteen and, at nineteen, invented one of the first calculators.  He also suffered throughout his life from insomnia, exhaustion, and intense pain believed to have been cause by stomach cancer that ultimately killed him at age 39.  He is described as “a man of slight build with a loud voice and somewhat overbearing manner…He had always been in delicate health, suffering even in his youth from migraine…precocious, stubbornly persevering, a perfectionist, pugnacious to the point of bullying ruthlessness yet seeking to be meek and humble …”

When Pascal fell ill from overwork, his doctors advised him to seek distractions and prescribed a regiment of horseback riding, tennis and amusement; this has been described as Pascal’s “worldly period.” It is said that Blaise soon fell in with a group of witty and sophisticated men who introduced him to the pleasures of gambling. He became enamored with the life of leisure, and after his father’s death, the 28-year-old Blaise felt free to enjoy his inheritance in materialistic pursuits. Then, in 1654, Pascal’s world changed.

According to E.T. Bell’s “Men of Mathematics:” On the day of his conversion [Pascal] was driving a four-in-hand when the horses bolted. The leaders plunged over the parapet of the bridge at Neuilly, but the traces broke, and Pascal remained on the road. To a man of Pascal’s mystical temperament this lucky escape from a violent death was a direct warning from Heaven to pull himself up sharply on the brink of the moral precipice over which he, the victim of his morbid self-analysis, imagined he was about to plunge. He took a small piece of parchment, inscribed on it some obscure sentiments of mystical devotion, and thenceforth wore it next to his heart as an amulet to protect him from temptation and remind him of the goodness of God which had snatched him, a miserable sinner, from the very mouth of hell.”

Out of this traumatic experience, came “Pascal’s Wager,” which maintains that we are incapable of knowing whether God exists or not, yet we must “wager” one way or the other:

“God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up… Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose… But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is… If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.”

Ironically, Blaise’s love of gambling, abetted by a brush with death, led to a work on probability theory that has inspired solace and comfort to legions for more than three centuries.  In a body wracked with a pain for which there was no cure, a mind formulated precise geometrical proofs and bet on God.

The studious thought and meticulous care involved in bringing Middleton Place gardens to life has endured, despite random chaos descending upon its manicured lawns.  The estate was looted and burned by Union soldiers during the Civil War.  Twenty years later, the property was ripped apart by the great Charleston earthquake of 1886.  The plantation grounds then lay in tangled ruins until a Middleton heir began restoring them to their former glory in 1916.

And, while I still like jumping on planes to places like Middleton Place, gradually this Human Doing is getting a little more comfortable with sitting still with my thoughts and feelings.  In fact, I am astounded to find they often bring me great peace and pleasure. 

I’m not the only one who wouldn’t have wagered on those odds not too long ago. 

http://www.middletonplace.org/

http://www.thocp.net/biographies/pascal_blaise.html