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IN APRIL, the following spring, another of Ariane’s letters arrived, this time from Florence:
Dear Peter,
Once, when I was in the kitchen with my mother, making chowder, I chopped up more carrots than she usually used. When my mother saw what I’d done, she said something like, “You’re not going to put all those carrots in, are you?” I said something like, “Why not? It’ll look great.” (I went through a period of exaggerated fondness for the color orange.) My mother sighed and said, as well as I remember, “Ariane, I spent a long time training myself, acquiring the necessary skills, educating myself, practicing, preparing myself for this work, the work of making a chowder that exhibits what my mother used to call ‘the magnificent balance of disparate ingredients brought together and invited to play.’ I have made this my life’s work, and I don’t take this work lightly. Don’t get the idea that I just improvise as I go along.” I said something like, “Oh, sure,” and in a state of embarrassed humility, I began sweeping the extra carrots aside, when she stayed my hand and said, “No, no, you needn’t do that. It’s just that we have to adjust everything else to balance the abundance of carrots. If we succeed, we’ll name this variation after you.” When I first began to think for myself, I recognized that I was still only a potential person, a beginner’s kit for making a person, a lump of clay, or a block of marble, or—as my mother would have said—a bag of groceries, and I had wasted too much time waiting for a potter or a sculptor—or a cook—to make someone out of me. I see now that the making of my self is as real a piece of work as the making of a painting or a building or a chowder. The idea that we make ourselves is cemented into our language, hidden in metaphors that we use so often that we hardly notice them anymore: “I don’t want to make a fool of myself . . . I want to make something of myself . . . He was a self-made man.” If you want to make a work of art, maybe you first have to make yourself into an artist, and it’s possible, it seems to me, that the artist will turn out, in the long run, to be the more important work, but we’ll have to see about that. For now, I’m practicing the art of making my self, and, by the way, I’ve lost another pursuer. I have no idea what happened to him, but he hasn’t been around for some time now, so I’m counting him out. The rumors among the survivors run toward his returning to the States to become a restaurateur, inspired by my accounts of my mother’s cooking and the pleasure it gave her. Could be. But back to training myself to make myself. In a way, I’ve spent years at it. Lots of mistakes, but the apprentices always make mistakes, don’t they, and I’m the master and the apprentice, which sounds like the blind leading the blind. Anyway, I think I know what I’m after. I think I know where I’m going, even if I don’t quite know how I’m going to get there. I’m going to make myself proud of myself, stop punishing myself, control myself, take care of myself, keep an eye on myself, behave myself, stop feeling sorry for myself, and enjoy myself. It’s hard work, and I don’t always feel up to it. Sometimes it seems too much for me, but never for the person I’m going to be. I wish that she would come along soon and give me a hand. To tell you the truth, I wish she would take over. She could make me into her. She could be the architect of me, the sculptor of me, the chef of me. Sometimes (no laughing, please) I can almost see her. I recognize her, you know. She’s out there and she’s waiting for me.
Love, Ariane
[to be continued]
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