Let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.
Let me be gay
Let me be sad
Let me be cold
Let me be warm
Let me be hungry, have too much to eat
Let me be ragged or well dressed
Let me be sincere, be deceitful
Let me be truthful
Let me be a liar
Let me be honorable and let me sin
Only let me be something every blessed minute.
And when I sleep, let me dream all the time,
so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.
-Francie Nolan, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Listening to the last of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn on my way out to the country today, the above passage struck me. It reminded me, I think, of why this crazy life of extremes – often disorienting (and very inefficient) – of city and country.
By the time of the above passage, it’s 1917, and Francie is 15 years old. She has been forced to quit school – her only joy – to work a full-time office job (pretending to be 17) and be the primary bread-winner for her family. She’s known poverty and hunger her whole life, her beloved father died a drunkard, and her proud mother loves her brother better than her. So much day-to-day struggle, and yet still, she says: Let me be hungry, have too much to eat / Let me be ragged or well dressed. Not: Let me be stable, let me be secure, let me be middle-of-the-road. Let me be something.
War has just been declared, and upon learning this, Francie is having a kind of visionary moment – of seeing herself in history, of recognizing the profundity of her existence in that moment. She is a young woman, hungry for life and love and beauty, reading for the first time that the world is officially on fire. She consciously seizes the moment, tries to capture it – by taking the time to notice every detail about herself and her environment, and then sealing some things in an envelope (a lock of hair, a penny, a Whitman poem, the news clipping about the war). She writes her name, her age, and the date on the envelope and imagines herself opening it in 50 years. I don’t want to remember, she says. I want to live. I don’t want to reminisce, I want to re-live.
I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man
Stuffed with the stuff that is course, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine...
(from "Leaves of Grass")
Francie’s spirit is clearly that of a romantic – Emersonian, Whitmanesque, Proustian. At such a young age, she understands something that only a young person who has had a very short youth could understand: that the passage of time is an utter tragedy. And that every moment we are alive on this earth is a miracle worth bottling for eternity (in Francie’s case, sealing in an envelope) - a living phenomenon bursting with beauty and possibility. On some level, Francie, who at 15 is both still a child and more adult than most adults, understands her mortality.
Let me be something.
Let me share the silence of first snow with no one but the doe
Let me wake to the sound of city garbage trucks and car alarms
Let me burn the wood I’ve chopped and stacked, and warm my hands by the fire
Let me rebel against urban radiators, strip naked and open all the windows in January
Let me see and hear no one but God for days
Let me see and hear all the peoples of the world in a subway car
Let me smell the sweetness of grass and damp tree bark
Let me smell the smells of the street - fancy downtown bakeries, Puerto Rican oxtails, urine, and all
Let the stars show me how black is the night sky
Let the city lights own the skyline and the heavens
Let me till the earth and bring forth fruits
Let an orchid grow in the Bronx.
Let me be something.
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