Wednesday’s Child: Curriculum Vitarum
In Sicily they say a cat has seven lives. I am now on my seventh, and the thought of it no more perturbs me than it does the tenacious feline. A man knows he has embarked on the final stage of life’s journey when he begins to loathe all change: “Let nothing change for the worse or for the better,” he meows to himself, “because I have attained everything I was promised at birth. And were I to die tomorrow I would die a happy cat, which is precisely why I hope it happens some day other than tomorrow.”
My first life was childhood, “a scoop of the soul’s largesse” as Pasternak has it, a bucolic infancy unique in that it passed in almost monastic seclusion, a familial carte blanche unsullied by kindergartens or schools or even coevals, a sylvan idyll improbably and incredibly ubicated in Soviet Russia. The ubeity, in fact, would haunt me throughout subsequent lives, as few in the West could countenance my Munchausen tales of extraterrestrial exceptionalism.
The prolegomenon to my second life was Rome, where my parents and I passed a few months while our U.S. entry visas were being processed. Little did I know back then that propylaea might be more sacred than the temple where one is in a tearing hurry to arrive, and only cottoned on to this fact many years later. I would spend the next twelve years in America, my very mixed feelings about the place rather presaging those of the gentle reader today.
The third life, which I lived in an American university town, was an attempt to get to the bottom of the mixed feelings I mention, to disentangle and then to comb them into an ordered worldview. This period I later described in a book called The Gingerbread Race, whose subtitle, “A Life in the Closing World Once Called Free,” echoed the subtitle of my father’s autobiography, The Education of Lev Navrozov: “A Life in the Closed World Once Called Russia.”
My fourth life began with a second emigration, this time to Britain, whose citizen I became and remain. There my son was born, at the Portland Hospital in whose corridors I was allowed to chainsmoke and drink Scotch from the bottle while waiting nervously for him to come into the world. I was earning my living as a jobbing journalist, because the freedom of thought and of the press, though by then already in its dying days, was still animate enough for editors to give me work.
It was only when I found myself in London, in fact, that I understood – with my skin, rather than my brain – the difference between unfreedom and freedom, an insight my American sojourn had not prompted. Of course I knew why I had left Soviet Russia, but on that first day in London, when I rang up a newspaper editor and he answered his own phone, I knew why I had left America.
The fifth life – described in Awful Beauty, a book written at the time, but not published until fifteen years later – began with a breakdown of all things, not least among them my marriage to a woman who had done nothing wrong apart from wishing me well. For two years I drank a bottle of brandy every morning and sold what little I owned to gamble in London’s casinos. It puzzles me to this day how I survived the episode physically, because mentally I often doubt I survived it.
The sixth life was my third migration, from England to the Sicily that Goethe called “Italy’s Italy,” which is when the seed of a prickly pear planted nearly half a century earlier bore its varicolored fruit. Here Olga, like a shadow of Rome appearing before a Roman legionary in a tent pitched in some distant land, came from Moscow to join me, and here she has borne me another son. Here, quiet as a cat’s tread, the sixth life went on and unobtrusively became the seventh.
I could break it all down into nine parts, of course, in keeping with the old English adage – “for three he plays, for three he strays, and for three he stays” – but the Sicilian seven are quite enough for this improvised curriculum. Enough, at any rate, to remind the gentle reader that his faithful weekly correspondent is no blind kitten, but from his whiskers to the tip of his tail a senior cat.
what a hebdomad!
You’re a cool cat, deserving of seven’s reverence, and soon to be released from all tasks for the enjoyment of happiness, as they say…
On the Heptad:
didn’t Plato compose the soul of sevenness?
Everything is fond of sevens!
Correction for seven syllables:
“you’re a Cool cat, Daddyo”
Excellent. So very many details omitted, but would they add anything meaningful to this pithy summation.
Very nice, Mr Navrozov. I like seven. You are in good company with the Sicilans and Solon Ptolemy and Shakespeare with the number seven. But I guess nine would also be fine if one lives long enough. The 19th century is said to have invluded ten if you count living to 100 but even their most simple and extravagant poets could admit that at age 100 :
“If we should reach the hundredth year, tho’ sick of life, the grave we fear.”
My own father, during the down days of old age would remark with humor that “it was better than the alternative” During one of his last annual doctor’s visits I remember he was dutifully and rightly advised to quit smoking and he politely replied that he was already down to two or three a day and did not really plan on living forever. I can’t remember now if before his death at age 86 he still smoked during our last several visits together on in the front porch. But I do remember other things about them.
Jedge Robert, your father’s joke is at least as old as Cicero, so he was in good company. I just ordered a box of 20 Special Jamaicans and another 30 Hoyo de Monterrey. Of course in Italy our friend Josh Smith will outclass me, but I’ll bring along a few of the Avos he is kind enough to give me every Summer School. I rarely remember to thank Josh for the cigars or the Flanders and Vince Cornell for their good spirits. As I used to tell the blue-eyed boy from Tennessee (Mark Atkins), I often as a a spiritual advisor.