The Art of Disappearing

It is not people themselves that the speaker is trying to avoid, but rather a superficiality of connection. When the speaker says, “[s]omeone telling you in a loud voice / they once wrote a poem” (Lines 6-7), she demonstrates that superficiality. Firstly, she names the person in this scenario “Someone” (Line 6), implying either she never found out their name or she forgot it. Secondly, she notes their voice is “loud” (Line 6), which indicates that they may be speaking over music or the chatter of other people, which is a situation not conducive for making a real connection. Alternatively, it might be someone who compensates for superficiality by increasing their volume—a so-called “blowhard.” Moreover, the information that “they once wrote a poem” (Line 7) suggests this person is not a dedicated poet, but somebody trying to connect with a full-time writer by aping a non-professional, shallow interest in the subject. With three contextual details, the speaker depicts the major problems she finds in forging authentic connections in a party setting. It’s apparent that this line is Shihab Nye airing her frustration with no doubt more than a few uncomfortable real-life party experiences.

The desire for solitude extends beyond the superficiality of parties though. Shihab Nye writes:

When someone you haven’t seen in ten years

appears at your door,

don’t sing them all your new songs.

You will never catch up (Lines 20-23).

In this scenario, she explores the more subtle problems with connecting on a deeper level. The person she refers to has been away for “ten years” (Line 20), but the speaker doesn’t say why. Maybe the reason isn’t important, but the speaker nonetheless believes “[y]ou will never catch up” (Line 23): Each person carries so many “songs” in them that it is impossible to “sing” them all to one person (Line 22). There is another implication too, which is that singing is not the appropriate way to catch up. Just as in the party scenario, when the speaker could not forge a real connection to the person talking in the “loud voice” (Line 6), it may be that people cannot connect with one another through any form of speech, even a more artistic mode such as singing. A song is a performance that communicates a story, and by virtue of the 10-year absence, the only way to speak of oneself to the person at the door is to relate incidents from memory. The drop-in visitor hasn’t been present for those life events. Someone at such a distance can only be a spectator to the living of a life, which makes the potentially “endless” recall to catch them up not a valuable use of time.

Finally, to “catch up” (Line 23) is both a colloquial way of saying you’ll fill someone in on the current details of your life and a description of a person who is behind but moving fast enough to move parallel with someone ahead of them, as in a race. It raises the image of the visitor always running, pursuing a goal in isolation instead of moving in tandem. Their runaway ambition or other distractions will always keep them apart, at the “acquaintance” level of friendship.

The first stanzas suggest ways to extricate oneself from social engagements. The later stanzas depict what readers (and the self-reflexive “you”) will experience if they pursue solitude. The speaker says, “[y]ou’re trying to remember something / too important to forget. / Trees. The monastery bell at twilight” (Lines 13-15). Unlike the party and the experience of “sing[ing]…all your new songs” (Line 22), these images conjure silence and stillness. Twilight, across most of the globe, lasts about half an hour to one hour, so even if the monastery bell rings, it will only do so once, for a small fraction of that timespan.

Twilight and the monastery bell provide an apt metaphor for something that can make noise depicted in a moment of rest, a moment when it is being silent and peaceful. Everything around the bell in twilight is also peaceful because the bell is hanging still. Choosing to set the bell over a monastery at twilight further enhances the mood of stillness and calm. Monasteries are places where people pray and live in cloister, sometimes with vows of silence, and twilight is the time when people come in from work to start getting ready for sleep or they have yet to rise for the day. The image of twilight itself is that of soothing colors, calming visions of sunset and sunrise, dim lighting providing soft focus over the landscape, and cool or moderate temperatures.

To “remember” (Line 13) literally means to piece things together after they have been taken apart, so taking the time to “remember” is a way to bring things to life and make them whole, to preserve them against the onslaught of destruction or being broken or lost.