A Life Outside

Oh, to have been a fly buzzing near the ear of Emily Dickinson as she bent over her writing desk, scribbling her thoughts, contemplating the way sunlight shifts across the ground on dreary, winter afternoons.

The reclusive woman in white, who townspeople spoke of as a myth, never left her family's house during the last years of her life. She spoke through a door to visitors, lived in self-imposed exile from the world, sought to translate the power of her emotions into the little, black specks of words.

She felt things deeply, or so her poems seem to say. Thoughts and words were her entire world. She wrote hundreds of letters—the faces of friends reduced to the scrawl and smudges of their particular penmanship.

There is such romance in the story of this shy genius whose thousands of poems were only discovered and published after her death. As an undergraduate Creative Writing student, I wanted to be Emily Dickinson—someone who wrote out of the love and passion for the music of language, who did not chase publication but who wrote out of the simple need to express herself. To turn a soul inside out. To paint on the canvas of another’s imagination. To revel in the angsty torture of a “true” artist.

I loved the idea of such self-sacrifice for the craft of writing. So romantic. So exquisite. So tragic. The image of this delicate woman dressed in white writing in the stillness of her room touched me in a profound way. Something about her life seemed reverent, like a nun dedicating herself to her Holy Father.

Now, as I sit in the quiet of my own living room tonight, I feel especially akin to Dickinson—at least in terms of her solitude. And, lately, I wonder about Dickinson the person, not the myth or the genius poet, but the young woman who slowly retreated from social life.

What types of concerns caused her to pull away? Did she have a disorder that affected her ability to form relationships? Was she overwhelmed by the prospect of living a life among people? A person could argue that she suffered from agoraphobia. Is this what turned her into a living ghost?

But, what if Dickinson had not spent her days writing poem after poem? What if she had found love and married and had children and spent her days in the sunshine and the air? What if she had worn dresses of vibrant color and visited her friends in person rather than through letters?

We would never have her poems.

And, yet, at this point in my life, a part of me feels sorry for this woman who was so paralyzed that she could not leave her house. I begin to see this person hampered by some kind of inability, and I pity the genius whose “letter to the world” we cherish a hundred years later.

I am sure that she was happy in her way. I am sure that she experienced contentment in her way. Her poems show us the scope and depth of what she felt during her lifetime—whether in her actual life or dream life.

Would a healthier life have produced such concise and precise meditations on what it feels like to feel? Would she lead a more normal life if she were alive now? How many Dickinsons are lost to the world outside?

One of my favorite Dickinson poems is “I Heard A Fly Buzz—When I Died.” I am drawn to the simple truth of the poem. The fly buzzes, even after the speaker “could not see to see.” There are so many interpretations of the fly and its buzz. I think it is what it is. Nature will have her say in the end—once we pass on to the afterlife (wherever and whatever we may believe that to be). Our own physicality, decay, is between the “light” and ourselves. What we leave behind besides our keepsakes is our bodies, like a keepsake, an heirloom of bloodlines. Nature reclaims us.

Would I sacrifice the insights in this poem and all of the others if it meant Emily Dickinson, my literary hero, would have spent more time walking along sidewalks, frequenting shops, and laughing with friends?

These days, I almost believe that I would.