said you wanted. I didn’t mean to be mysterious. I never gave it out because I never wrote it down because it changes every year because I never got it right. I thought I’d wait and write it down when I perfected it, but it looks like I won’t get the chance. So I’m enclosing that, and I’ll leave it to you to figure out what it lacks. The so-called secret ingredient is not okra as many of you thought although that’s in there and does ooze that viscousy goop. The ingredient that supplies the creamy binder everyone wondered about is simply mashed potatoes, gobs of them, made with as much cream and butter as you please. Now you know. Carbophobes, beware.
The next thing I want to tell you is that, unlike Edith Piaf and her ilk, the ones either valiant or brazen enough to claim they have no regrets, I do. I have regrets aplenty. Some are best left unspoken—trust me—but others I’d like to get off my still ample chest, which, I might note, is—are?—still hanging in there, the last vestige of my formerly voluptuous self. Maybe you will figure out a way to avoid making the same mistakes. If not,
c’est la vie
, as the little sparrow would have said.
I will attempt to be transparent, a new thing for me. I see now that I’ve led my life too privately and now I want things to be known. You might even say that I want to be known. Please indulge me as I plan to ramble.
It seems to me, now that I’m contemplating regret, that there are two kinds—regret for things we did and wish we hadn’t and regret for things we didn’t do and wish we had. Had done. Would have done. Did do. I’m tangled in tenses already—it proves how slippery time can be. Or is. Which, I guess, is the point of regret. Was it Nabokov who said the prison of time is a spiral? Or did he say the spiral of time is a prison?
Lydia wondered if she should stop and look it up but decided not to. She liked not knowing.
Now that I’m dying, I find myself dwelling on these things, on what I did and didn’t do, and wondering which is worse.
I used to think it was worse to regret something you’d done—something stupid, something cruel or destructive—but I’m beginning to think the opposite. I’m beginning to think that leaving something good undone is worse than doing something bad. Something regrettable is still something, an act, a scrap of energetic material that can be sewn into something else, an action the momentum of which can be harnessed and redirected. Reversed, possibly, in some kind of existential judo. A thing not done is nothing, no thing at all.
Lydia wondered if the bit about judo was too much but decided to leave it in.
• • •
She set the paper down. If this weren’t a letter but a lecture, Lydia thought, say, for Art 101, that wonderful old chestnut of an art appreciation course she used to teach, she would now click on a slide of an Ivan Albright painting, the one of the funeral wreath hanging on a door. She’d tell them the title and they’d write it down:
That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door)
. Date: 1941. Style: Magic realism—Gothic, scary, obsessively detailed, theatrical.
This is a painting about regret
, she’d say, and the studious ones would write
about regret
in their notebooks. After a suitable pause and, she hoped, some awed silence, she would click again, and there on the screen would appear
Into the World Came a Soul Called Ida
. She wouldn’t be surprised to hear a gasp or two.
She’d give them time to take it in, the faded beauty with her bare legs exposed, legs that no doubt were once quite shapely and smooth but now are chunked with fat, pitted and pocked with cellulite, and sickly pale under unforgiving overhead light. They’d all look at Ida, looking at herself in a hand mirror, seemingly unfazed by her own ravaged appearance.
Then, to set the horror, Lydia would click again and up would come
Flesh (Smaller Than Tears Are the Little Blue Flowers)
. She would
The next thing I want to tell you is that, unlike Edith Piaf and her ilk, the ones either valiant or brazen enough to claim they have no regrets, I do. I have regrets aplenty. Some are best left unspoken—trust me—but others I’d like to get off my still ample chest, which, I might note, is—are?—still hanging in there, the last vestige of my formerly voluptuous self. Maybe you will figure out a way to avoid making the same mistakes. If not,
c’est la vie
, as the little sparrow would have said.
I will attempt to be transparent, a new thing for me. I see now that I’ve led my life too privately and now I want things to be known. You might even say that I want to be known. Please indulge me as I plan to ramble.
It seems to me, now that I’m contemplating regret, that there are two kinds—regret for things we did and wish we hadn’t and regret for things we didn’t do and wish we had. Had done. Would have done. Did do. I’m tangled in tenses already—it proves how slippery time can be. Or is. Which, I guess, is the point of regret. Was it Nabokov who said the prison of time is a spiral? Or did he say the spiral of time is a prison?
Lydia wondered if she should stop and look it up but decided not to. She liked not knowing.
Now that I’m dying, I find myself dwelling on these things, on what I did and didn’t do, and wondering which is worse.
I used to think it was worse to regret something you’d done—something stupid, something cruel or destructive—but I’m beginning to think the opposite. I’m beginning to think that leaving something good undone is worse than doing something bad. Something regrettable is still something, an act, a scrap of energetic material that can be sewn into something else, an action the momentum of which can be harnessed and redirected. Reversed, possibly, in some kind of existential judo. A thing not done is nothing, no thing at all.
Lydia wondered if the bit about judo was too much but decided to leave it in.
• • •
She set the paper down. If this weren’t a letter but a lecture, Lydia thought, say, for Art 101, that wonderful old chestnut of an art appreciation course she used to teach, she would now click on a slide of an Ivan Albright painting, the one of the funeral wreath hanging on a door. She’d tell them the title and they’d write it down:
That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door)
. Date: 1941. Style: Magic realism—Gothic, scary, obsessively detailed, theatrical.
This is a painting about regret
, she’d say, and the studious ones would write
about regret
in their notebooks. After a suitable pause and, she hoped, some awed silence, she would click again, and there on the screen would appear
Into the World Came a Soul Called Ida
. She wouldn’t be surprised to hear a gasp or two.
She’d give them time to take it in, the faded beauty with her bare legs exposed, legs that no doubt were once quite shapely and smooth but now are chunked with fat, pitted and pocked with cellulite, and sickly pale under unforgiving overhead light. They’d all look at Ida, looking at herself in a hand mirror, seemingly unfazed by her own ravaged appearance.
Then, to set the horror, Lydia would click again and up would come
Flesh (Smaller Than Tears Are the Little Blue Flowers)
. She would
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