The phrase “Finding My Path” suggests that said path has led to an edifying, comfortable, satisfying place, a place where deep yearnings have been fulfilled, hard questions answered, important accomplishments attained, and some peace achieved. When I was twenty-one, I expected (I think—who can remember exactly what one expected twenty-some years ago?) that middle age would indeed be such a time of serene accomplishment, of battles won and gloated over. It should be the well-deserved era not just of sitting but downright sprawling on one’s laurels.

For some, this might be the case. For me, and many others of my approximate age, this is not so. We have our accomplishments, yes, and for most of us, we can say, with Mary Chapin Carpenter, “everything we got, we got the hard way.” We can also say, with Steve Earle, Faust, and the rest of the perverse and restless species, “I ain’t ever satisfied.” Let me be perhaps uncomfortably honest, and, at the same time, step into the self-protective first person plural. Despite any material comfort we might luckily have amassed, we host depression, doubt, the slow and annoying erosions of aging, the comforting but tedious rounds of routine and domesticity, the abrasions of financial necessity, an aching and pointless nostalgia for lost youth, angers without easy outlet, the dulling of hope, and the receding of mystery and passion. The world is too much with us, to quote William Wordsworth. We have, by this point in our lives, been forcibly parted with many loved ones. Each of us could recite with ease longish litanies of loss. We are haunted by questions without answer, questions that have driven artists and philosophers for centuries. The wearisome Latin phrase is Cui bono: What good? What good is the mortal world when nothing strong and beautiful lasts? What use is desire, especially that which can never be fulfilled? What good is ambition when it is so often thwarted? What, if anything, can be learned from, salvaged from, fear or loneliness, or from the world’s blatant and daily tragedies and injustices? We, to echo Dante, in the middle of our lives find ourselves in a dark wood. We are often not whole, not balanced, not calm, pleasant, or rational. Often we feel too much; we are too intense for our own good.

As you can surely tell by now, my father’s ancestors, the Ferrells from central Ireland, the Manns from Germany’s Palatinate, have bequeathed to me a tendency towards melancholy, a Northern European gloom. In addition, my native region has given me a wide streak of Appalachian fatalism. Rereading Beowulf lately in the Seamus Heaney translation, I can only shrug with affirmation when Beowulf says, “Fate goes ever as fate must.” This is an attitude that, on bright days, leads to freedom; on grim days, to a pervasive sense of hopelessness. Here I think of Lee Smith’s wonderful protagonist Ivy Rowe in Fair and Tender Ladies. Writing to her sister, Ivy says,

Silvaney, I have been caught up for so long in a great soft darkness, a blackness so deep and soft that you can fall in there and get comfortable and never know you are falling in at all, and never land, just keep on falling…You know I used to have so much spunk. Well, I have lost my spunk some way. It is like I was a girl for such a long time, years and years, and then all of a sudden I have got to be an old woman, with no inbetween. Maybe that has always been the problem with me, a lack of inbetween. (193)