In Transit: Running and Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-

         tide!

Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!

Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or

         the men and women generations after me!

Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!

Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of

         Brooklyn!

Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!

Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!

Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house or street or public

         assembly!

Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by

         my nighest name!

Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!

Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as one

         makes it!

 Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 1891

One of my favorite parts of the day is bringing the boys to school. After we have said our good-byes, they nearly always run to the entrance, even if only minutes before they were bewailing the fact that they had to go to school at all.

I have always seen joy in this act: the eagerness of youth, physical and mental energy untouched by age or by cares for the future or the past.

Of course, I also recognize my own romanticism here, and I am fairly certain that there is another explanation for their dashing wherever they go.

My boys have absolutely no tolerance for being in transit. The destination is what matters most, not the trip. “Are we there yet?” is only one manifestation of this urgency, the desire to get on with it and get where we’re going.

I can still relate, and at times I feel the same impatience, but as I grow older and see my own mortality with greater clarity, increasingly reflected back at me in the illnesses and losses of friends and family, I am more and more taken up with the trip. At the best of times, this manifests in a close attention to and appreciation of the present moment; at the worst, it appears in a clinging to the moment, a longing for time to slow down rather than simply be. A melancholic nostalgia can follow close behind such times.

Part of the brilliance of Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is the fact that it is set in transit—not just on a ferry, but in the river of time itself. Here is a speaker drinking in deeply the present, capturing it: “Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!” At the same time, however, he is keenly aware that this moment, his moment, shall pass, and become another’s: “Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me!” As he says earlier in the poem,

These and all else were to me the same as they are to you,

I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river,

The men and women I saw were all near to me,

Others the same—others who look back on me because I look’d

         forward to them,

(The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)

The speaker is steeped in the knowledge that our present will be another’s past, but, in embracing that passage, he also revels in both the moment and its transitory nature.

When I watch my boys run, sometimes I want to urge them to slow down, not to be in such a hurry. We all get where we are going sooner or later.

But perhaps I should first learn to heed my own advice. My own running has been extremely goal-oriented: the constant pursuit of Personal Records certainly demonstrates this, but the marathons most of all. Here is where my joy in the journey has consistently broken down: in always striving to improve my time, I inevitably reach that point in the race where all I long for is the finish line. In this respect, my long runs during training have been much more enjoyable than the races themselves, when I am pushing myself to the limit.

So why not run the marathon with no goal at all, or perhaps with the goal of hurting less (if such a thing were possible)? These are certainly reasonable options. Still, I have learned that the pain that comes near mile twenty of the marathon also firmly anchors me in the present. I have never been able to disassociate myself from that pain like some. When every step takes effort, it is difficult to daydream. And as hard as it might be to believe, this is part of the joy of marathoning: the complete connection with the body that comes from pushing it to its limit. As Whitman says elsewhere in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,”

I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,

I too had receiv’d identity by my body,

That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew

         I should be of my body.

In the last few miles of the marathon, I long for the finish line, true, but I also feel each footstep, each breath. Yesterday and tomorrow are equally remote, and even with the pain, there is a hard-won peace in the present.

The weather is at last turning here in northwest Indiana, and I am beginning to run more often. I can’t say that I am ready to let go of all of my goals, simply to run for the joy of it. But I am going to try to pay more attention to the race as well as the finish line, to keep running while I can, taking comfort in the knowledge that the race will go on long after I am gone.

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll get my boys to slow down sometimes and run with me.

 

Title: Municipal ferry, City of New York, [named] Brooklyn [c1909?]
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA