A few hours ago, at five in the afternoon of a pure-blue-skied, warm summer’s day, I took a glass of water outside — a couple of ice cubes making it tinkle pleasantly — and sat down in the easy chair on the deck of my houseboat, in the shade.  I had a book with me too, and a pencil, but for a while I just sat there with the book lying unopened on my lap, gazing at the pine tree and the olive tree and the slowly angling sunlight playing on the water, and listening to the quiet around me. “Finally,” I found myself breathing out loud, “the idyll.”

This was my image of how I’d wanted to spend the summer.  Not hunkered down at my desk like the past several ones, unaware of even the most beautiful days outside.  Not trying to meet deadlines, either imposed by others or self-imposed.  Not full of things-I-have-to-do.  Because this year I wanted a real summer, before I begin serious work on the next book. A lazing-around-doing-nothing kind of summer, that is — a potter-around-on-the-deck and dive-off-the-end-of-the-dock and kayak-at-dawn and raid-the-fridge-with-friends and read-some-great-novels summer.  A let-the-next-book-simmer-in-the-back-of-my-mind-while-the-front-of-my-mind-idles summer.  A languorous, infinitely hyphenated summer, for both body and mind.

And then suddenly, when I sat down in that chair a few hours ago, that summer was here. Image had become reality.

This might have had something to do also with the book in my lap, which I opened to the marked page and continued reading.  It was Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “A Time to Keep Silence.”  A friend had mentioned in an email that she was reading it, and something about the way she did the mentioning made it seem essential that I also read it, though she had done no urging.  She didn’t even say it was a book about monasteries and monks, which it is.  She didn’t actually say anything at all about it.  Except that somehow I knew it had something to do with a kind of hard-won tranquility — or what mystically minded Christians might call grace.

I was reading it neither for work nor for play, but for the serious pleasure of it. Though I confess (the right word here) that this pleasure may have been heightened in that I was reading about the drastic strictures of monastic life while cushioned in a comfortable chair, my feet up on a footstool, pausing every now and then to stroke the cat stretched out alongside as I savored Leigh Fermor’s gorgeously evocative writing, which gave the everyday repetitiveness of monasticism a stern, almost enviable beauty.

Quiet and calm — and fortunate those of us who can find such an idyll, if only for a few hours.  I think of the opening line of my favorite poem by Wallace Stevens, which is also its title.  Here’s the whole of it:

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.