The Human Stain

Its necessity. Its excitement even. I no longer indulged the pernicious wish for something else, and the last thing I thought I could endure again was the sustained company of someone else. The music I play after dinner is not a relief from the silence but something like its substantiation: listening to music for an hour or two every evening doesn't deprive me of the silence—the music is the silence coming true. I swim for thirty minutes in my pond first thing every summer morning, and, for the rest of the year, after my morning of writing—and so long as the snow doesn't make hiking impossible —I'm out on the mountain trails for a couple of hours nearly every afternoon. There has been no recurrence of the cancer that cost me my prostate. Sixty-five, fit, well, working hard—and I know the score. I have to know it.

So why, then, having turned the experiment of radical seclusion into a rich, full solitary existence—why, with no warning, should I be lonely? Lonely for what? What's gone is gone. There's no relaxing the rigor, no undoing the renunciations. Lonely for precisely what?

Simple: for what I had developed an aversion to. For what I had turned my back on. For life. The entanglement with life.

This was how Coleman became my friend and how I came out from under the stalwartness of living alone in my secluded house and dealing with the cancer blows. Coleman Silk danced me right back into life. First Athena College, then me—here was a man who made things happen. Indeed, the dance that sealed our friendship was also what made his disaster my subject. And made his disguise my subject. And made the proper presentation of his secret my problem to solve. That was how I ceased being able to live apart from the turbulence and intensity that I had fled. I did no more than find a friend, and all the world's malice came rushing in.

Later that afternoon, Coleman took me to meet Faunia at a small dairy farm six miles from his house, where she lived rent-free in exchange for sometimes doing the milking. The dairy operation, a few years old now, had been initiated by two divorced women, college-educated environmentalists, who'd each come from a New England farming family and who had pooled their resources-pooled their young children as well, six children who, as the owners liked to tell their customers, weren't dependent on Sesame Street to learn where milk comes from—to take on the almost impossible task of making a living by selling raw milk. It was a unique operation, nothing like what was going on at the big dairy farms, nothing impersonal or factorylike about it, a place that wouldn't seem like a dairy farm to most people these days. It was called Organic Livestock, and it produced and bottled the raw milk that could be found in local general stores and in some of the region's supermarkets and was available, at the farm, for steady customers who purchased three or more gallons a week.

There were just eleven cows, purebred Jerseys, and each had an old-fashioned cow name rather than a numbered ear tag to identify it. Because their milk was not mixed with the milk of the huge herds that are injected with all sorts of chemicals, and because, uncompromised by pasteurization and unshattered by homogenization, the milk took on the tinge, even faintly the flavor, of whatever they were eating season by season—feed that had been grown without the use of herbicides, pesticides, or chemical fertilizers-and because their milk was richer in nutrients than blended milk, it was prized by the people around who tried to keep the family diet to whole rather than processed foods. The farm has a strong following particularly among the numerous people tucked away up here, the retired as well as those raising families, in flight from the pollutants, frustrations, and debasements of a big city. In the local weekly, a letter to the editor will regularly appear from someone who has recently found a better life out along these rural roads, and in reverent tones mention will be made of Organic Livestock milk, not simply as a tasty drink but as the embodiment of a freshening, sweetening country purity that their city-battered idealism requires.

Words like "goodness" and "soul" crop up regularly in these published letters, as if downing a glass of Organic Livestock milk were no less a redemptive religious rite than a nutritional blessing.

"When we drink Organic Livestock milk, our body, soul, and spirit are getting nourished as a whole. Various organs in our body receive this wholeness and appreciate it in a way we may not perceive."

Sentences like that, sentences with which otherwise sensible adults, liberated from whatever vexation had driven them from New York or Hartford or Boston, can spend a pleasant few minutes at the desk pretending that they are seven years old.