Looking Away
Here is the ancient floor, Footworn and hollowed and thin, Here was the former door Where the dead feet walked in. She sat here in her chair, Smiling into the fire; He who played stood there, Bowing it higher and higher. Childlike, I danced in a dream; Blessings emblazoned that day; Everything glowed with a gleam; Yet we were looking away!
, Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
Hardy returns to a room from his childhood. The floor endures, worn thin by feet now gone. Someone sat by the fire, someone played music, and the child danced. “Everything glowed with a gleam.” And then the final line lands like a door closing quietly: “Yet we were looking away!”
What were they looking away from? Not from each other or from the room. They were failing to register the moment itself, the fullness of what was happening even as it happened. The blessings were “emblazoned,” visible and unmistakable, and still they passed unrecognized. Hardy’s “looking away” names something deeper than forgetfulness. We are, it seems, most likely to miss what is most immediately ours.
Anyone who makes things will recognize this ache. We can be in the middle of the work, the living work, and somehow not be there for it. We rush toward the finished piece, or worry over whether it’s good enough, and the glow of the making passes through us unregistered. The floor gets worn by our footsteps, proof that our bodies were in the room. Awareness, though, asks something more of us than simply being there.
As the tools available to creative people grow more capable, one version of this question sharpens. When the labor lightens, does our attention deepen or drift? The struggle of making has always served, among other purposes, as an anchor, something that holds us in the room, attentive to the fire, hearing the music. If that anchor loosens, we might find ourselves freer to attend to what actually matters. Or we might find, years from now, that everything glowed with a gleam, and we were looking away.