Late in Covid’s first October, my wife and I stuffed three days of provisions into a picnic cooler, downloaded two long audio books, and drove from Austin, Texas to the Cape, where we signed mortgage papers and took occupancy of a beachfront condominium in Provincetown’s East End. For 42 years, Texas had been where we made a living, but for more than a decade, during one rented week each summer, Provincetown was where we gathered with our daughters and their partners to celebrate life.
On a glorious November Saturday a few days after the purchase, still stunned by the unexpected privilege of owning property in P’town, we were sitting in the sand staring across the bay toward Long Point when horns began to blare on Route 6A. We raced back through the beachgrass, jumped in the car, and joined the impromptu parade with which Commercial Street greeted Biden’s victory. In that moment we felt, or wanted to feel, that the long season of death, division, and moral ugliness was beginning to give way to something more peaceful, generous, and life-affirming. And what better place — what easier place — to feel it than Provincetown?
Two hundred years earlier, John Keats concluded his most famous poem with a homily uttered not by a human speaker but inferred from the perfect silence of an excavated Grecian urn. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is a claim familiar to many beyond the circle of Keats’s readers. But even those readers generally forget the dark shadow cast by the preceding lines, which locate the urn’s romantic promise at a moment “when old age shall this generation waste” and “in midst of other woe.” So, which is the truth? The promise or the waste, the beauty or the woe? Or both?
This spring in Provincetown, the question feels more urgent to me and more baffling than ever. Concentric crescents of seaweed, rows of small green cushions in an ephemeral amphitheater, attend our morning walks along the bay beach at low tide. Beyond them, layers of liquid color shimmer and blend: cobalt, midnight, teal, violet, sky, punctuated at intervals by smooth peninsular protrusions of sand, like fat, happy exclamation points setting off each watery phrase. “Life,” my wife murmurs, admiring an impossibly baroque piece of driftwood, shell-encrusted and draped in sea moss.
Here, on this beach, the deep truth of such beauty almost seems, as the urn argues, to be all I need to know. But I have just arrived from Texas, and superimposed on this serenity is other knowledge: that two days earlier an angry, intoxicated driver mowed down eight immigrants outside a Brownsville refugee shelter; that a day before that a neo-Nazi shot 15, eight fatally, at a mall outside of Dallas; that this month marks the first anniversary of the Uvalde elementary school shooting.
Of course, one need not divide one’s time between Provincetown and Texas to feel so riven. I imagine that other Outer Cape residents have experienced similar sensations, similar struggles to negotiate the relationship between here and wherever else they call or have called home. Indeed, “Texas,” as I am using it, is really a stand-in for America, the country that my binational friends regularly threaten to leave, especially if Trump is elected again. So will I, I tell them, smiling. I’ll go to Provincetown.
But “here” and “there” are not so easily distinguished or neatly opposed as I have made them out to be. In Texas, my wife and I have long been programmatic and financial contributors to an exceptional provider of low-income housing and family support services. On the Outer Cape, as the Independent regularly reports, the lack of affordable housing has made living here close to impossible for young families or for workers in the service industries and helping professions — an invisibly gated community, for all its openness and warmth. “Cold pastoral!” Keats’s speaker brands the beautiful urn.
And yet, three lines later, he describes it as “a friend to man,” not for any relief or even refuge from human misery that it offers but for the capacity for wonder and uplift that it sustains, the soundless music that it pipes, “not to the sensual ear, but … to the spirit.” Amid the woeful gender politics that afflicts and coarsens much of the country, I heard this music (absurd as this might sound) when, on a trip to the restroom at a bayside P’town restaurant, I encountered three doors, each marked “Whatever — just wash your hands.” The beauty and truth of that face of Provincetown, too, is a spiritual gift and a necessary resource that I’ll take back with me to troubled America.
Evan Carton is professor emeritus of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where he founded the university’s Humanities Institute.
