To garble Greta Garbo a bit, I want to be at home.
More than ever these days, I want to shrink the world to the couple of rooms in my house where I'm most comfortable. I've been declining requests for my time, and the social whirl is less compelling than it ever was. To me, a perfect evening often means stretching out in the den and vanishing into a good novel or compact disc.
Over the past year, as I've undergone treatment for aggressive prostate cancer — surgery, radiation, hormone therapy — this was something I needed to do. It was part of the healing process, of coming to grips with my new vulnerability.
I have to admit that the impulse is more dangerous now, as I struggle with post-treatment depression. It is a thin line between the womb of healing and cutting yourself off from the world.
Even so, I want to nest. I'm doing well physically — my blood tests couldn't be better, and I regularly take five-mile walks — but my spirit is still convalescing. I crave homely days built around writing, reading and time spent with family and friends.
I grew up in northern New England, and I'm feeding my inner Yankee hermit who would like nothing better than to live in a cabin a couple of miles down a pocked and rutted logging road. I come from a long and leathery line of ornery, horn-handed men who burned their lonesome days wrestling with snapping turtles, squinting at pickerel, junking cars and picking the dump.
I prefer my coffee — and ale — dark, bold and bitter these days, but I take pleasure in the most gentle rhythms of daily life: walking the dog, meeting a crony for breakfast, getting a haircut. And solitude is an agreeable pal.
I'm still reinterpreting myself in the face of cancer, and that takes time and quiet. It can't be rushed, and I can't do it successfully if I'm caught up in our huckster culture's unrelenting ruckus.
I don't want to be among tens of thousands of people shrilling and shrieking at a football game or a Springsteen concert at Giants Stadium. An hour of hushed conversation at Starbucks is more than enough, is the true DNA of our finite lives.
Through all of this I've been simplifying my life, both consciously and subconsciously, as if trying to flense myself to something elemental.
I have discovered the deep joy of culling my possessions, rather than being possessed by them. It thrills me to dispense with moldering piles of crispy paperbacks, rickety stacks of compact discs and ragged flannel shirts that look as if they once belonged to Kurt Cobain. I obsessively kill old e-mail messages as if they were cancer cells.
Our younger son, Owen, took our second car to college this fall, and I'm glad it is gone. The more errands I do on foot, the better.
And lately I've been gorging on young adult fantasy novels: Books chockablock with magic and mystery by Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Stroud, J. K. Rowling and Rick Riordan, Ursula K. Le Guin and Cornelia Funke.
I feel as if I'm questing after my core boyhood innocence, trying to conjure the dreamy kid who spent hour upon hour on the summer porch writing and reading and drawing as the Boston Red Sox of Carl Yastrzemski and Tony Conigliaro played on the staticky Sylvania radio that had the broken, upside-down "S."
I miss the boy I was — everyone called me Andy in that time and place — who couldn't imagine having cancer or doing the zombie shuffle through the shadow land of depression.
As I took the cure in my den recently, inhaling "Inkheart" by Ms. Funke and snubbing (with great relish) the insistent ring of the telephone, I realized that I'm trying to recreate that long-ago porch, trying to make my world manageable enough right now to wrap it about myself like a prayer shawl.
