We spent most of last week relaxing in our favorite seaside motel on California’s central coast. It’s a nice little place, not luxurious, but it stands directly across a narrow road from the ocean. We spend our days there walking along the boardwalk, taking naps, reading books, and eating simple meals with good wine. At night, we fall asleep to the sound of the surf. All in all, it’s heaven.
This little village, Cambria, lies six miles south of Hearst Castle, the spectacular monument to excess built by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Our first night in town, we turned on the television and happened across Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ classic story of a ruthless newspaper tycoon very transparently based on Hearst. A couple of days later, we drove up the coast to catch a glimpse of Hearst’s Xanadu on the hill, overlooking a spectacular stretch of ocean, but it was a drizzly day and the mansion was hidden by low clouds. Fair enough; Xanadu should by rights be shrouded in fog.
I visited once, many years ago. I remember it as a bit of a spooky place, though admittedly I could be thinking of the Welles version, which I’ve seen many more times. It’s always hard for me to imagine living comfortably in cavernous spaces built of hard surfaces and filled with stuff that looks really uncomfortable to sit on. Still, the breathtaking view of the ocean from Hearst’s castle at the top of the hill is definitely worth the price of admission.
Meanwhile, about a quarter mile down the road from our motel stands a very different Xanadu that excites my imagination far more. Like Hearst’s, it has a commanding view of the sea, but the comparisons stop there. It’s a small, wren-colored bungalow with a chimney, its address painted over the front door with a heart, set back from the road behind a large, overgrown garden of succulents. When I picture the perfect place to live in the world, this comes very close.
It’s always hard for me to imagine living comfortably in cavernous spaces built of hard surfaces and filled with stuff that looks really uncomfortable to sit on.
Could it be perfect, though? Hearst’s mansion was built on a great ranch purchased by his father in the late 19th century, where young William had spent many happy summers camping as a child. A centerpiece of the property is the spectacular and much-photographed Neptune’s Pool. A grand house on a steep hill, overlooking the ocean, couldn’t be a more perfect setting for a temple to the god of the sea.
Hearst lived there for 28 years, nearly a full Saturn cycle, but it was never perfect. He built the place of his dreams in a setting of great natural beauty and, most importantly, sentimental significance. Yet he never stopped tinkering with it, tearing down buildings and erecting new ones like a child with a Lego set.
This month’s Pisces New Moon (March 6, 2019, 8:04 am PST, 15.47 Pisces) is shrouded in mist, the Sun and Moon coming together just nine hours before the Sun makes its annual conjunction with Neptune. Astrologers view Neptune as a planet of imagination, of confusion, of dreams, true love, and great yearning. Under Neptune’s enchantment, we imagine our own Xanadu, our mystical dream world of utter bliss. It’s the gift of this New Moon season, then, to build our castles in the air, and to dream of living in them full time.
But while Virgo is the sign we associate with perfectionism, it’s Pisces, its opposite sign – ruled in modern times by Neptune – that is subject to the tyrannical perfectionism of dreams. In the realm of Pisces we, like Hearst, may be unable to achieve the ideal, unable to inhabit it with true ease, comfort, and gentleness.
In the realm of Pisces we may be unable to achieve the ideal, unable to inhabit it with true ease, comfort, and gentleness.
I suppose the same would be true if I ever got to live in my tiny seaside bungalow on Moonstone Beach. I picture myself sitting at the window, typing away at my little essays with the ocean as my soundtrack. But the reality would probably be workmen fixing the roof, and squirrels wrecking the succulents, and tourists disturbing the view during the summer. And even on good days, how could you possibly get anything done with that beautiful view as a distraction?
This Neptune-infused Pisces New Moon invites us to dream our dreams. But on the very same day, chaotic Uranus enters decidedly earth-bound Taurus, and real life rather rudely intervenes, dispelling any illusions of perfect bliss. Such was the dilemma of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Inspired by an opium-filled dream, he set about writing his epic poem about Xanadu, the summer palace of Kublai Khan. But he claimed to have been interrupted by “a person from Porlock,” and, unable to hop back on the train of inspiration, he left the piece unfinished and long unpublished.
Uranus in Taurus and persons from Porlock notwithstanding, most dreams are eventually interrupted by reality. At the end of a few precious days each year, we close the door on the little seaside motel and make our way south, through the suburban sprawl and urban traffic, toward our beloved home in an old neighborhood somewhat farther from the sea than we’d like. Even Hearst, with all the money a man could want, had to eventually leave his beloved castle on the hill due to failing health.
Whether it’s a mansion or bungalow by the sea, the ideal love affair, or a perfect career, most of us will never live full time in a perfect paradise. The epic poems of our lives, once interrupted by reality, may never be finished. But then… if we did, and if they were, what would be left for us to dream?
©2019 April Elliott Kent
