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And today I’m willing to say “I’m here” to whoever can hear me, and for whatever good it might do for man or beast.
In general, it’s fair to say that as you get older you experience a complexer relationship with the ongoing—which seems at odds with how it should be.
We’re, most of us, the last persons anyone in his right mind wants to talk to on any given day, including Christmas.
“Nature always has another thing to do to us, I guess, Arnie.” It’s my best go-to Roethke line and fits most human situations.
I don’t look in mirrors anymore. It’s cheaper than surgery.
Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due.
Bonding heads the list of words I’ve ruled out. Emerson was right—as he was about everything: an infinite remoteness underlies us all. And what’s wrong with that? Remoteness joins us as much as it separates us, but in a way that’s truly mysterious, yet completely adequate for the life ongoing.
We’re likewise the kind of desirable white people who don’t show up grinning at their church on Sunday, pretending “we belong, since we’re all really the same under the skin.” Probably we’re not.
they’re pissed off about the same things he’s pissed off about—the wrong people getting everything, fools too-long suffered, the wrong ship coming into the wrong port. Despair misunderstood as serenity.
He’s also a personhood nutcase who wants the unborn to have a vote, hold driver’s licenses, and own handguns so they can rise up and protect him from the revolution when it comes.
Statistics, however, show that great cravings of almost any nature, including a wish to assassinate, can be overcome just by brief interludes of postponement—the very thing no one ever believes will work, but does. That IS news.
Almost all conversations between myself and African Americans devolve into this phony, race-neutral natter about making the world a better place, which we assume we’re doing just by being alive.
Or I could let silence do its sovereign work, and see if something of more material import opened up.
“You’re alive to tell it,” I said. “You survived. Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?” I don’t, of course, believe this. Most things that don’t kill us right off, kill us later.
inaugurated a relationship of a common kind
better not to know many things. Full disclosure is the myth of the fretting classes. Those who ignore history are no more likely to repeat it than anyone else but are more likely to feel better about many things.
“His life was a losing war against ambiguity.
Living the life of the not-yet-wounded.
I’ve never sought the services of a grief counselor. A dwindling group of us still holds out.
I left for debate club that day, then nothing was ever again as it had been. You don’t think things like that can happen. Then you find out they both can and will.
knew Ms. Pines was now searching for departing words. She was too savvy to deal off the “c” card—abominable closure.
It’s a solid gain to experience significant life events for which no words or obvious gestures apply. Awkward silence can be perfect. The whisper of the gods, Emerson says.
Most everyone I knew from before is gone or dead. I don’t make much of an impression on things now—which is satisfying.
Some people really are what they seem to be—though not that many.
There are even Internet cemeteries that invite residents to make videos of themselves, so loved ones can see Aunt Ola when she still had a brain.
do this by portraying for her the self I’d like others to understand me to be, and at heart believe I am: a man who doesn’t lie (or rarely), who presumes nothing from the past, who takes the high, optimistic road (when available), who doesn’t envision the future, who streamlines his utterances (no embellishments), and in all instances acts nice.
My view is that I loved Ann back in those long-ago vicious days all there was in me to love. If it wasn’t enough, at least she mined out the seam. What really was essential back then (I never like the sound of really; I’d be happy to evict it from the language along with many other words) was her own unquenchable need to be . . . what? Assured? Affirmed? Attended to? All of which she defines as love.
Ann believes the hurricane, which blew away the Mar-Bel condos like a paper sack, was a bedrock agent. A true thing. “We need to think about calamity in our own personal terms, don’t we?” she’s said to me imperiously. (I’m not sure why so many people address me with sentences that end in question marks. Am I constantly being interrogated? Does this happen to everyone? I’ll tell you. The answer is no.)
In my view, we have only what we did yesterday, what we do today, and what we might still do. Plus, whatever we think about all of that. But nothing else—nothing hard or kernel-like. I’ve never seen evidence of anything resembling it. In fact I’ve seen the opposite: life as teeming and befuddling, followed by the end.
Second, the Default Self allows me to try not to seem the cynical Joe she believes me to be and won’t quit trying to prove. Trying to cobble up the appearance of a basic self that makes you seem a better, solider person than someone significant suspects you are—that can count. It counts as goodwill, and as a draw-down on cynicism, even if you fail—and you don’t always—which is the real charmed union marriage should offer its participants.
Expectancy, I told her, was the hardest part of most difficult duties—from
The world gets smaller and more focused the longer we stay on it.
“Marriage is just one story that pretends to be the only story, isn’t it, sweetheart.”
There is no urge to touch, to kiss, to embrace. But I do it just the same. It is our last charm. Love isn’t a thing, after all, but an endless series of single acts.
Then somebody said—Carter Knott—that Eddie was writing a novel (the last outpost for a certain species of doomed optimist).
Indeed, for months now—and this may seem strange at my late moment of life (sixty-eight)—I’ve been trying to jettison as many friends as I can, and am frankly surprised more people don’t do it as a simple and practical means of achieving well-earned, late-in-the-game clarity. Lived life, especially once you hit adulthood, is always a matter of superfluity leading on to less-ness. Only (in my view) it’s a less-ness that’s as good as anything that happened before—plus it’s a lot easier.
Like most people, of course, I was never a very good friend in the first place—mostly just an occasionally adequate acquaintance,
Most of my friends over time have been decidedly casual and our contacts ephemeral. And I don’t feel I’ve lost anything because of it. In fact, like many of the things we suddenly stop to notice about ourselves, once we’re fairly far down the line we are how we are because we’ve liked it that way. It’s made us happy.
Is this “economizing on others” nothing but a blunt, shoring-up defense against death’s processional onset (as half the jury might argue)? Or, as the other half would agree, is it a blunt, shoring-up acceptance of the very same thing? I’d say neither. I’d say it’s a simple, goodwilled, fair-minded streamlining of life in anticipation of the final, thrilling dips of the roller coaster. During which ride I don’t want to be any more distracted than I already am.
“I’ve always suffered fools well, which is why I sleep so soundly at night.” I had no idea what that meant, but after writing it, I had nothing else to say.
But what I mostly want to do is nothing I don’t want to do.
“It’s a slippery slope to the moral high ground.”
Much more than I dislike Fike, he embarrasses me. Though I’m aware embarrassment owes to the fear that some quality in him is identical to some quality in me that I like. The appearance of tolerance. I’m sure Eddie only keeps Fike around for laughs.
Misery, I’ve learned, doesn’t really love company, just like nature doesn’t abhor a vacuum. Nature, in fact, accommodates vacuums pretty well.
It is his only religion. Politics and dough. God’s just the day job.
Silence is the best defense against non-entities—let them become insubstantial, like a retreating fog.
It doesn’t matter what I say anyway. Eddie and I are of one mind—life is a matter of subtractions.
A wound you don’t feel is not a wound. Time fixes things, mostly.
Cain’t do that much. But I’m here. So I cain’t do nothin’.”
