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To work on the tedious, self-centered, pitiable, laughable character Swift. The one nobody feels bad for. Now he is fifty.
Oh Buddy
We all recognize grief in moments that should be celebrations; it is the salt in the pudding.
Even your narrator, one morning after what should have been a happy occasion, was found shivering at the end of the bed (spouse: “I really wish you weren’t crying right now”).
Dude who are you
He thinks: Hard to feel bad for a middle-aged white man.
Around the world his pity flies, its wingspan as wide as an albatross’s.
Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.
There is really no other word for someone who celebrates Christmas and Easter, even if only as craft projects.
Looking around for inspiration, Less’s eyes fall upon his torn blue suit hanging in the closet, and he decides this is the priority. The novel is set aside.
real
everything is fresh simply because it must be.
Less opens his eyes to an image from a war movie—an army-green airplane propeller chopping briskly at the air—no, not a propeller. Ceiling fan.
POV youre owen hunt
“No one has ever been hopelessly in love with me.” “No,” Carlos says. “You always gave them hope, didn’t you?”
He gave him up willingly; he even stayed away from the wedding. He has suffered enough, all on his own; he is crippled, uniplegic, forsaken, and bereft of his magic suit. He has nothing left to take away, our gay Job. He drops to his knees in the sand.
I think everybody wanted to touch that innocence, maybe ruin it.
From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad. I admit it looks bad (misfortune is about to arrive).
Perhaps he was burning down a house in which he no longer wanted to live.
The End. And all that he held in his hand were the notes and afterword.
It isn’t all bad. It means now people will think you were always a grown-up. They’ll take you seriously. They don’t know that you once spent an entire dinner party babbling about Nepal when you meant Tibet.”
my point is, welcome to fucking life. Fifty is nothing. I look back at fifty and think, what the fuck was I so worried about? Look at me now. I’m in the afterlife. Go enjoy yourself.”
Robert has never been kind to his body; he’s worn it like an old leather coat tossed in oceans and left crumpled in corners, and Less saw its marks and scars and aches not as failures of age but the opposite: the evidence, as Raymond Chandler once wrote, of “a gaudy life.”
Two thousand years of flaming Viking boats and Celtic rites and Irish wakes and Puritan worship and Unitarian hymns, and still he was left with nothing.
The young woman exits through the little door. He hears her struggling to close it behind her; it has clearly suffered for centuries and is ready to die.
Has he lost his mind, or is everything a reflection?
The world was rushing in to fill the void where Arthur Less had always been.
I hadn’t known that I assumed he would wait there forever in that white bed below his window. I hadn’t known I needed him there.
Arthur Less, who was supposed to remain in that bed forever, now on a trip around the world—and who knows where he might be? Lost to me.
Watching him only a moment before my father introduced me: “Arthur, you remember my son, Freddy.”
Oh Freddy
Then I heard his voice, my new husband, Tom, who loved me, and therefore saw everything: “I really wish you weren’t crying right now.”
Oh poor Tom
In this room, everything is reflecting, but here is just the blank white wall of the future, on which anything might be written.
Tomorrow, he will see Lewis for coffee and find out whether Clark has really left him and whether it still feels like a happy ending.
But what I am trying to tell you (and I only have a moment), what I have been trying to tell you this whole time, is that from where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad. Because it is also mine. That is how it goes with love stories.
After choosing the path people wanted, the man who would do, the easy way out of things—your eyes wide in surprise as you see me—after holding it all in my hands and refusing it, what do I want from life? And I say: “Less!”
