The Late Americans

by Brandon Taylor

Curiouser and curiouser, thought Seamus, that a person, presented with what they wanted most, could seem so miserable about it.

This wasn’t poetry. This was the aping of poetry in pursuit of validation. This was another kind of poetry theatric: If you just said enough names, people assumed you knew what you were talking about and tended to attribute the vagueness of the reference to their own ignorance.

It would have been easier for these poets to say that sometimes you lied and sometimes you were mistaken and sometimes the truth changed on you in the course of telling. That sometimes trauma reconfigured your relationship both to the truth and to the very apparatus of telling. But no, they went on signifying. Tethering their bad ideas to recognized names and hoping someone would call them smart, call them sharp, call them radical and right, call them a poet and a thinker and a mind, even if they were just children.

Perhaps it was this that he resented in the work of his peers. It wasn’t that their lives were worse than his or that his life was better than theirs—it was that they all had the same pain, the same hurt, and he didn’t think anyone should go around pretending it was something more than it was: the routine operation of the universe. Small, common things—hurt feelings, cruel parents, strange and wearisome troubles.

Platitudes. Eunice didn’t go around living her life awaiting a moment to dispense wisdom. She was in the business of living, getting by. Eunice was at the center of a whole universe that he couldn’t begin to pierce and understand. It was a civic inattentiveness of the soul that had made him say something so stupid.

The stars, he thought, had been watching him his whole life.

He had wanted to ask why it was that people found it so much easier to extend charity to the anonymous herd beasts of the field than to other people. Loving people was hard. It was difficult sometimes to believe that they were good. It was hard to know them. But that didn’t mean you could just go on without trying. What he believed was that love was more than just kindness and more than just giving people the things they wanted. Love was more than the parts of it that were easy and pleasurable. Sometimes love was trying to understand. Love was trying to get beyond what was hard. Love, love, love.

When someone truly disapproved of something, they seldom said it. Why would you? The quality judgment had nothing to do with the object being assessed, he thought, but it had everything to do with proving that one possessed the faculty of discernment. They all were going around all the time trying to prove themselves, litigating the case for their own worth.

People in graduate school were always talking about going to law school, except for the people in law school, who talked about going into real estate. Painters, dancers, poets, and even scientists dreamed at their desks of the law, of a codified system that ran through all their lives and kept them from bilious harm. What they wanted was something that made sense and made money and could convert their temporary suffering into something more stable and right.

Perhaps what people misjudged for prodigious talent was really just unexpected competence.