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Honesty tossed you down the basement stairs, and no amount of whimpering would persuade the gatekeeper to let you up again, to feel the sun, breathe fresh air and take a much-needed piss on the green green grass. An honest man was a damn dog in this world, made to heel and told to stay put, while the dishonest man got filthy stinking rich and stuck the country with the tab.
Honesty tossed you down the basement stairs, and no amount of whimpering would persuade the gatekeeper to let you up again, to feel the sun, breathe fresh air and take a much-needed piss on the green green grass. An honest man was a damn dog in this world, made to heel and told to stay put, while the dishonest man got filthy stinking rich and stuck the country with the tab.
Who thought himself an ass whose fate was worse than death: it was to live forever in the permanent fear of always dying.
For it all seemed suddenly like one long, tired script, our blocks of speech assigned to us at the start of time. And though we might yearn for new adventures, happy ends, we lack the capacity to imagine even alternative lines.
So he’d had a scare or two in the past. Being alive was, as far as he could tell, an unrelieved nightmare of strange twinges and mysterious growths.
The least a man might be allowed to do is share his fear with loved ones at a moment of uncertainty—but no, you get a reputation for being tender.
This was one of the old man’s more curious features: an antipathy toward novels as a general rule, and absolutely no taste for reading them, together with a tendency to find their shimmering starts almost everywhere in the course of ordinary life.
But I did care deeply about the man who would emerge out of that swamp to become the source of love in me. I’d been making a study of that man all my life, and I can tell you: it was never the truth of his circumstances or the facts of his life or the history I’m peppering you with now that made him an object of fascination, but rather the fantastical mind-set and the many fictional selves he hoped to make real, without which life, for him, would not have been worth living.
And as difficult as that admission was to make, even to himself, it still didn’t get at the half of it, the really shameful half. Something more alluring than sleep, only something of a pathological compulsion, could truly explain the…oh, Christ, the burden, the fucking back-borne monkey that pounded its fists and shrieked bloody murder in his ear day and night, making a complete fucking shambles of the facade of Scholar/Father/Full-time-Jobber. On nights he wasn’t bleeding tears by ten fifteen, he was pulling his pecker out of his pants! He was giving it a yank before his brain exploded with
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Though a longtime antagonist of organized religion, Charlie was as superstitious as the next guy and never wanted to cross the last remnants of God that still resided in his mind.
You can bow out of almost anything, and sure, there might be consequences, but dodge them or square up to them, accrue them with interest or pay them down over time, there is the immediate illusion of freedom.
To disarm; to perceive, if dimly, a perspective different from your own; to credit that perspective with testimony even when it went against you, even when you couldn’t see it yourself; to yield to another’s narrative; to own up to your share of obstruction, self-destruction, casual cruelty; to see yourself clearly, as another might, in the context of your blind and busy life, your ambitions, your defenses; to accept, however innocently and belatedly, your culpability in the degradations of the moment, the petty fights, the squandered nights; to mature, to dawn to facts, to move beyond denial,
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He would not have cared to live out his life as if in a farce, but it was in a farce he was forced to live. There his quarrel with the world began, and there his quarrel with the world ended.
Imagine that: for every life, not one history but as many as there are people who observed and participated in that life; hundreds, if not thousands, of accounts for just one of the billions of human beings who have lived and died, a staggering proliferation of competing narratives that, no matter how close, can never be reconciled.
when we consider the necessarily curated nature of any narrated life, its omissions as well as its trending hashtags, if you will, we are forced to conclude that every history, including our own first-person accounts, is a fiction of a sort. Or, as Wallace Stevens put it much more succinctly, “The false and true are one.”
With protectors like these, who needs predators?
You can’t lose a father and not be affected in some profound and unexpected way.
Depression, that still beast, came to roost. Depression laid its black eggs in him, which hatched, howled for food, and grew stronger on dark thoughts. It was not the cancer, but the reckoning, that came close to killing him.
I have always consigned the desiderata of religious concepts, with their dry abstractions and dubious utilities, to a junk drawer of the mind, where inevitably they went to get all jumbled up and die of unholy neglect.
It preoccupied him: everyone had a calling. It depressed him: he had not found his. It gave him hope: he might still do so before he died.
As we climbed, every turn and transition to a new odor told of the distance Jerry had traveled from the one-time respectable suburban homeowner to the Dumpster-diving dropout with self-sabotaged credit.
“Because dharma isn’t what you want to do, or what you’d like to do, or what you dream of doing…it’s what you must do, Dad, without hope of personal gain. It’s duty…not bliss, or excitement, or even contentment.”
Charlie now had a little insight into the legal profession: you might hire a lawyer, but you always fire a fall guy.
In a private moment of self-reflection, a man confronts the farce that he is. All his worst instincts, habits of mind, predictable appetites and easily parodied past actions crystallize in that moment into a punch line that prevails above all his refinements and respectability. He is a human exaggeration—if not to his associates or loved ones, then to himself. Then the moment passes. He ceases looking at himself in the mirror, turns on the tap and splashes water on his face. He returns to flesh and blood, to power incarnate, to possibility. He washes his hands of the past and leaves that
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I thought back on my years of envy, the dumb luck that gave her a dad and me a mere surrogate, always tenuous, and I realized that in fact it was tenuous for everyone always, the fortunate no less than the fostered, because in time the world makes orphans of us all.
I had seen a little world go kablooey in Danville, another do the same in Key West, and a third in Downers Grove, and it seemed likely to happen a fourth time in the house on Rust Road. But it didn’t. Charlie lucked out. Barbara returned to school. Jerry fell and was caught. Marcy came around. It was time for me to fly back to Rome. Barbara stopped me on my way out to my rental car on my return to the airport. “You have been a great help to us, Jake,” she said. “I didn’t understand why you were here at first—” “I wanted to be here,” I said. “Right, but why? Well, now I know. You love that man.
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You believe in change, don’t you? That a man need not be mired hopelessly in himself, confined to his appetites and checked by his limits, bound for the grave much as he came into the world, making promises he would never keep and fooling himself every step of the way?
Real life makes for good novels because it’s lived as a bunch of lies, and because fictions of one kind or another are the only things worth living for.
I had become disillusioned, which is no easier to overcome than grief. It is grief, in fact—not for the death of a loved one but for the death of a vibrant ideal.
