Michael > Recent Status Updates

At the end of every life is a full stop, and death could care less if the piece is a fragment. It is up to us, the living, to supply a shape where none exists, to rescue from the flood even those we never knew.
We all, like beggars, must patch the universe as best we can.

“What formed me were anecdotes — often inconclusive, generally unheroic — connected to a particular forty acres of water... [I]f I could ever open myself, I suspect I’d find its coves there, its sleeping silt, its placental water smooth with algae... and the faces of those I’d known, revealed as clearly as if mine had been that lake of legend said to reflect the hidden heart.”

America was my foreground, familiar and known: Captain Kangaroo and Mister Magoo, the great trains clattering and tilting west, pulling out of the seam in the summer wall as my father and I sat waiting in the DeSoto on Old Orchard Road. Behind it, though, for as long as I can remember, was the Old World, its shape and feel and smell, like the pattern of wallpaper coming through the paint.

“[B]eneath the world I had known — so very familiar to me, so very ‘American’ — just under the overgrown summer lawn, or the great stone slab of the doorstep — another one lay buried.”

“I can tell you this: aloneness does things. Your face in the mirror becomes her face too... Dreams flare, then die. You want to be still. To be left alone. To not have to move until you don’t have to. I know how it sounds, but trust me—there’s some peace in this.”

“And there are times since she went, I’ll be honest, when loss is the only laguage I hear.
Everything’s taken from us anyway. Without mercy. To give it away is like saying you quit just before you’re fired.”

Odd how I miss his voice, and yet it's his silences I remember now[.]

This was the home of depravity — in the evening, its red lights lured in visitors. There were streets where every building was a house of shame: sordid dens, where vice shared a bed with hunger and consumptive women with withered charms ran a miserable industry; secret cellars, where crime, whispering and winking, defiled school girls and sold off their innocence for ghastly rewards...

“Roman history, Nathaniel. You need to read it. It is full of emperors who cannot tell even their children what catastrophe is about to occur, so they might defend themselves. Sometimes there is a necessity for silence.”

You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.

There were parts of the city where you saw no one, only a few children, walking solitary, listless as small ghosts. It was a time of war ghosts, the grey buildings unlit, even at night, their shattered windows still covered over with black material where glass had been. The city felt wounded, uncertain of itself. It allowed one to be rule-less. Everything had already happened. Hadn’t it?

I venture it is impossible to listen to other people the way we listen to a very good book... The ultimate answer to the question “Why read?” is that only deep, constant reading fully establishes and augments an autonomous self.

“I know many people who continually recite poems to themselves in the awareness that the possession of and by the poem helps them to live their lives.”

“There is a reader’s Sublime, and it seems the only secular transcendence we can ever attain, except for the even more precarious transcendence we call ‘falling in love.’ I urge you to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and for considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.”