Ch

He wants his children to have an old life and a new life, a life that is indivisible from all lives past , that grows from them, exceeds them, and another that is original, pure, free, that is beyond the prejudice which protects us, that habit which gives us shape. ..He is preparing them for this voyage. It is as if there is only a single hour , and in that hour all the provender must be gathered, all the advice offered. He longs for the one line to give them that they will always remember, that will embrace everything, that will point the way, but he cannot find the line, cannot recognize it...

---James Salter.

Cheever and the lost life, the lostness in life. On the edge of everything, this cold glass, these black keys, the fuzzy hiss of the speakers is this tangible sense of something that is lost, not quite there. Didn't make it. On the edge of the life of things is a blue line...

The sense of falling, of falling away, of fallen things. The grey pallor of puffed-up, sullen faces, the forlorn look you see on some people's faces, even in the brisk early-morning light. The sense of being a tremendous failure. The word tremendous deriving, in large part, its substance from the fact that it was, in truth, an ordinary failure, no different from anyone else's mediocre stab at life. But it was tremendous in a different and special way, even though he wasn't even unique here either. It was this: that he couldn't even imagine what 'success' would mean or if he'd be happy if he got it. 'Success' is an American affliction that blights a man's life, and clouds his judgement.

What would it mean to succeed? What could it mean? Some form of recognition by a half-assed drunk, a steel bar to mark the fact, a brief moment of fame amongst one's contemporaries and then the inevitable slide into oblivion? The revelry and irreverence in that punk go-getter's eyes, reading from the script like a whore.He hoped that he might see him in another light, with the moral clarity of a saint, or with the judicious wisdom of a cardinal. Why these religious metaphors? Somehow he imagined good sense returning to him, like a natural balance; thought that a gentle forgiveness might make its way to the surface, instead of this unrelenting narrowness of vision, the cool irreversibility of a fixed image. To see him (and therefore himself) with the eye of a drunkard, as if he was viewing him in clothes two sizes too big, which is to say, as slightly ridiculous and nothing more.

Walks past the monolithic building in the morning, its imposing dullness can't hold a candle to the irreducible dullness of what happens inside, the narrowing down of sight, the collapse of imagination. At least the early-morning shadows are soft, softer than those at the end of the day that cut across it at acute angles. How much light and shadow this building's absorbed already! It has this unlimited capacity to do so, and that makes it timeless.

But for now, everything's soft, like the heart of the sparrows, or the ginger cat licking its wounds on top of the trash can. There's a degree of gentleness or drowsiness in the voices overheard in the corridors. The mild excitement of trembling in the uncertainty of first love. Or so it seems from a distance.

"Ch", she wrote, and he, imagining himself to be Jewish, thought this was a word of disdain or mockery: 'Ay, ay, ay'. Nothing he said could explain what he meant. And her words were lost in the translation. "Ch" reminded him of currency, an amount to be paid in compensation. Or maybe it was a word, followed by a click of the tongue, used to frighten beggars away.

What was that one line, that one word by which we may know ourselves?