If you write, speak, or act from a dominant position it always appears-to yourself at least-that you are coming at it from a neutral position; the very fact of you being in that position allows you a certain leeway. If, on the other hand, you're a minority (in your own eyes or those of others) then it's: me against the world. It's hard to imagine a minority report free from bitterness and recriminations.
~~~
Private journals. It startles you-though it shouldn't-that there's no mention of politics or the 'real world' until two thirds into the book, the 1960s, page 243 to be precise:
'Men and women of Jewish descent are blackballed at the country club. Next to armaments, the nation's largest-selling product is whiskey and drugs. Wall street capitalists are real, militaristic and avaricious. You can see them on the station platform any morning, the overt and cheerful sponsors of tyranny all over the world.'
Before it was all country clubs, gin, repressed homosexuality, his wife's coldness and more gin. Well, at least that was the backdrop against which there are some great insights.
What will be remembered? How to reach the universal or timeless within the small arc of time allotted you, your 'rootedness' in a small, provincial corner of the world?
The exciting thing about a journal is that it is so unexciting. What one is allowed, or what one allows oneself, is the space to breathe and not react to passing external events. Or at least to partially insulate oneself from their impact.
What emerges in a journal is a life.
The passage of time, growth, new avenues explored, but also the recurrence of certain themes, like a red thread weaved through it all. The writer, hunched over the blank page,a kind of secular monk.
What also surprises you is just how little reference there is to other writers, to other books. Updike and Roth get brief mentions but that's about all. What did Cheever read, what did he like? Whatever it is, we learn nothing of that here.
'The computer is invincible, unseen and antic; at times cretinous. It is a blow to our best sense of reality.'
Swimming in September...
'The pool is real enough and is the crux, the truth of a humid afternoon. There are leaves in the water these days. I am the last swimmer. The wind in the leaves is highly vocal. The light is pure and very elegiac. I enjoy swimming at this time of the year. The water is in the sixties. The stones are warm in the sun...'
The plain recording of simple, marginal things, the light at a particular time of the day, the slow growth of darkness in our lives. A minority report comprising short sentences, devoid of any lyricism, ornamentation, embellishments. Nothing new under the sun. You just return to the same place again and again, hoping to find the same faces. Nothing flash, and no great revelation-your life has been too circumscribed and circumspect, too small for that.
'Swimming is the apex of the day'.
You know that for some of your friends the days spent at school were the best days of their lives-or at least they came to be represented that way. Looking back, everything else was a falling away from that pristine time. To laugh heartily and unknowingly is a precise way of avoiding second thoughts, of letting the sun drift over your naked back....
As you grow older nothing strikes you as deep. The superficiality of money and property and success. For some it was the distant gleam of a religious understanding. But for the most it was a kind of stumbling, a loping from from one job or place to another with a kind of hopelessness that goes by the name of freedom nowadays.
You wonder what it would be like to belong to a community of scholars or some other similar group:
'a community of accomplished men, who are passionately concerned with their deepest intuitions about love and death.'
Swim. Float. Avoid contact. Drift.
Have your B-complex to keep your spirits up; ginkgo balboa, herbal tea, green and black, chocolate, some homemade labneh. This is as close to blessedness as you'll get..a 'local maximum', a life lived in a low, inaudible key, without frame or weight. These minor reports you write to yourself lack all poetry.
November. Fires fragment and the smoke from the burning leaves stings your eyes.
~~~
Private journals. It startles you-though it shouldn't-that there's no mention of politics or the 'real world' until two thirds into the book, the 1960s, page 243 to be precise:
'Men and women of Jewish descent are blackballed at the country club. Next to armaments, the nation's largest-selling product is whiskey and drugs. Wall street capitalists are real, militaristic and avaricious. You can see them on the station platform any morning, the overt and cheerful sponsors of tyranny all over the world.'
Before it was all country clubs, gin, repressed homosexuality, his wife's coldness and more gin. Well, at least that was the backdrop against which there are some great insights.
What will be remembered? How to reach the universal or timeless within the small arc of time allotted you, your 'rootedness' in a small, provincial corner of the world?
The exciting thing about a journal is that it is so unexciting. What one is allowed, or what one allows oneself, is the space to breathe and not react to passing external events. Or at least to partially insulate oneself from their impact.
What emerges in a journal is a life.
The passage of time, growth, new avenues explored, but also the recurrence of certain themes, like a red thread weaved through it all. The writer, hunched over the blank page,a kind of secular monk.
What also surprises you is just how little reference there is to other writers, to other books. Updike and Roth get brief mentions but that's about all. What did Cheever read, what did he like? Whatever it is, we learn nothing of that here.
'The computer is invincible, unseen and antic; at times cretinous. It is a blow to our best sense of reality.'
Swimming in September...
'The pool is real enough and is the crux, the truth of a humid afternoon. There are leaves in the water these days. I am the last swimmer. The wind in the leaves is highly vocal. The light is pure and very elegiac. I enjoy swimming at this time of the year. The water is in the sixties. The stones are warm in the sun...'
The plain recording of simple, marginal things, the light at a particular time of the day, the slow growth of darkness in our lives. A minority report comprising short sentences, devoid of any lyricism, ornamentation, embellishments. Nothing new under the sun. You just return to the same place again and again, hoping to find the same faces. Nothing flash, and no great revelation-your life has been too circumscribed and circumspect, too small for that.
'Swimming is the apex of the day'.
You know that for some of your friends the days spent at school were the best days of their lives-or at least they came to be represented that way. Looking back, everything else was a falling away from that pristine time. To laugh heartily and unknowingly is a precise way of avoiding second thoughts, of letting the sun drift over your naked back....
As you grow older nothing strikes you as deep. The superficiality of money and property and success. For some it was the distant gleam of a religious understanding. But for the most it was a kind of stumbling, a loping from from one job or place to another with a kind of hopelessness that goes by the name of freedom nowadays.
You wonder what it would be like to belong to a community of scholars or some other similar group:
'a community of accomplished men, who are passionately concerned with their deepest intuitions about love and death.'
Swim. Float. Avoid contact. Drift.
Have your B-complex to keep your spirits up; ginkgo balboa, herbal tea, green and black, chocolate, some homemade labneh. This is as close to blessedness as you'll get..a 'local maximum', a life lived in a low, inaudible key, without frame or weight. These minor reports you write to yourself lack all poetry.
November. Fires fragment and the smoke from the burning leaves stings your eyes.
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