Drawing to the close of Cheever...
There is a way out, I know-a phrase, a memory, an anecdote, a word-but I am unable at the moment to find it.
Today you saw a dark, singular brown leaf, about the size of your thumb or a peanut shell, lying distinctly on the dew-covered grass. Next to it a deep-green weed, flattened like a frozen star from another planet.
The mornings are dark and devoid of any colour. I stagger a little when I walk and this is the darkness that I sought.
Your skin is incredibly dry and feels like an ancient parchment. It is as if your face is a single page, a page that no-one reads-least of all yourself. Out of the corner of your eye-why do you always see things partially, never completely?-you notice a glinting of gold from the nail-cutter. Perhaps there is an engraved gold fish on this one. You turn the water off and open it up. Rust, so deep that it turns to gold when the light is just right, or strikes at the right angle, or when someone looks at with curiosity. Is the human heart any different?
You open it up, only to be surprised, deceived.
At a different time of the day all this may appear quite different than it is. From some great outback a message will come and you will pick up the key again.
The papers in your office are piling up. A friend suggests that my bouts of illness this year-which is very unlike you-ultimately stem from this collection of paper and dust. There is a thin film of it and it gets into your lungs. So, work might kill me-indirectly.
There is very little humour in the journals. Does that count against a person? Will there be a time when there is no counting?
There is something comforting about the smell of tobacco on your clothes, like a distant memory that is filtered by the passage of so much time and that yet, amazingly, clings on. The shabbiness of your life, its lack of direction...maybe all that will be redeemed by the past.
You will go nowhere during the break, not leave the city that is not really a city. You will, no doubt, talk to a few people (who are not really people). Preparations must be made. Another journey, one that lives with us forever but goes unseen.
There is a way out, I know-a phrase, a memory, an anecdote, a word-but I am unable at the moment to find it.
Today you saw a dark, singular brown leaf, about the size of your thumb or a peanut shell, lying distinctly on the dew-covered grass. Next to it a deep-green weed, flattened like a frozen star from another planet.
The mornings are dark and devoid of any colour. I stagger a little when I walk and this is the darkness that I sought.
Your skin is incredibly dry and feels like an ancient parchment. It is as if your face is a single page, a page that no-one reads-least of all yourself. Out of the corner of your eye-why do you always see things partially, never completely?-you notice a glinting of gold from the nail-cutter. Perhaps there is an engraved gold fish on this one. You turn the water off and open it up. Rust, so deep that it turns to gold when the light is just right, or strikes at the right angle, or when someone looks at with curiosity. Is the human heart any different?
You open it up, only to be surprised, deceived.
At a different time of the day all this may appear quite different than it is. From some great outback a message will come and you will pick up the key again.
The papers in your office are piling up. A friend suggests that my bouts of illness this year-which is very unlike you-ultimately stem from this collection of paper and dust. There is a thin film of it and it gets into your lungs. So, work might kill me-indirectly.
There is very little humour in the journals. Does that count against a person? Will there be a time when there is no counting?
There is something comforting about the smell of tobacco on your clothes, like a distant memory that is filtered by the passage of so much time and that yet, amazingly, clings on. The shabbiness of your life, its lack of direction...maybe all that will be redeemed by the past.
You will go nowhere during the break, not leave the city that is not really a city. You will, no doubt, talk to a few people (who are not really people). Preparations must be made. Another journey, one that lives with us forever but goes unseen.
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