All that is

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 habitwhich 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.

Light Years was dazzling, with its dream-like, lyrical, sentences that seemed to flow effortlessly, like a clear stream over sunken stone-thoughts, or like time itself, the seasons blowing through us before we could stop and catch them, or understand what was really happening.What is a life but a catalogue of what is missed?

But you couldn't read anything else by him. Solo Faces, for instance, had to be abandoned. I think it will probably be the same with Denis Johnson who also had/has a visionary style..but after the wonderful Jesus's Son his Train Dreams came as a big disappointment.

On the other hand, you want to read everything by Walser and by Alfred Hayes. 

J. Lasdun asks what makes a writer "great" and wonders if Salter, great stylist that he was, fell short and if so, why? It's almost as if he tried too hard for-and achieved- the perfect sentences. Is that all there is? But I suppose in an age of falsity we want true grit, a different kind of brokenness, one that stops the machine of seamless desires and imagination and instead brings us closer to home. Anything else doesn't sound authentic.


Breece Panacake, on the other hand...

Some small, temporary interruption that lasts for a moment, stops you in your tracks, so that you can forget, remember something else; something comes back to you even though "you" are not you any more and it doesn't make up for it; the past is never reconstituted and even when it is, to the extent that it is, it is no longer the past.

Interviewers of writers are trying to get at what, exactly? The cliches are legion: who influenced you?; how do you write? (What is this obsession with mechanics?)?; how much of the writing is autobiographical? Questions like an afterglow, circling the main act, the stunned repetition of the thoughtless.

Tobacco's amazing powers of resistance. The way it lingers on on someone's clothes, stains their fingers or teeth; the way it inheres in the body, or makes its presence felt in a room. Someone steps in from the cold and even though they're not smoking now you can imagine their life one hour ago, the conversations that enlivened the afternoon. All the old smokers in Wales are now dead or not remembered. Wales and Argentina are places that only exist on maps, their outlines crumbling against the sky-blue sea.

'The dark river of himself' carries on, north or north by north-west, the set course. Each day brief in our lives. 

A commencement speech is sugar-filled, brown with decay and complacency. A few jaded parents realize this is not the moment of transition to maturity, understanding, world-wise competence,the promised delivery, but just a tarnished picture of money slipping through their fingers on a hot afternoon in a hall with the high windows jarred open. All the time they'd rather be sitting in the shade, dumbed down in front of a flat screen or spend the hours getting sloshed, wasted. Men in wide and flat hats and the deep cynicism of the unsuccessful are asked to rise, to honour those who pass through the doors, never to be seen again, like boats we launch into the wide world.