I dreamt my own death and the light was calm, serene, easy and simple and gentle. I'd always imagined it just so, the perfect light of late summer, just before Fall and the evening chill.
"God forbid," she said in horrified innocence. And then added: "You ate too much".
He couldn't argue with that, but as usual she'd cut down a train of thought that might have led somewhere. Not that it made much of a difference now. How could grief and a kind of acceptability go together, he wondered.
Bumped into old _ just now. Hadn't seen him for a while but he's still as confident as ever, breezing through life, even though he'd been asked to leave the organization for a series of misdemeanors and moral failings. No-one quite knew how he did it, how he came thought it all unscathed, with that winning $100,000 dollar smile and a new dutiful trophy by his side.
By this time she had no idea what he was talking about and turned her face to look vacantly out to the window, to some other, distant life. The evening came down on them silently in the unlit rooms. For the evening meal, he would remember, the plates weren't set perfectly.
~~
'To move towards the good is to move in time and that movement may itself involve new understandings of what it is to move towards the good.'
--Macintyre.
Even if there is some perfectly conceived form, and even if one has some kind of access to it, it remains true that in any real life there is jumble, confusion, lapses, the wayward movement of time, the past sometimes swept in unexpectedly, the present rushing from your fingertips. Which is to say: Even in the perfect order there is if not disorder then time, open-ness, flux. Life is not an idea or a system, no matter what, no matter that we sometimes act as if it would be a good thing if it was.
Life, as a broken circle, is a strange kind of equilibrium, a strange constellation of opposing forces, dispositions and inclinations.
"God forbid," she said in horrified innocence. And then added: "You ate too much".
He couldn't argue with that, but as usual she'd cut down a train of thought that might have led somewhere. Not that it made much of a difference now. How could grief and a kind of acceptability go together, he wondered.
Bumped into old _ just now. Hadn't seen him for a while but he's still as confident as ever, breezing through life, even though he'd been asked to leave the organization for a series of misdemeanors and moral failings. No-one quite knew how he did it, how he came thought it all unscathed, with that winning $100,000 dollar smile and a new dutiful trophy by his side.
By this time she had no idea what he was talking about and turned her face to look vacantly out to the window, to some other, distant life. The evening came down on them silently in the unlit rooms. For the evening meal, he would remember, the plates weren't set perfectly.
~~
'To move towards the good is to move in time and that movement may itself involve new understandings of what it is to move towards the good.'
--Macintyre.
Even if there is some perfectly conceived form, and even if one has some kind of access to it, it remains true that in any real life there is jumble, confusion, lapses, the wayward movement of time, the past sometimes swept in unexpectedly, the present rushing from your fingertips. Which is to say: Even in the perfect order there is if not disorder then time, open-ness, flux. Life is not an idea or a system, no matter what, no matter that we sometimes act as if it would be a good thing if it was.
Life, as a broken circle, is a strange kind of equilibrium, a strange constellation of opposing forces, dispositions and inclinations.
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