4014. “cleaning house and throwing out things
you know you’re going to miss”
It’s like cleaning house and throwing out things
you know you’re going to miss—there comes a
time when junk dreams get in your way.
Pauline Kael, reviewing The Long Goodbye
And you just know you’re going to miss them all—all that junk: especially when they are the sum total of all that remains of the few you had felt by the beat of your heart you just couldn’t ever do without; and knew in the back of your mind had basically left the building about as soon as they had come. (“The lover’s anxiety: … the fear of a mourning which has already occurred, at the very origin of love.” Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments)
Anyway, you’ve only got so much space at the place where you really live, and you just know that if you want to make room for more company, you have some serious housecleaning to do. You just know (as much as you hate zero sums), to let in a new round of comings and goings, you need to toss out souvenirs of old ones. You just know that
Note: “Life is the elimination of what is dead” (Wallace Stevens).
… breaking a wounded silence … in companionable talk … the
conversation that helps, in trouble; balm to hurt minds …
Denis Donoghue on Randall Jarrell, “The Lost World”
All those face-to-face conversations that you meant or mean to have, but can’t, now—not yet, anyway; or not anymore, maybe: frank and forgiving, face-to-face conversations, whose time is passed or, perhaps, to come. You don’t know whether it’s too early or too late for them, and maybe the best you can do unless and until you do is some essay that would “steer a middle course” between requiem and rehearsal for the prime-time sound stage of voices mingling; “a middle course” between a “style … familiar” (Hazlitt, “On Familiar Style”) enough to recall the signature sounding of someone you’ve loved; and foreign enough to release someone you might love even more.
Note: “Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course” (Shakespeare, Macbeth).
4021. Principia Mathematica
Like an object whose loss has begun to be felt …
John Ashbery, “Lost and Found and Lost Again”
—like the light of a world that someone you love, try as he might, could never pass on to you.
When I was a boy, my father labored by the light of the best of his love to teach me what he knew about what could be known, and what never known. Principles of Uncertainty and Prisoner’s Dilemmas—I only pretended to understand the basic math that underwrote and animated his conscientious labors to convey all he knew (and knew that he didn’t) to me. I’m pretty sure he knew in the back of his mind that I was faking it.
Here’s what I know I surely know I will never know: would it console him to know that since my graduation from his home-school of geometry, out here on my own, I’ve learned a little about principles of uncertainty and prisoner’s dilemmas, even without the math? Would it console him to know that I wish I could show him my work?
Note: “The teaching of Divine truth must still be a mystery” (Ruskin, Modern Painters, part 2, section 6, chapter 2).
4023. “how to talk to people you don’t like”
“Neither you nor Buddy know how to talk to people you don’t
like.” She thought it over. “Don’t love, really,” she amended.
J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
And what makes matters worse, I often think that I do when I don’t. I often think that I know just how to converse with people dwelling on the dry side of indifference; how to talk them and me both into thinking that I really do like them, even really, really love them (and thus—full disclosure—they, me). But it’s all an enchanted forest, a bare and barely demilitarized zone of so many pretty lies—or, no better, half-truths; so many sentences with too many stress marks, and too little chance for what is best left undervoiced.
But things are looking up, I like to think. I like to think that somehow in the midst of a lifelong chattering, charm offensive, whether through those silent spaces that come between the panzer paragraphs of my prolixity, where people are able to get a word in, edgewise (those spaces get bigger with age: the Old-School, Mobile Army of Metaphors, having mostly run on nonrenewable, Nietzschean energy ever since it first got mechanized, is getting a little exhausted), or a corresponding refinement of curiosity about what that Child-Wise, Edge word might be, or might become, if it is allowed room enough to grow up, I’ve learned a little about how you might end up liking, even loving, people you weren’t expecting to feel much for when the peace talks started (when it came time for those talks, it used to be that I’d always look to run the clock out—gaming the shape of the negotiating table, or by some other cute trick of the filibuster).
What I’ve learned about really liking and loving people on the other side of the Table Talk is pretty simple, actually. I’m sure you knew it already. (All these years, I’ve prided myself on being a quick study; turns out, when it comes down to a lot of the things that matter most, I’m a pretty slow learner.)
How do you talk to people you don’t like or love, so that you give all parties involved a decent chance of finding some grace-noting, new-sounding light at the end of the Tunnel?
Easy. You don’t talk. You listen.
Note: “dial tone, of course, followed the formal break in the connection. She appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself … all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world” (Salinger, Franny and Zooey).
4037. “aspects of the life of Jack Kennedy of which Lyndon Johnson was unaware”
There were … aspects of the life of Jack Kennedy
of which Lyndon Johnson was unaware. … Behind
that easy, charming, carefree smile on the face of the
ambassador’s second son was a life filled with pain.
Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon
Johnson: The Passage to Power
Well, you can hardly impeach him for that: powers of discernment far above and beyond even those attached to LBJ’s outlandishly off-scale pay grade at the Department of Human Fallibility would have been demanded to deduce, at the time, the deep and daily physical anguish that defined his second most salient rival’s every move and motion. Not even that most practiced and talented marker of human weakness and woe (this side, anyway, of Olympus or Sinai) could be expected to penetrate the vast fleet of many-winged conspiracies that worked their craft day and night to keep up the appearances of all that glamorous vivacity and vigor; to make his way past all that and gather near the body just on the other side of the curtain; the body ever in pain; the body that, long before Dallas, lay ever near dying.
After all, as we all well know, even imagining the pain of our nearest neighbors, that “element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency” (Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life)—even the most elementary approximations of pain (I may know that he is in pain, but I never know the exact degree of his pain [Wittgenstein])—involve acts and attitudes of patience and perception that surpass our understanding:
Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.
(Emily Dickinson)
The Biography of Pain: some would call that God’s Work. And some have held “that here on earth
Note: God’s work must truly be our own” (John Kennedy, “Inaugural Address”).
In the … wild laughter of the book, there is a cry of pure pain.
Mary McCarthy on Nabokov’s Pale Fire, “A Bolt from the Blue”
—and, lo and behold, it’s brought to you by the last people you’d expect to hear it from; the last people you’d expect to carry the cracking sound of anguish close to your ears—both of them about as compassionate as a piece of dry ice sculpture (what a Piece of Work, the both of them!)—but listen, and you’ll hear the pain they want you to hear. Just like how you can sometimes hear in the strain of a mean and snobby joke, someone lonely, wanting someone near; like how every once in a while you discover hidden in the most noisy exhibitionist ruse, a beaten heart’s hapless and unheard appeal for some fair peace; like how, once in a blue moon, you come upon, in the broadcast self-confidence of pedant or pervert, the Confession of his knowledge that the one Authority from whom he seeks Sanctuary, never lets the Petitioner near his Premises in the first place (“Lady Augusta is the one character he could ever really imagine, partly no doubt, because she could not imagine him.” Mary McCarthy on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest).
And then you remember: just because someone can’t get out of her own dry head doesn’t mean that she doesn’t want you in her own deep heart.
Note: “I was mentally composing a telegram to the Pope” (Mary McCarthy, The Seventeenth Degree: How It Went, Vietnam, Hanoi, Medina, Sons of the Morning).