There is a type of love I don’t understand – the love of a dependent; a child, or an invalid.
The scene is this.
It’s Christmas Day.
My mother father sister and I are sitting in a rest stop McDonalds. Mother father and sister are eating quarter pounders. I’ve got my lips around a medium mccoffee, not drinking it, just feeling the heat.
From my peripheral vision comes this amorphous figure, a boy with a lolling expression slinking towards the bathroom. He’s floating, galloping forward, with extraterrestrial jubilation. A tall man is walking behind, supporting him. The boy’s feet on his feet, the boy’s arms on his arms. His grey against the boy’s bright blue. He is smiling too, oblivious to the heads starting to turn toward them.
I too, am staring; a freezing wave flushes from where my lips touch the coffee lid: some feeling between the categories of fear and love.
Sister points and asks what is THAT.
Dad looks and says we’re lucky that’s not you.
I left unsaid but they seem happier than everyone else.
The Asian families to the left and right of us are doing the polite thing: not staring, emitting pity with their silence and downcast eyes. Then there’s two trucker guys directly in front of me, looking on silently with contorted faces. The younger of the two especially: his face is red and wrinkles are sprouting from the lines of his eyes–his mouth drooping to an O.
I look a way for a moment and he’s crying. The older one’s mouth is moving but I can’t hear him. He’s probably speaking soft, comforting things. I wonder what private anguish the boy and his father invoked.
Life is good when you are young and have a body which is capable of loving, climbing, jumping, feeling. But the body decays much faster than the mind and soon you are old and you tire of those physical joys. To ward off the eventuality of this middle age depression, which is obvious to anyone because of parents and grandparents, we spend our youths in pursuit of intellectual things, accomplishments, things we can still enjoy when we are fifty.
In the pursuit of these intellectual things, accomplishments, we neglect ourselves and instead of loving, climbing, jumping, feeling, we tear out our hair and seek forced solitude so that we might turn in a problem set, finish a paper, please a professor.
I recognize that I take an especially anti-intellectual stance in this paragraph, denying the possibility of emotional revelation in academia, but, eh.
The humdrum of school is nice because it imposes order — there are rewards, a sense of accomplishment.
At the same time, it leaves me with almost no time to enjoy things. It’s odd, but now, after working for the last two weeks, even my favorite books seem bland. At this point, it is surprising to read about other people who place so much feeling into nonworking life.
Anyway.
I believe that the key to great literature is a premonition of the extraordinary. There is a line that can’t be crossed because the opposite side is the realm of the weird, the fantastical, the shoddy sensationalistic genre of science fiction. But the border is where greatness lies, where men like Gatsby, and Dick Diver are conceived, too fantastic, idealistic, or good looking for every day life, but vividly real caricatures of our own idealism, our own lust and desires.
I spent the last 24 hours watching and bidding on one ebay item: a pair of Axiom M22ti cherry wood speakers.
This singular event precipitated passion, joy, disbelief and despair.
Passion for the wonders of music that I shall enjoy!
Joy that I outbid the stupid motherfucker by $5!
Disbelief that after a short break from the computer, I had lost by exactly the amount I had cunningly won by.
Despair that I had wasted all day with an obsession that bore no fruit.
Anyway, whatever evil that swept over me in the last day is over.
