In this paperback I bought at the airport, so that I’d have something to read on the plane, though I was hoping I’d fall asleep, and that the paperback would help me do so…yes, in this paperback I bought, and started reading, but that I didn’t finish, because indeed I fell asleep, was a character whose job it was to trace the whereabouts of two men who were rivals of the crime boss who employed him.
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If I look back on this diary, and find entries, like yesterday’s, that I’d rather not have written, or that I wish I’d written differently, so that, were I to come across them again, I wouldn’t find them sentimental, or so involved with the workings of my own mind, and the notions that occur to me, that they would seem sentimental to me, even if they don’t seem that way to others, I won’t delete them, but will leave them where they are, though I’ll try not to think of them, and will hope they’ll go unnoticed, or be forgotten.
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If I could return to my childhood, not to relive it, but to tell that child, through some mode of communication, some thing that might be of use to him, to make his life easier, or make him more capable of meeting life as it unfolded, so that he wouldn’t be spared its difficulties, but could respond to it with more honesty and courage than I had at the time, I suppose I would, though I wonder if, by doing so, I would undo whatever mechanisms have produced the person I am, and thus negate or extinguish me, which wouldn’t necessarily be a loss to the world, but which would be a loss to me, insofar as I don’t want to be extinguished, unless, by way of such an occurrence, I am delivered into the presence of whatever named or nameless entity created the world, and the mechanisms of which I speak.
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In the rain, on the sidewalk, at a corner where there is a stairwell going down into the subway, I bought an umbrella from a man who, after he’d asked me did I want a blue one or a green one, and I’d told him a blue one, said to me, in a laughing voice, “I knew you’d say that.”
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I had the afternoon off, so I went to a museum, thinking, I suppose, that I’d wander through the galleries, looking at whatever paintings were hanging on the walls, and then leaving once I began to feel restless, or bored, though after I’d arrived, and had sat on the steps out front of the building, so I could finish the sandwich I’d brought with me, before going in, I realized I was happy enough to remain where I was, watching the people who were around me, and the traffic in the street below me, for the duration of time I would’ve spent indoors.
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I have a friend who has done well enough in his career, in finance, that he no longer worries about money, though he does worry about other things, like the happiness and well-being of his spouse, who also works, and their two young daughters, who do seem happy most of the time, he says, but who, like anyone, are troubled or affected by encounters and interactions that he couldn’t have predicted, and that he cannot influence as much as he would like to, so that a new appreciation for what he calls the psychological or existential realities of life has been brought home to him, although, when I ask him, jokingly, if he’d like to trade his circumstances for mine, so that I could become him, and he become me, though we’d still maintain our separate identities, or souls, he laughs and says, no, your circumstances are more difficult than mine, which I don’t think is true, although, after we part, and I’m walking back alone to my apartment, where no one is waiting for me but my dog, who I love dearly but who, I must admit, is not as complex as a human would be, and who thus requires less of me than I have the capacity to give, I realize that I don’t believe the reverse is true, either.
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I went for a walk last night, and nothing extraordinary happened. I crossed the bridge, which, because the day had been rainy, wasn’t as crowded as it usually is, and now, though the rain had stopped, the planks on the bridge were slick, so that one’s footing wasn’t as certain as it is when they are dry, and I found myself looking down occasionally, to see where I was stepping, rather than looking only out past the metalwork and the beams and the girders, across the water, toward the buildings of the city whose lights had come on, or that already had been on but that now, because the sky was dark, and there was no natural light against which they were competing, or into which they were merging, were visible.
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According to this book I've been reading, about a homicide that occurred in a town that doesn't seem, from what I can find out about it, to be known, historically, for anything other than the crime in question, a detective who worked on the case for many years, but who has been unable to identify and apprehend a suspect who can be arraigned and tried in court, continues to work on it, on his own, even though he has retired from the police department and has moved with his wife to a beachfront community in a different state, where, he told the journalist who interviewed him as part of her research for the book, the weather agrees with him and there are opportunities to relax, but where, as well, he’s begun to feel depressed for the first time in his life, a circumstance he attributes to the fact that the victim for whom he’s wanted to find justice has, to this day, gone without it, though lately he's become conscious, he said, of how such a concept must be more important to him, and to those who loved the victim, than it could be to the victim herself, who clearly cannot want anything, anymore, at least not in the way that he, or her family, can want something, assuming there's a way she can want anything at all, though whenever he does become conscious of this, he added, he reminds himself that such concerns are not for him to ponder, and that they do nothing to further the investigation.
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You gotta be kidding me, the grass grows over me.
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Last night I got in an argument with my friend, who is also a writer, about what role could be said to most properly belong to the novelist in society today, though after the argument was over, and we'd admitted that neither of us was in possession of the answer, but that we both were probably wrong, and that most likely there was no single description that could be considered true, or, if there was one, that we, being who we were, had the right to attempt to articulate...yes, after we'd gotten through all that, we began to argue with two women who till then had been strangers to us but who, because they’d been sitting near us and had overheard us, had started talking to us about the very subject we had raised, offering us their perspectives, which were nuanced and complex, though by that point in the evening my friend and I were no longer arguing because we wanted to convince anyone, or because we thought either of us was correct, or that our opinions mattered, but because we liked the women and didn’t want them to go away.
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A man who got off the train at a station near a neighborhood where I used to live was weeping.
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On a wall in the foyer of one of the houses my family lived in while I was growing up, in a town none of us can be found in anymore, though now and then one of us might visit, or happen to pass through it, my parents hung a painting of a landscape in which there appeared to be, on a branch of one of the trees, on a hillside that, to the viewer, seemed very far away, a bird that was doing nothing but sitting there, waiting, or watching whatever there was to watch, though of course there was no bird, or even any tree, but only brushstrokes that gave the illusion of such.
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In the subway, at night, while I was waiting for a train that, once I boarded it and it was moving, would stop at a station in the neighborhood where I live before continuing on toward other stations, in other neighborhoods, I saw, beneath a bench on which a man had already been lying when I arrived, so that I couldn't have said how long he'd been there, or whether he was asleep or only trying to sleep, a rat whose progression I'd been following with my gaze since it had appeared, half a minute earlier, near a bin that was positioned further along the platform and from which some refuse had fallen.
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A writer who, at lunch yesterday, told me about the book she has been working on for more than a year, despite the fact that she is no longer interested in the subject matter, which involves a public figure who was famous in the previous century, and who still is famous, though he is no longer alive, also told me, after we'd finished our lunch and had left the restaurant and were standing in the sun on the sidewalk in the neighborhood in which we'd met, and from which we'd soon depart, that once this book is finished, and is published, she's never going to write again, though when I asked her what she would do instead of writing, which till now has been the pursuit from which she has made her career, she only shrugged and smiled and looked at me with relief.
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The book I’ve been writing has not been going well, so I’ve considered giving it up, and leaving it in the condition in which it is, by which I mean saving it as a file that I’ll no longer open, and beginning something new, though I’ll still be aware of its existence, and will want, at times, to return to it, and may even continue it at a later date, and finish it, though it’s also possible that I’ll forget about it altogether, so that it’ll remain on my computer, or somewhere in the cloud, for the rest of my days, and even, I suppose, after my days are over.
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In the night I woke and could hear, through the window that opens onto the courtyard between the building in which I live, and the walls of the buildings that face the street on the far side, the sound of laughter and conversation from a party I’d been able to hear, also, when I’d first fallen asleep, though now the sound was quieter, and more relaxed, as if many of the partygoers had departed, and the only ones remaining were those who'd been in each other's company long enough that they'd begun to feel as though they knew each other better than they had when they'd arrived, and thus had formed the pairings, or groups, that would sustain them until they too went home, and no more noise drifted up to me, in the room in which I lay.
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After the aircraft on which I was a passenger had rolled back from the jet bridge, but before it had taken off, so that it was still waiting on the tarmac in a queue of planes that now and then inched forward, as whichever plane had been first began to hasten down the runway and lift into the sky, the woman who was seated beside me, and who'd chatted to me about the destination both of us were headed toward, fell asleep against the window, though she woke when our plane reached the front of the queue and began its own thunderous acceleration, so that she was looking out the window, and was mindful of our surroundings, as the ground and the buildings and the roadways and the vehicles began to appear beneath us, and to recede.
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One of my students asked me, after I'd shown them, on the screen that pulls down in front of the white board, an image of a painting by the painter Paul Cézanne, why I thought the artist had given this painting the title he'd given it, rather than some other title, to which I’d replied that I did not know, though after I’d admitted as much I’d begun to speculate as to what the answer might be, and in fact had become so carried away by the question, and what my thoughts were with regard to it, that I spent the remaining minutes of class on that subject, without arriving at a conclusion, so that after the hour was over, and my students had gotten up from their seats and had gathered their things and had left, I was still looking at the image of the painting, where it had been projected onto the wall, trying to articulate something about it to myself.
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In a church I went into in the afternoon, in a neighborhood where I do not live, but to which I sometimes walk on days when I'm not working, and am thus unoccupied by the tasks and responsibilities that, when I am working, can relieve me of that restlessness that comes from not having a place to be, or a thing to do, or a person to attend to...yes, in this church I went into, while I was thus conscious of the passage of time, or of the way we must all proceed through time, I saw in a pew near the front, kneeling, so that I couldn't see her face, and could only imagine what had brought her here, if one could say that anything had brought her here at all, a woman who was much older than me and who at no point, while I remained there, became aware of my presence.
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At the beach, after I’d been swimming and had returned to the shore and had made my way up the sand to where I’d left my towel and my flip flops, but before I’d started toward the boardwalk, along which I needed to wander to reach the stairs that led down to the sidewalk that separated the seaside from the neighborhood in which was the train that had brought me here, I saw at my feet, while I was drying my torso and my legs, a shell from which emerged, when I picked it up to look at it, a crab or a crustacean that scurried away before I had a chance to drop the very object in which it had been hiding.