Thought. Dream.

The meeting was boring as usual. He'd dozed off, as usual.

It's not a dream if you can will it. Why not? Does this then qualify as thinking? You don't think so? Who the fuck are you arguing with? You don't know? What are you doing anyway? You know what's more embarrassing? That you care enough to think your life is embarrassing. That it is, isn't. That you think it is, is. 

His name was called out. He's travelling to Baltimore. Clients were more fun. At least they kept his honesty from himself.

He wanted to tell her he did not want to cry again. He did not.

The Aftermath

What Emily Dickinson did not mention when she wrote 'After great pain a formal feeling comes':  the struggle between stubbornness to maintain formality and the willingness to yield is just as painful.

Broken Promises & Disturbed Sleep

He wanted to announce that falling out of sleep at 3.30 AM was not waking up. That the broken promise of sleep still had a redemptive possibility. Waking up was reserved for 6 AM, when staring into the unforgiving empty day did not have the promise of a hiding place. 

Blending

Define it, he'd say. He tried. But that's merely solitude with an extended frame of reference, he'd point out.

Then it actually struck him. Down. The definition did. In solitude, the feedback of one's own definition still reiterates oneself. The absence of that last loop is what makes it isolation. 

Darkness is at least amorphous, he thought.

Aging emptiness

She wasn't the type to be moved by the depth of his torment. He was embarrassed. That had stopped moving anybody, let alone her. He wanted to ask her why. He did not.

Elsewhere she said, of course it's not Utopian if the goal of your life is to have your children grow up and claim to have been raised by a depressive.

Office

What do you mean you want a wider group?

Just to make sure we aren't too dependent on you.

And the wider group will help in that because?

Don't be antagonistic.

Okay, let me rephrase. Why do you assume inference approaches work better for power equations and not for the actual inference engine that's being built? 

What?

You just defeated your own argument.

Wish it on no one

Coming from anyone else, this would have sounded pretentious. Not Walser,

I would wish it on no one to be me.

Only I am capable of bearing myself.

To know so much, to have seen so much, and

To say nothing, just about nothing.

The day after

A desire to be tortured is not worth the effort in being that.

Relearning this is otherwise known as the human condition.

Consider the Ant

Philosophy classes usually teach the ethics of suicide as some sort of a cost benefit analysis, don't they? Or, they argue that the rationality of imposing death rests on the returns longer term life not outweighing the short term pain. The crucial aspect being that the point at which such a consideration is made is as critical. That is, if one were to consider a person X who had pain Y at time t1, it does not matter what the pain becomes at time t2. What matters is the judgment of the benefits of a life well lived at a later point as compared to the pain Y at the time t1. This has all sorts of inherent issues given the judgment at time t1 is by very definition under a 'cloud'. But that is not the point of whatever this is. Most Philosophy departments will deal that question in their introductory courses. 

What isn't clear is if Y weren't pain but insult. Not pain inflicted by insult but the epistemic insult of life itself. I wish to propose, there is a number unto which the external stimuli do outweigh the insult. Only time t1 here is the age of the person. 

Kettle

The woman in green was narrating a story. Some story. 

You were high but aware; that's one of the things that annoyed you about yourself. She must be a nice person. Her friends seem to pay attention. One of them seems hot.

She says she's got a song for everyone in the room. She stops at you second. She says something you can't follow. They'd assumed you were stoned. But others' reek isn't a problem of intoxication. They can't be expected to know that. They seem like happy people.

Incompleteness

She wasn't really the talking type.

He told her his pursuit was noble. It took half that sentence for him to be embarrassed by it. 

She was noble. That he had established; by definition. All else was unprovable.

He wanted to ask if her fist was full of clay.

Tell me more

She gave him a patient hearing. She always did that. After all, a person who had things to say, even if in bad faith, had things to say. He had a way of making his pettiness seem grand. Neither of them were sure if this was owing to his ability or because she had politely let it pass all those years ago and it'd assumed a character of its own. But it made the conversation appear elevated and burying their incompetence was a mutual goal anyway. Short term-ism isn't just a corporate phenomenon, he'd say; in the conversation itself, the self referencing will have passed for abstraction.

Reading gives the reader too much space. That must be why he had issues with writing. 

Others' reek

You have double parked your auto on a rather busy section of Sardar Patel Road. The man in the car wants to make a right; instead he makes noises that stem from righteous indignation. Smug motherfucker. You yell back and call him random names as a reflex. He stops and smiles back. You take the abuse up a notch, walk up and dare him to step out.  He does. And stands upright. The smile breaking into laughter is designed to insult; you know that. You dare him further to hit you. He gives it thought.

Yesterday reeks in the rum of your breadth. He must have smelt it too.

You were talking to the crowd. He was still contemplating the dare. He shows shame. That should teach him. 

Same Result, Faster

Or, if David Foster Wallace had lived in Madras he'd have died earlier.

The Wall

It always seems to be a physical thing. It's vast and one doesn't see the either ends of it. But it's still an object, one would think; infinitude does not disqualify object status, does it? The question one is left with however is, while everything on this side is dark, why is it even visible? It's stone. Is that implication of light an exponentially decreasing function? 

A dead daughter and a forgotten thought

I forget the name of that William Wordsworth poem where he poignantly points to the paradox of human grief: on losing his daughter Dora, he assures himself that time is a true healer but is so shattered when he realizes that in that process he remembers less of her.

He being who he is wrote it well enough; I am sure scholars have dissected that work better than I can.  I thought it was worth pointing to, as an analogy: thoughts that consume one's vacant isolated nights at times deserve better than being abandoned after Zoloft.

Jack Holmes and His Friend

When Ernest Hemingway said 'write what you know' I am certain he did not mean to dismiss 'imaginative literature' as John Irving likes to claim. The proof of that pudding is in Edmund White's evocation of longing in his most recent book Jack Holmes and His Friend. It is comforting to know that such chroniclers of life exist; that the novel as a literary device still attempts to crystallize life's many ambiguities. And above all, that exploration of the human condition requires one to have lived a life and not necessarily attend an MFA program.

Jack Holmes is a complex man. He is endearing in his obsessive love for one man, cold in his indifferent handling of others' longing for him. But such is the depth of his internal struggle that the reader wants to be the object of his obsessive infatuation. The kind of human complexity that makes one realize sexuality is an artificial construct. Edmund White's treatment of the straight man is a lot less compelling. Is it because he lives the Hemingway maxim too well or was it an intended juxtaposition is something I have not been able to understand.

This is a very good novel. Please read it.