of course wrong .
“Describe” would be better .
“Suggest” would be better still .
On the other hand: “tell” might work: try “tell” as she uses it .
I try it: She “tells” her present fear of life in relation to Sartre .
I try it again: She “tells” her present fear of life in relation to Heidegger. She “tells” her understanding of the abyss. She qualifies her understanding of the abyss: “This is merely how I interpret the abyss; I could be wrong.”
Considerable time passes before I realize that my preoccupation with the words she used has screened off any possible apprehension of what she was actually saying when she wrote her journal entry on that March day in 1984.
Was that deliberate?
Was I screening off what she said about her fear of life the same way I had screened off what she said about her fear of The Broken Man?
Hello, Quintana? I’m going to lock you here in the garage?
After I became five I never ever dreamed about him?
Did I all her life keep a baffle between us?
Did I prefer not to hear what she was actually saying?
Did it frighten me?
I try the passage again, this time reading for meaning.
What she said: My present fear of life .
What she said: Pass into nothingness .
What she was actually saying: The World has nothing but Morning and Night. It has no Day or Lunch. Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep . When I tell you that I am afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street, is this what I am actually saying?
Does it frighten me?
25
L et me again try to talk to you directly.
On my last birthday, December 5, 2009, I became seventy-five years old.
Notice the odd construction there —I became seventy-five years old —do you hear the echo?
I became seventy-five? I became five?
After I became five I never ever dreamed about him?
Also notice—in notes that talk about aging in their first few pages, notes called Blue Nights for a reason, notes called Blue Nights because at the time I began them I could think of little other than the inevitable approach of darker days—how long it took me to tell you that one salient fact, how long it took me to address the subject as it were . Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored: I have watched tears flood the eyes of grown women, loved women, women of talent and accomplishment, for no reason other than that a small child in the room, more often than not an adored niece or nephew, has just described them as “wrinkly,” or asked how old they are. When we are asked this question we are always undone by its innocence, somehow shamed by the clear bell-like tones in which it is asked. What shames us is this: the answer we give is never innocent. The answer we give is unclear, evasive, even guilty. Right now when I answer this question I find myself doubting my own accuracy, rechecking the increasingly undoable arithmetic (born December 5 1934, subtract 1934 from 2009, do this in your head and watch yourself get muddled by the interruption of the entirely irrelevant millennium), insisting to myself (no one else particularly cares) that there must be a mistake: only yesterday I was in my fifties, my forties, only yesterday I was thirty-one.
Quintana was born when I was thirty-one.
Only yesterday Quintana was born.
Only yesterday I was taking Quintana home from the nursery at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica.
Enveloped in a silk-lined cashmere wrapper.
Daddy’s gone to get a rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in .
What if you hadn’t been home when Dr. Watson called?
What would happen to me then?
Only yesterday I was holding her in my arms on the 405.
Only yesterday I was promising her that she would be safe with us.
We then called the 405 the San Diego Freeway.
It was only yesterday when we still called the 405 the San Diego, it was only
“Describe” would be better .
“Suggest” would be better still .
On the other hand: “tell” might work: try “tell” as she uses it .
I try it: She “tells” her present fear of life in relation to Sartre .
I try it again: She “tells” her present fear of life in relation to Heidegger. She “tells” her understanding of the abyss. She qualifies her understanding of the abyss: “This is merely how I interpret the abyss; I could be wrong.”
Considerable time passes before I realize that my preoccupation with the words she used has screened off any possible apprehension of what she was actually saying when she wrote her journal entry on that March day in 1984.
Was that deliberate?
Was I screening off what she said about her fear of life the same way I had screened off what she said about her fear of The Broken Man?
Hello, Quintana? I’m going to lock you here in the garage?
After I became five I never ever dreamed about him?
Did I all her life keep a baffle between us?
Did I prefer not to hear what she was actually saying?
Did it frighten me?
I try the passage again, this time reading for meaning.
What she said: My present fear of life .
What she said: Pass into nothingness .
What she was actually saying: The World has nothing but Morning and Night. It has no Day or Lunch. Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep . When I tell you that I am afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street, is this what I am actually saying?
Does it frighten me?
25
L et me again try to talk to you directly.
On my last birthday, December 5, 2009, I became seventy-five years old.
Notice the odd construction there —I became seventy-five years old —do you hear the echo?
I became seventy-five? I became five?
After I became five I never ever dreamed about him?
Also notice—in notes that talk about aging in their first few pages, notes called Blue Nights for a reason, notes called Blue Nights because at the time I began them I could think of little other than the inevitable approach of darker days—how long it took me to tell you that one salient fact, how long it took me to address the subject as it were . Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored: I have watched tears flood the eyes of grown women, loved women, women of talent and accomplishment, for no reason other than that a small child in the room, more often than not an adored niece or nephew, has just described them as “wrinkly,” or asked how old they are. When we are asked this question we are always undone by its innocence, somehow shamed by the clear bell-like tones in which it is asked. What shames us is this: the answer we give is never innocent. The answer we give is unclear, evasive, even guilty. Right now when I answer this question I find myself doubting my own accuracy, rechecking the increasingly undoable arithmetic (born December 5 1934, subtract 1934 from 2009, do this in your head and watch yourself get muddled by the interruption of the entirely irrelevant millennium), insisting to myself (no one else particularly cares) that there must be a mistake: only yesterday I was in my fifties, my forties, only yesterday I was thirty-one.
Quintana was born when I was thirty-one.
Only yesterday Quintana was born.
Only yesterday I was taking Quintana home from the nursery at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica.
Enveloped in a silk-lined cashmere wrapper.
Daddy’s gone to get a rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in .
What if you hadn’t been home when Dr. Watson called?
What would happen to me then?
Only yesterday I was holding her in my arms on the 405.
Only yesterday I was promising her that she would be safe with us.
We then called the 405 the San Diego Freeway.
It was only yesterday when we still called the 405 the San Diego, it was only
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