or someone at a cocktail party, or one of my friends’ parents, and there I am looking at the ground in rank embarrassment—and he’d just say, “What?” opening his palms, imploring, “What? I’m
serious
.”
What he really did was teach English literature, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Donne, down at St. Anselm’s. At home he was always coming out with quotes and allusions, murmuring literary lessons from the side of his mouth, responding to the random events and mundane conversations of our household with dollops of abstract commentary.
The substance of most of these asides I have long since forgotten, but one stays with me.
I’d come home whimpering, tearful, because this kid Burt Phipps had shoved me off a swing. My mother, Peg, pretty and practical and efficient, wrapped three pieces of ice in a sandwich bag and held them to my injury, while my father leaned against thegreen linoleum counter, wondering why this Burt character would do such a thing.
And I, sniffling, go, “Well, because he’s a jerk.”
“Ah, but no!” pronounces my father, holding his glasses up to the kitchen light, polishing them with a dinner napkin. “One thing we can learn from Shakespeare, Hen, is that every action has a motive.”
I’m looking at him, holding this drooping sandwich bag full of ice to my bruised forehead.
“Do you see it, son? Anybody does anything, I don’t care what it is, there’s a reason for it. No action comes divorced from motive, neither in art nor in life.”
“For heaven’s sake, dear,” says my mother, squatting before me, peering into my pupils to eliminate the possibility of concussion. “A bully is a bully.”
“Ah, yes,” Father says, pats me on the head, wanders out of the kitchen. “But, wherefore doth he
become
a bully?”
My mother rolls her eyes at him and kisses me on my wounded head, gets up. Nico’s in the corner, age five, building a multistory palace of Legos, lowering into place the carefully cantilevered roof.
Professor Temple Palace did not live to see the advent of our present unfortunate circumstance; neither, unfortunately, did my mother.
In a little more than six months, according to the most reliable scientific predictions, at least half the planet’s population will die in a series of interlocking cataclysms. A ten-megaton explosion, roughly equaling the blast force of a thousand Hiroshimas, will scorch a massive crater into the ground, touching off a series of Richter-defying earthquakes, sending towering tsunamis ricocheting across the oceans.
And then will come the ash cloud, the darkness, the twenty-degree dip in global temperatures. No crops, no cattle, no light. The slow cold fate of those who remain.
Answer this, in your blue books, Professor Palace: what effect does it have on motive, all this information,
all this unbearable immanence
?
Consider J. T. Toussaint, a laid-off quarryman with no previous criminal history.
No verifiable alibi for the time of death. He was at home, he says, reading.
Under normal circumstances, then, we would next turn our attention to the question of motive. We would wonder about those hours they spent together, that final evening: they went to
Distant Pale Glimmers
, they got loaded on movie-theater beer. They fought over a woman, perhaps, or some silly old half-remembered elementary-school insult, and tempers flared.
The first problem with such a hypothesis is that’s just not how Peter Zell got killed. A murder resulting from a long night of drinking, a murder about a woman or a pissing contest, is a murder committed with a bat, or a knife, or a .270 Winchester rifle. Here instead we have a man who is strangled, his body moved, a suicide scene deliberately and carefully constructed.
But the second and much larger problem is that the very idea of motive must be reexamined in the context of the looming catastrophe.
Because people are doing all sorts of things, for motives that can be difficult or impossible to divine
serious
.”
What he really did was teach English literature, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Donne, down at St. Anselm’s. At home he was always coming out with quotes and allusions, murmuring literary lessons from the side of his mouth, responding to the random events and mundane conversations of our household with dollops of abstract commentary.
The substance of most of these asides I have long since forgotten, but one stays with me.
I’d come home whimpering, tearful, because this kid Burt Phipps had shoved me off a swing. My mother, Peg, pretty and practical and efficient, wrapped three pieces of ice in a sandwich bag and held them to my injury, while my father leaned against thegreen linoleum counter, wondering why this Burt character would do such a thing.
And I, sniffling, go, “Well, because he’s a jerk.”
“Ah, but no!” pronounces my father, holding his glasses up to the kitchen light, polishing them with a dinner napkin. “One thing we can learn from Shakespeare, Hen, is that every action has a motive.”
I’m looking at him, holding this drooping sandwich bag full of ice to my bruised forehead.
“Do you see it, son? Anybody does anything, I don’t care what it is, there’s a reason for it. No action comes divorced from motive, neither in art nor in life.”
“For heaven’s sake, dear,” says my mother, squatting before me, peering into my pupils to eliminate the possibility of concussion. “A bully is a bully.”
“Ah, yes,” Father says, pats me on the head, wanders out of the kitchen. “But, wherefore doth he
become
a bully?”
My mother rolls her eyes at him and kisses me on my wounded head, gets up. Nico’s in the corner, age five, building a multistory palace of Legos, lowering into place the carefully cantilevered roof.
Professor Temple Palace did not live to see the advent of our present unfortunate circumstance; neither, unfortunately, did my mother.
In a little more than six months, according to the most reliable scientific predictions, at least half the planet’s population will die in a series of interlocking cataclysms. A ten-megaton explosion, roughly equaling the blast force of a thousand Hiroshimas, will scorch a massive crater into the ground, touching off a series of Richter-defying earthquakes, sending towering tsunamis ricocheting across the oceans.
And then will come the ash cloud, the darkness, the twenty-degree dip in global temperatures. No crops, no cattle, no light. The slow cold fate of those who remain.
Answer this, in your blue books, Professor Palace: what effect does it have on motive, all this information,
all this unbearable immanence
?
Consider J. T. Toussaint, a laid-off quarryman with no previous criminal history.
No verifiable alibi for the time of death. He was at home, he says, reading.
Under normal circumstances, then, we would next turn our attention to the question of motive. We would wonder about those hours they spent together, that final evening: they went to
Distant Pale Glimmers
, they got loaded on movie-theater beer. They fought over a woman, perhaps, or some silly old half-remembered elementary-school insult, and tempers flared.
The first problem with such a hypothesis is that’s just not how Peter Zell got killed. A murder resulting from a long night of drinking, a murder about a woman or a pissing contest, is a murder committed with a bat, or a knife, or a .270 Winchester rifle. Here instead we have a man who is strangled, his body moved, a suicide scene deliberately and carefully constructed.
But the second and much larger problem is that the very idea of motive must be reexamined in the context of the looming catastrophe.
Because people are doing all sorts of things, for motives that can be difficult or impossible to divine
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