The Art of Language

It sometimes happens to a person that, after a particularly hectic day when he – or in this case she – believes that life could not possibly hold any more surprises, some final incident will occur that renders all previous misadventures inconsequential in comparison, and leaves the person staring vacantly in slack-jawed incredulity. Let us then forgive Jennifer Jessup her moment of stupefaction as her parents, in their party finery as she’d last seen them twenty years before, slid into the booth opposite her to resume the performance of their parental duties.

How does one prepare for a duel?  What are the details that must be arranged?  If one has already drafted a will and made one’s funeral arrangements; if one has no family to inform; no pets for which to find new homes; no rents in one’s life in need of repair; no letters to write; no goodbyes to be said; then how does one fill the hours between the challenge and the "sunrise three days hence”?  There are, of course, books one would still like to read and the memoirs one has every intention of someday writing.  But reading and, still more, writing require a certain presence of mind − a capacity for concentration.  And how does one apply one’s full attention to the deployment of mere words on paper when one’s very life is in comparatively immediate peril?  − when the blood, now distributing nutriments to one’s various organs and constituent tissues, may, at sunrise three days hence, stain the wildflowers of Veridian Meadows?

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth

Godamned law of gravity, I'll fix its wagon.

Some day — a year from now, or a century, or an eon — the fiddler will play his final tune, and the dancers will retire from the floor.  The last man on earth will bury the second last, and then die alone in his emptiness, and history will cease its brief journey through measured time.  But the world will take no notice of his departure; it will continue without benefit of anthropological participation.   For the future of our planet does not lie with this fragile species, the human race.  The day of our destruction was ordained at the moment of our birth.  We have ourselves devised the method of our ruin as our abilities outpaced our understanding — as our wisdom lagged behind our knowledge.  While flowers will turn toward the light, men cloak their judgment in shadowed superstition.  And decisions, darkly wrought, bear dreadful consequence.  In the end, we shall have been only as strong as our missing link. Though trampled grass will right itself, and decapitated flowers will bloom again, all evidence of our passage will be erased.  Untended treasures will be magpied, away, while the wind will carry off any pitiful scraps of paper we may have left behind as testimony to our brief sojourn.  Lost coins and keys and keepsakes will work their way, over the years, deep into rich black soil, never to be seen again.  And the earth will forget the indignities with which we have defiled her. Rejoice, damned creatures; and take comfort.  Celebrate what is and what has been and what will be no more.  Be content in the knowledge that, long after your frantic dance has ended, the wild flowers of Veridian Meadows will endure.

On bare pavement, the sudden application of brakes generates a strident scream of rubber that cannot be mistaken for any other sound. Its shriek will strike mindless terror into the hearts of everyone up and down the block and inside every building facing the street. But the sound of brakes applied in panic on an ice-covered street is low and liquid. And it conveys a more personal message, speaking only to the driver and to the unfortunate pedestrian who perceives too late the out-of-control vehicle bearing down upon him.   When the moist whisper of rubber sliding down the ice-bound street divulged its horrid secrets in Haskell’s ear, he was unable – blind and helpless as he was – to respond to its urgent message.

I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound - if I can remember any of the damn things.

It had been some years since he had watched his wife as she slept, and he found the experience oddly enlightening. He immediately noticed something in her face he had never seen before. He bent over her to examine her more closely in the diminished light as an entomologist would scrutinize a butterfly of a newly discovered species; yet it took some moments for him to realize exactly what it was that so intrigued him. He discerned in his wife’s face − in this single moment − the innocence of her childhood, the impiety of youth, the concern of her middle years and the weariness of advancing age. It was a baby’s face before him, and yet it was the face of his bride on their wedding day. It was the face he had seen over dinner the evening before, and it was the shriveled visage of the dowager she would someday become. He saw her, not as she had been or would be at any single moment of her life, but as the sum of her existence. He beheld the woman in her entirety.

Though I was never given to introspection, in that brief moment before she screamed, I saw there, in her large and lovely eyes, the reflection of this horrid creature that is I.

And so pass the hours of sweet satisfaction (Are they hours, or brief seconds?) swift winged fragments of the future that cast no perceptible shadow as they hurtle past and dissolve into lingering memory. These fragile moments they would hold forever, a light against the gloom of mundane duration, slip through their fingers and leave them only echoes of their passing.

The booming and the clanking and the screaming chorus of dying men faded from his consciousness, until only a single scream remained − echoing and reinforcing his fear − as he fled down the long and brightly lit hallway.  He burst at last through double swinging doors into a large room filled with lounging old men, and overseen by a wasted and weary nurse.  The nurse looked up at his frenzied arrival, and, as he caught himself in mid-stride nearly losing his balance, she raised an eyebrow and brought an index finger to her lips, blowing a silent "sh” through her teeth, but saying nothing.  The old men continued to lounge, ignoring the disturbance.  And Private Billy Bindleshaft looked around the room, utterly bewildered by the incongruity of it all. Where in hell was he?

Let us reflect for a moment on this enchanted hour of adolescence, when awakened passion overwhelms the hesitant heart and renders logical contention irrelevant; when parental exhortation and reasoned contemplation are banished into the shadows of neglect, to wither and perish in the gloom. Recall the raging appetite of youth that numbs its harried victim to all other hungers − all other thirsts. Remember a time when we too have happily suffered starvation and endured the symptoms of incipient dehydration sooner than deny this consumptive craving, borne of hormonal secretions newly coursing through our veins.

Consider Haskell Yngren − newly adolesced. Slight of build, with mouse-brown hair and hazel eyes, he stands barely five-feet tall – pathetically short for his fifteen years. He has come to the river alone, and he skates the periphery of the shoveled rink with the easy stride and feigned preoccupation of a boy used to solitary skating.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

It is certainly not for us to point the finger of blame if we should meet a man, some Friday night, in the middle of a busy intersection wearing only his shoes and socks and sporting a trendy brass spittoon on his head. Though any such incident may inspire our careful scrutiny before we approach, in the spirit of commiseration and with due regard to our own frailties, we must take care lest we condemn this wretched gentleman on the basis of circumstances that may well have been beyond his power to govern.

Listen, Billy Pilgrim came unstuck in time.

Hari knew this reef well − this demon rock − forged in the fires of hell and thrust up from the black abyss, to lie in wait beneath the surface − whipping the waves into boiling ferment, and hungering to clutch the careless mariner to its scabrous breast. He could name the many fine vessels that had foundered here, and whose moldering bones now lay broken and scattered across the ocean floor below. And he had often heard the voices on the wind − the mournful intonations of good sailing men, forever lost beneath the waves.