A NUMBER OF YOUNG LOVERS

The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you are awake.

I may lose. I may be lost. I may not make it anywhere. No matter what desperate efforts I make, it may be that things are already irretrievably damaged. I may be only scooping in vain the ashes of ruins, and the only one unaware of it is me. There may be no one here who will bet on my side. “I don’t mind,” I say in a small, determined voice to someone there. “I can say this. At least there are things I must wait for, and things I must seek.”

Look what happens in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Puck’s eyedrops turn Lysander from an opportunistic womaniser into a devoted husband. In Shakespeare’s use of the magic potion, it is not that the object of desire itself is altered - the women are who they are - rather that the man is forced to see them differently. In the same play, Titania briefly falls for a clod wearing an ass’s head - a mischievous use of the transforming potion, but one that questions reality: Do we see what we think we see? Do we love as we believe we love?

I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood - or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.