View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
There is a cruelty in abstraction. It cuts into flesh. It relies on our fear of mortality for its meaning. The way it disturbs, distresses is meant to undermine some illusion of duration, of time controlled, even simply perceived. My paintings were abstract and splashed with guilt as much as paint, scratched with shame as much as with the knife or spatula. Back in Philadelphia I discovered bad dreams and fitful sleep. I locked myself away to explore those abstractions. My isolation wore well as I was an artist and artists were supposed to be moody and at least occasionally reclusive. The paintings I made I could just barely look at. I drank. When I emerged from my bed, so to speak, and went to my studio and revealed my paintings at my review, no one said a word. My professors, one after another, quietly, privately gave me nods of approval, then backed away as if something was wrong with me. They had no idea.
“I was so angry with you,” she said.
“I know.” I was pleased she had used the past tense. “I screwed up.”
“Not just about April,” she said. “I’ve been angry for years. You’ve just never been here.”
I listened. Before I might have become defensive, perhaps even hurt, but not now. She poured the tea. She was thirty years older than she was when we first met. She was slightly heavier. Her face was interestingly lined. Her hair was mostly gray. She had never been more beautiful than she was as she poured that tea. And I loved her. I understood that I had always loved her and I was so sad that I had never allowed her to feel that love.
“Here’s a question for you,” I said. “You find the perfect skipping stone.” I picked up a flat rock. “Say this is it. Imagine that this stone is beautifully flat, that it’s Payne’s gray in color, just like this one, oval but not egg-shaped. It’s made for the art of skipping.”
“Okay,” she said.
“It’s perfect. Do you throw it or keep it?”
“You throw it,” she said.
“Really?”
“Yes.” She took the stone from me. “You can keep it until you die and then you’ll never see what it can do.”
“What if you mess up the toss?” I asked. “It just goes splash into the water. No skip, not even one.”
“How is that different from dying with it in your pocket?”
I looked at the water.
“You don’t agree?” she said.
“No, I agree completely.”
“So, what’s the point of all this?”
“About this baby thing.”
interesting that i didn't save this the first time i read the book. i think about this passage a lot, maybe not in the literal sense but in terms of courage in the abstract
At that moment of seeing Victoire childlike on that bench I could have caught myself, freed myself with even the mildest allusion to Lolita, but the fact of the matter was that it was not her youth that attracted me. In fact, I am not even certain that what charmed me was all that genuine, that being her guiltlessness, her irreproachability, either of which were constructions of mine or hers. It really wasn’t that I wanted her, but that I wanted what she had, a kind of freedom, a purity of spirit. It was a sort of integrity, something that I strived for but had lost through so many years, maybe never had. I wanted what she had the way I wanted to draw the way my daughter drew when she was four, when that tangle of lines was an elephant, an elephant that I could not see, but an elephant. I recalled how brokenhearted I was when one day she crumpled up her picture and complained that it didn’t look like an elephant at all. Victoire allowed me to see that simple bench as it was, as more than what it was, and I was happy for it. I loved her for it. I sat on it beside her and felt the smoothness of it under my palms, attended to the coolness of it.
interesting that i didn't save this either!
“Why are you here with me?” I asked.
“Pardon?”
“Victoire, you are a beautiful young woman. Men are drawn to you. Men your age. I’m an old married man. I have two children. I live in another country. I can offer you nothing.”
“That’s not true,” she said.
“How is any of that not true?”
“First of all, I don’t want anything from you. Except you.”
“That’s my point. You can’t have me,” I said. “I’m not going to leave my wife and children.”
“But I do have you, don’t I? You are right here beside me, eating the same croissant, looking at the same overstated church. We lie in the same bed, breathe the same air.”
crazy that i didn't save this either omg
“Suppose,” I said, “we were together. Just for the sake of argument, imagine it. I will die long before you.”
“And then I will be sad before having a happy rest of my life. I will find another man. Maybe another old man like you. Maybe a younger one.”
Her answer was so clean, so perfect, so smart. “Of course,” I said. I reached over and held her hand.
“I told you. You do love me. Tu es mon beau ténébreux.” She leaned over and placed her head against my shoulder. It was an agreeable feeling, a nice weight. I would later confess to myself, sadly, that everything she had said I wanted to hear. I studied the top of her beautiful twenty-two-year-old head, peered through her hair, through her unblemished scalp, through her bone and into her brain, and loved her, wanted her to feel loved. More precisely, I wanted her to feel loved by me. It sounded as stupid then as it does now.
ahhhhh
The women excused themselves and left us on the patio.
“You dog,” Richard said. “You’re not going to say that this isn’t what it looks like.”
“No, I’m afraid it’s exactly what it looks like. A goddamn train wreck.”
“The daughter? How old is she? Twenty-five?”
“Twenty-two.”
“What about the mother?” he asked.
“What about the mother?”
“She’s beautiful, in case you hadn’t noticed. And she knows?”
“Yes.”
Richard whistled. “To the French,” he toasted.
“I’m an idiot,” I said.
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Take my word,” I said.
OR THIS lolllll
“Victoire,” he said to the moon. “She’s a beauty.”
“There are lots of beauties out there,” I said.
“Right. Aren’t you above it all.”
“Yes, she’s beautiful,” I agreed. I stopped at the middle of the bridge and looked down at the Seine.
“Don’t do it,” Richard said.
“Don’t think I haven’t thought of it.” I looked at him. “So, my friend, am I crazy?”
“No, but you’re a carrier.”
“Am I?”
“Yep.”
“This can’t lead to anything,” I said.
“Nope.”
“I’ve got a beautiful family.”
“Yep.”
“Is this pretty much how this discussion’s going to go?”
“Yep.”
“I actually have feelings for this woman.”
“I’m sure you do,” Richard said. “I don’t even know her and I have feelings for her. And for her mother.” He laughed softly. “Don’t listen to me. I know you’ve done the math, but here it is again. She’s nearly twenty-five years younger than you. When she’s thirty-five, you will be fifty-nine. Not quite old, but you see where this is going. Your daughter will be nineteen and will hate your guts. Your son will be fifteen and he’ll excuse himself from the dinner table so he can go to his room and jack off to internet images of Catherine Deneuve.”
“I preferred the monosyllabic routine.”
oh my god lol
“She must have some pussy.”
I caught myself before I could become angered by his remark. Instead, in my head I heard Victoire’s whispered “Je t’aime” and saw her green watercolor. “You have no idea,” I said.
“Tell me, does she make you feel younger? Is that part of this?”
On the face of it this was a reasonable enough question. I thought about it. “No,” I said. “In fact, I feel older. I would have to, wouldn’t I? But the thing is, I don’t care. She doesn’t care. She really doesn’t. So, I don’t care.”
“How moving.”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
cant believe i didnt save this either omg
[...] Social classes, we contend, are fundamentally associated with the stored historical baggage and the accumulation of advantages over time.
Bourdieu says this a lot but I like this phrasing