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[...] How he wished he could cast it all off, admit his ignorance, embrace his normality. He entertained absurd fantasies of giving up his teaching job and becoming a plumber or a van driver instead. If he thought for more than a few minutes, however, he realized that this was impossible. The idea of normality still revolted him. The people he saw every day-with their haircuts, their glasses, their well-chosen shoes-they had never welcomed him before, and he had spent his adult life leaning away from them. How could he now seek succor in their ranks?
So, deported from the higher state of intellect and ideas, and unwilling to take up citizenship in a more mundane country of skin and bone, Chester had for the past three years been stuck in a limbo, stranded in a purgatorial Heathrow of indecision and inertia. His marriage remained an engagement, his book a few contradictory jottings, all he didassiduously and almost every hour-was eat. He guzzled up to seven meals a day, and the departmental snack bar became his de facto office.
lol
What kind of life must that be? Eight hours up and dowp on a train, into the Railway Arms to drink yourself silly, dinner from a frying pan, a terrible hangover and then begin again. Moving from job to job, shedding friends, gathering illnesses. Chester stopped chewing for a moment and let the possibility of desolate and dreary singleness sweep over him like a gust of secondhand smoke. He had always thought that life, his life at least, would end, whatever its meanderings and false starts, in an undefined but surely well-deserved, satisfaction. Now, as he pushed on towards forty, and in the sad half-light of this disheveled steward, it began to occur to him, slowly and embarrassingly late perhaps, that this was not necessarily so. Some mistakes once made were never rectified; some chances missed would never reappear. Looked at from this perspective, life struck Chester suddenly as harsh and inadequately explained, and happiness as a matter not of time but of desperate human effort.
She had met Chester at a house party in Bedfordshire in 1988, a month before her finals. By that point she had given up studying almost entirely. Her life was devoted to cocktail parties and the drama club, and the thought of writing an essay practically sent her to sleep. Chester, in contrast, was in the flush of graduate-student enthusiasm: his long, shy silences would be broken only by loud outbursts against formalism and in favor of Belgian semiotics. He struck her at first as an exotic oddity-as dark, intense and badly dressed as a Russian dissident. Once they had been out together a few times, however, she began to interpret his seriousness, his desperate almost painful need to succeed and his concomitantly dreadful if inarticulable awareness of failure, as a sign of maturity. None of the males she had been with before seemed to care very much about what was coming, probably because they assumed that their lives would be much like their parents’ except with more sex and better gadgetry. But for Chester the future was a fearsome, shaggy-headed ogre which every day he would have to wrestle to the ground and which every morning would be on its feet again strong and resistant as ever. Although these anxieties arose mainly from the particularities of his temperament and class, for Lucilla they were signs of a wonderfully premature oldness. At twenty-four he was fatherly. Within a month she had decided, in the silent but irreversible way of hers, that they had mated for life, and the actual events that followed: Chester’s appointment at the University of the Metropolis, his book, her sparkling success at The Daily Continent, their engagement, were to her just delightful bubbles on the surface-froth while the dark strong riptide of their life together ran irrefutably on.
It had taken quite a while for Chester’s growing girth and his continuing refusal to set a date to complicate this thinking. In the previous eighteen months they had attended twelve weddings, five christenings and a bris. The effects had been incremental; each on its own did not trouble her but taken together they signaled to Lucilla that at some point in the recent past the chronology of her life had gone seriously awry. Chester was fat and uncommunicative; she was wealthy and well-known; they talked only about television and restaurants, and rarely had sex. Theirs was the lifestyle of exhausted fifty-year-olds, but they were not even married. She had never given birth!
For Chester, who had never been abroad, it was all a delight and a revelation. Sitting in a bar the afternoon before they left, he looked around at the French people with their long, dark hair and unusual raincoats and thought how strange they seemed in some ways, but in other, more important ways, how familiar. He was one of them now. They were all in it together-loving, being loved, the great pandemonium of desire.
i just like that line
At about the same time, Lucilla began to blag the occasional celebrity interview, the proceeds of which she squandered on new clothes for both of them: for her, little patterned sundresses and great clunky shoes; for Chester, Paul Smith safari suits and gut-tight rollnecks.
Thus refashioned, they went to drinks parties in Hampstead and Notting Hill, and instead of rooting himself, as he previously would have, by the buffet table, Chester mingled. At first he felt dreadfully adrift and vulnerable among the yakking shoals of writers and consultants. But he realized quite quickly that their conversation was mainly burnished gossip and routine innuendo, and that the people he had feared or despised were, depressingly perhaps, no more or less competent or entertaining than he was himself.
omg lol
After eating, Chester would, as a rule, spend twenty minutes contemplating his own unhappiness, its nature and its depth. This was like dropping a stone into an old quarry and waiting for the eventual splash, except every year the wait was longer, and while he waited the empty sound of loneliness screamed in his ears and his face felt as numb and nerveless as if he had been novocained. Occasionally he drooled.
jesus
Commencement
They're calling old people seniors
short for senior citizens but it's as though
they're still in college and can look forward
to graduate school at Purgatory State
or the University of the Damned and
I can see this poem is intent on being Catholic
though it started out agnostic
Maybe that's because I was talking
to Ed Webster on the phone tonight
and he described himself as an agnostic
who got a job teaching at a Catholic school
in the Bronx or maybe because I was reading
the classifieds in The Daily News today
and several greeted dead ones in heaven
in any case I like seniors maybe the rest of us
are juniors and sophomores and we still have
the junior prom and all that romantic angst
to go through before we reach the holy land
:)
[...] The newspaper column is too finished, too regular; it is an easily digested piece. The essay of the kind that I have long enjoyed reading-as perfected by, say, Montaigne, Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Orwell or E.B. White-has all but disappeared from modern English. Anyone with an argument of more than 1,000 words is called an essayist-which is a shame given that, at its best, the essay strives for the literary permanence of a poem or novel and, I think, concerns the search for a personal voice. For Montaigne the essay was a philosophical form-amorphous, reflective, digressive and informed by self-revelation. Above all, it was personal and confidential. And he was writing not because he was commissioned but because he felt compelled to do so. His essays were ends in themselves. Hazlitt somewhere likens the idea of the essayist's role to that of a traveler embarking upon a long journey, the destination of which is uncertain. It is something like that for an essayist ... the idea of starting in one place and ending up somewhere completely unexpected. The word essai, in French, means an attempt, which captures the tentative nature of the form, a questing for knowledge. In this sense, the best essayists are those who have the gift of digression, those who can surprise the reader and themselves, who are able to luxuriate in language and to elaborate and inflate any chosen subject. One of the frustrations of being a writer in Britain, at the moment, is that there are very few places where you can publish essays which are not, in effect, extended book reviews. There is the monthly magazine Prospect, which in eclecticism, range and style recalls the defunct Encounter, and very little else. Few publications offer space for long, discursive essays.
by Jason Cowley
JOHNSON: There was a horrible piece I wrote in 1968 praising the student revolution. I'd gone to Paris to cover the Vietnam talks and then in the middle of this the students exploded, for no reason at all, and this became the story. Everyone forgot about Vietnam. It was very exciting, of course, and I fell for it and wrote a piece, which was a kind of imitation of The Communist Manifesto saying that a new specter was haunting Europe, a specter of students. It went down very well—that wasn't the problem. I realized I'd made a huge error of judgment when, in the same week, no less than four very rich men congratulated me on it.
lol