I wrote these words in what must have been a bout of romantic abstraction: life, to put it gently, had stalled. A relationship had recently dissolved. I had returned to New Haven after a two-year absence to finish my last year of law school, and among the terse new faces I encountered in what had once been familiar haunts—the courtyard, the student lounge—places where clusters of students gathered to trade grievances for consolation; to rub ruby red the soles of their inside jokes, and work out the wrinkles in their plans: not a single friend. Company was hard to come by. And to top it all off, it was no longer summer. I wrote these words in the still white light of Connecticut in late October, beneath the tarpaulin of dying trees that obscured an overcast sky, longing for summer the way one longs for company at the margins of those red-hot clusters of people, melding into each other as clusters do, laughing, soldering, screaming.
In that light: life flares brightest in melancholy.
To wade in melancholy is to wade on the outside of things. I often think of melancholy in these terms: melancholy as a still blue swimming pool. Yet another romantic abstraction—but what can you do except fall in love with the waters in which you live? To wade in melancholy is to wade apart from those clusters of people, to see them from afar, to light a cigarette and close your eyes to the thought that if you were only somewhere among them, somewhere inside them, if you were only at the raucous center of that widening gyre of grievances and consolation, of communal misgivings and communal affirmation, catching the chords of dissent in your throat as you speak, and laughing along to their inside jokes—that you will somehow have touched upon the brine of life.
But life flares brightest in melancholy.
Life flares brightest when those truculent instincts recede, when the expectation of integration is subdued by an apprehension of integration as in fact acquiescence, detrimental to the original spirit of the mind; free, indomitable. I am talking here about a period of my life when I spent most of my afternoons not in the anodyne light of the law school but in front of the window of a bookstore on Chapel Street, trying to put my finger on why I had found that light to be so starkly disagreeable, why I had stopped taking an interest in the community hours and lunchtime lectures, the afternoon wine tastings and potluck dinners, so estranged from my community that by the end of October a single photo posted to Facebook seen at the wrong place and time could send me faltering into my coat pocket, fumbling for a cigarette.
To be in melancholy is to be in some way out of step with the world, to no longer have access to certain signals. It comes, in my case and to my high solace, as a form of reverie: you open your eyes and there it is. That fluttering mesh screen. Those bright green leaves. A bright blue swallow sipping from a granite fountain on a calm spring day. You can even see it in the still white light of Connecticut in late October. What you invite in from the world outside you invite in only to augment the individual colors—I am talking here about reasons to “stay in touch,” the suppression of certain gloomy instincts: acts of goodwill among passersby that hint at brotherhood, love between strangers. You keep your eyes on the woman at the center of the raucous table who you imagine, too, has succumbed to daydreams. Your experience of the world is augmented at all times by music, a voice in your ears that you don't quite “hear” but rather integrate as consolation, the first three minutes of “Cortez the Killer,” the moment his trembling voice finally breaks through and your eyes are no longer on those sober faces but at the world outside, at a fistful of leaves that have been shorn from their branches to be dispersed across the still white sky—“he came dancing across the water, with his galleons and guns”—there, there it is, the world of other people be damned.
The brine of life.
Life flares brightest in melancholy.
In melancholy the music peaks. In melancholy the mind is prone to wander, the thoughts congeal, the sentences come. I spent much of that fall working on a novel that would and wouldn't come, pacing outside the law school and trying to avoid in the corridors those classmates whose fathers I understood to be the governor of so-and-so state, the senator of another, the Vice President. Integration is acquiescence. You try to hold it, sentences like these—you try to hold it in your head as you pace and smoke—the sentences whisked out of reverie. But to let it linger—melancholy, that blast of blue—is to expose yourself to blue's inevitable inverse, much as nightfall inevitably blankets over even the whitest of the city's blank white October skies. Suddenly it is December and the campus has emptied and you are caught in between imagined itineraries and imagined places to be, watching from your front porch the playful frolic of Christmas lights in your neighbor's living room window, and you are alone. Loneliness is like that. It catches up to you when you least expect it. Tonight, for instance, is Christmas, and in the dim light of a semester past with little but the outer edges of a novel and the company of books, music, and cigarettes to show for it, my loneliness has finally caught up to me.
I remember Christmas when I was a child, the specificity of our family's place on the outside of things. We were one of the families that didn't quite fit into any of the narratives that America knew. Underclass, yes. Immigrants, yes. Unacculturated, yes. But with dysfunctions and paranoias all our own. On the table would be a rotisserie chicken from Food City, discounted for the holidays. On the TV, rooftops blanketed by snow, windows draped in light, the opposite of melancholy. In the other room my father would be screaming and my mother would be crying. I myself had the chicken and the TV and above all I had the industriousness of youth, had the truculent insistence that there in the vacuum which had failed to open up for certain outsiders like my mother and father, there in the country that had at its margins those linguistic and cultural exiles who for some impenetrable reason had chosen to abandon their homelands—and at its teeming center those comely and embattled people on TV—that there would be a place for me. Integration was all I thought about in those days, was all I was after—what others saw on TV as plot points, I saw as templates. This is how I remember Christmas as a child: sitting in front of the dim blue glow of the TV screen, in touch with the reality of where we stood in this world but dreaming of perfection.
Dreaming of integration.
Of course these are childish instincts, but childhood instincts writ large form the bases of adult society. In the wintry air of Connecticut tonight, standing alone on my front porch and trying to make out shadows in the lighted window across the street, I find myself drifting out of the pleasant narcotic hue of melancholy and once again dreaming of integration, dreaming of a hand to hold in the blue dim of winter. Insistently my mind turns back to that still and languorous summer afternoon back in August, sitting in front of an open window, that fluttering mesh screen, those bright green leaves. “I don't want to go back to New Haven,” I remember saying to my then-boyfriend as the flutter of company thrummed its quiet rhythm all around me, the company of loved ones, the lament of a child. “I want to stay in front of this window forever.” Melancholy is like that: it has as its center some memory of being at peace with the world, in step with the rhythms around you. On the snowy walkway outside the apartment building across the street, a couple drifts past.
The most enduring memory I have of my generation being united around something was not the numbness that many of us felt on the morning after the election, or even the grace and relief almost all of us felt on the night of the election of the president before that. I can still tell you every detail of the moment it happened, the moment the news alert came in on my phone, the moment the bedroom doors in my four-bedroom apartment flung open all at once and I could hear my roommates cheering and shouting from down the hall—“Quick, turn on the TV!” and later “Come on, we're all going to Jimmy's”—the moment my country's fractured generation for the first and last time that I can remember came together as one, the night we learned bin Laden was dead. I remember sharing a cigarette later that evening with a couple of Europeans outside Jimmy's, the chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” still echoing from a television inside the bar. “Well, he was kind of like your country's boogeyman, wasn't he?” I remember a graduate student from Germany pointing out, in a conversation that otherwise tracked the familiar lines of punishment and the balm of closure and just deserts. My country, I remember thinking, trying to summon the exhilaration that had come so easily to the crowd of celebrants around me.
But an exhilaration that reverberates outward, like the kind that accompanies patriotism, and as distinct from the kind that accompanies the death of a boogeyman, has less to do with those private settlements of relief and closure and the balm of just deserts than it does with a more difficult solace. The solace of integration. “Here we go, baby,” the twentysomethings had cheered that night in front of the White House, holding up American flags and red baseball caps and twenty-four-ounce cans of Natty Light. “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!” You experience it while watching breaking news, or as the difference between listening to music on your phone and listening to music in public, roused no longer simply by the opening thrum of Azealia Bank's “212” but by that subliminal perception of cascading affinity, anonymous communion. You experience it at political rallies and college football games, or on the Fourth of July, watching the fireworks among a throng of people as a soaring rendition of “Ride of the Valkyries” plays from an intercom somewhere in the black distance, that homogenization of sympathies bearing the banner of “common purpose” and yet inspired by that atavistic need to belong through and through, specific to no particular purpose at all.
The solace of integration.
I remember that solace from August—and now all of a sudden it is December, all of a sudden the year is done and the only sentences I can still hear in my head as I watch a pair of passing headlights illuminate the driveway across the street and the flare of Christmas lights in my neighbor's living room window have to do with time, lost time. Time balms, time soothes, time flickers and inexorably passes, time and the world as we know it, the only world we'll ever know, and every day we get a little older, the life stretched out in front of us closes in a little tighter, and there we still are, alone in our dreams, alone in our melancholy.
It's when melancholy breaks that the trouble begins.
The danger is on all sides. You drift in a clear blue pool that has at each border some harsher tint of color, envy, resentment, anxiety, dread, panic, and at last alienation. Melancholy breaks when you slip off the edges. I'm not sure when and where it happened in my case except that it happened sometime in the fall, the novel wouldn't come together and the company wouldn't come. All the people I ever met and liked untangled into loose ends. For a period of several weeks I would sit in the back of the classroom, trying to focus on what the professor was saying but finding my attention drift inexorably to the classmates I remembered from various house parties or late-night outings I had talked myself into going to, the classmates passing notes or whispers or sidelong glances to each other in the middle of the lecture hall, the girl who I had laughed about circumcision with over cocktails at the beginning of the year, and why we hadn't struck up a friendship. The last party I ever went to was at a second-year's house where all I can remember anyone talking about was who at our law school was a conservative, who at our law school was a Republican, who at our law school had voted for the current president; MAGA hats were mentioned with a laugh of revulsion that might have accompanied, in an earlier era, the rumor that so-and-so owned an SS armband.
I remember spending most of that evening smoking a bowl on the porch, trying to work out where in this new alignment I even stood. The election had done a number on us. It was easy in the beginning to watch the protests on TV and sink into the blindness of the padded covers, sink into the comfort of knowing that what you were watching on TV was on behalf of the outsiders, the downtrodden, the poor and lonely and browbeaten everywhere—I remember viscerally my mother and father's many brushes with racism and nativism in this country, the vacuum that had failed to open up for them as they stagnated in the underclass. The vulgarity of this particular president's broadsides against certain populations, and more ominously his corralling of certain others, had shaken alive some intuition that the lines had been drawn, and on one side of it stood the good citizens whose empathy and compassion extended outwards, and on the other side stood—and this word came up more than once, came up in classroom discussions about immigration and refugees, came up at happy hours and wine tastings and evening mixers—evil.
There was a sense that the country that had been promised to us when we were young was gone—by “us” I do not mean American millennials, of course, but a very specific segment of us: I mean the ones who had at least a vague idea in high school of what a “safety school” was or what the word “undergraduate” meant, I mean AP students, I mean the educated elite. (I remember taking a perverse pleasure in learning that a girl who otherwise seemed to live a very happy life as the daughter of a national-level politician broke down in tears on election night after realizing her father would no longer qualify for a cabinet position.) “I don't know my country anymore” was not an atypical sentiment of the time, a sentiment I remember identifying with as a child when I was a recent immigrant to the United States but that I was surprised to hear coming out of the mouth of a woman whose father and mother are both sitting federal judges.
I suppose the impulses that the election had awakened in the educated elite should have appealed to me, even if the educated elite did not: egalitarian impulses, an impulse toward a more perfect union, an impulse toward putting an arm around the poor, the lonely, the downtrodden; and inviting them in. The derailment of a political ideology hostile to our country's most vulnerable people. An impulse toward perfection. In this light it is easy to see the curios of groupthink—the skepticism of dissent, the naming of dissenters at house parties—as reasonable compromises. “Incorrect attitudes,” it was understood, had cost us the White House. “Incorrect attitudes,” it was less often pointed out, had also enabled the survival and prosperity of the educated elite, had also afforded them food and clothing and electronics and raw goods from the developing world, had also seized from this country's first inhabitants the land on which they now thrived—had also given them, in other words, everything they had. What is “America,” anyway, if not a country founded and sustained and nourished into preeminence by “incorrect attitudes”?
And how seriously are we to take any American's attempt to ensure that these attitudes are “corrected”?
What I am talking about here is not hypocrisy but coherence. What each and every single one of us is after, by virtue of our ability to see and think critically about the world, is coherence—the coherence of our ideas, the coherence of our access to information, the coherence of our social organization, the coherence of the lives we live and the lives we dream of living—in a word: perfection. But America has never been a coherent country, neither the idea of it nor its lived experience, and the only thing encouraging us to see it this way is our sense that it would all fall apart if we didn't. One of the seductive fantasies about America is that it can be spoken about as a single idea. Yet even in its opening credo—out of many, one—one detects a rich and suggestive shudder: a disunion of people, a disunion of cultures, a disunion of ideas and experiences and ideological starting points.
I remember when I was a child, being taken in with the America diffused to me by the people I saw in movies, by the people I saw on TV—in short, by Hollywood, that technicolor dream factory which in sheer scale and efficacy has put every other propaganda department in the history of humanity to shame. More than any other engine of American life, Hollywood in the last century has made America what it is to the world: a green light of beauty and prosperity, of innovation and opportunity, a multiracial, multiethnic monoculture to be envied and admired and dreamed of from afar. In fact, it never was. What I saw as a child and understood to be America was in fact a culture particular to those who were in a position to tell their stories on TV: America itself was still somewhere else, somewhere impenetrable, swells and ripples of discordant ideas and experiences and ideological starting points, fumbling to march together under the same flag.
It's when that tangled mass of decaying algae and saltwater detritus reaches our shores that the trouble begins.
I am talking now about lives lived in radical obscurity from one another, lives whose only attribute of interest to the people who otherwise had no interest in seeing them were the attitudes they produced, the positions they rallied around, the votes they yielded. They are black or white or both or neither; they are left or right or both or neither; they are astute or naïve or both or neither—they are lives lived outside but in the persistent shadow of the monoculture, lives of obscure dignity and laborious grace that invariably unfold against the pure products of America, the pervasive loneliness and melancholy and sense that no one is watching us, the perpetual indifference to all but the private fates of a glamorous few, the sedative patriotism that works only to obscure that impermeable segregation of classes and cultures and socioeconomic experiences that is in fact the actual experience of American life.
That lives lived in radical obscurity from one another inherit radically divergent starting points and arrive at radically divergent conclusions seemed only to render that obscurity more palatable, those conclusions more untenable, the people out there more inadmissible. I remember being told on more than one occasion this past fall that certain attitudes—invariably traditionalist or reactionary or right-leaning but also invariably held by large swaths of our country's population—were not simply “unsound” or “incorrect” but indicative of solipsism, callousness, childlike thinking, and other defects of one's moral character. That I happened not to align with these attitudes did nothing to ingratiate me to these observations. What I understood instead was that I had passed a literacy test, that I had read the right books and encountered the right people and inherited from those perspectives the right degree of tolerance and empathy and open-mindedness, that I had demonstrated in my attitudes a fluency with the moral vocabulary and ethical intuitions of the educated elite— that, in short, my attitudes had been gentrified.
“You can't reason with them,” I remember overhearing someone say one day after class. “You can't reason with people who want to burn it all down.” This had unsettled me. “Burn it all down” was an exhortation I had last encountered in college, had last encountered in the company of Trotskyists and workers' rights activists and radical feminists in the basement of the humanities building at the University of Chicago, when unemployment was high and wages were stagnant and Obama, two years into office, had failed to emerge from the center-left cocoon of his campaign rhetoric a revolutionary; an exhortation which in the years since the Great Recession and that top-heavy recovery imposed to subdue it had mushroomed and billowed into every pocket of the developed world except its steel-plated surface, its government, its mass media, its major commercial institutions and elite universities, all as quiet and orderly and incurious as ever, as if they'd been designed to hum along with only minor alterations through even the apocalypse, untouched by fire. The fire was somewhere else, and would always be somewhere else, inaccessible to the particular ideations and sensitivities of the educated elite.
It occurred to me while watching an interview with an Ohio voter this past fall that the “correctness” or “incorrectness” of certain attitudes—nativism, retrograde views on race or gender or sexual orientation, a general apathy to the fates of outsiders—held less of an interest to me than the curious predictability of their appearance in an individual's worldview, given only scant details about that individual's material and social conditions. It had weighed on me, too, the melancholy, the alienation, the sense that my family and I had yet to earn a place in this country; I had recoiled in discomfort, too, watching the self-described “lifelong Democrat” in her forties or fifties struggle to explain why she had refused to vote for the Democratic candidate in 2008 and 2012, the doubts she had nurtured about our first black president (“The information I was getting—could have been bits and pieces from television, could have been information that was not true—but it set in my mind that he would not represent us in the event of a war”). Yet these were doubts that I suspect I, too, might have harbored as a child, green to this country and susceptible to conspiracy theories and invectives against elite rule; doubts that seem unintelligible to me now only in light of the fullness and richness of my access to the world, the circles I've been allowed to penetrate, the sensibilities I've had time to nurture.
And that's it, isn't it?
What begins as experience and instinct culminates in attitude. What we are talking about when we talk about the “correctness” of one's attitudes is the “correctness” of one's encounter with the world, is the “correctness” of one's exposure to certain ideas and people and ways of looking at things, the sensibilities one has absorbed and the time one has had to refine them—is, in other words, the fullness and richness of one's access to the world that make up what we talk about when we talk about privilege. In this light the myths lose their piquancy, a certain power to animate: the Zoroastrian struggle between good and evil depresses into a mundane story of isolated tribes in the same country that have evolved in separate pockets of air, each of whom has absorbed from the air around them an impulse to yield to “certain” outsiders, but not others, an impulse to cleanse their base instincts of “certain” traditionalist notions about gender and sexuality, but not others, of “certain” tribalist intuitions about race and religion and country of origin, but still not others; and the class of good citizens whose empathy and compassion are said to radiate outward “further than most” depresses into a league of ordinary people proficient in the vocabulary of privilege and self-reflection in vogue with the powerful classes. How we come to any of it—the base instincts, the immoderate fixations, the splotches of misheard information or the information that isn't there, the righteous indignation, the charitable and uncharitable impulses, the reluctantly held suspicions and then our all too sudden urge to succumb to them; and the whole entire time, like a piano playing in the background, that ever-shifting melancholy, those blue-gray hues—is the story of our lives.
From these hues: out of many, one never came.
In this light the country e pluribus is after never seemed so distant.
At any rate the melancholy had broken for me by the end of the semester, the distance between the integration I had always dreamed of and the specificity of my place on the outside of things had grown so acute that by the middle of November even the window of the bookstore on Chapel Street had shed its dislocating potency, I could no longer call to mind those bright green leaves, that fluttering mesh screen, all I could focus on were the conversations that broke out into laughter at the surrounding tables. I began to spend my days and nights at home, writing on a table littered with takeout boxes long emails to people I had once been close to, people who had gotten married or moved to the other side of the country or both, but the only emails that ever came back were rejection letters for a short story I had sent out in August.
August stayed in my mind, magnified as both a milestone and an object of obsession, a point at which the music had soared and life stretched out long and trembling in front of me and perfection still felt imminent, within reach. In fact, perfection never seemed so tall an order: I misinterpreted stoplights, blundered into puddles, lost my keys for a week and slipped a napkin into the front door whenever I went out for cigarettes (“It's no big deal, every writer I knew in college was a bit of an eccentric,” my roommate once explained by way of consolation). “This is no longer melancholy,” I finally told myself toward the end of November, after the apartment had emptied and I found myself at nine p.m. on the night of Thanksgiving running water from the shower to try and drown out the music from the dinner party upstairs (by then the thoughts no longer congealed, the sentences no longer came).
“This is textbook alienation.”
I saw a specialist the next Tuesday but neglected to tell her about either the dinner party or the running of water from the shower. Instead we talked about ambition, the distance between the lives we live and the lives we dream of living, my ambition and my parents' ambitions and the ambitions of the immigrants I had seen deported on TV; about the ambitions that had projected some of us to law school and some of us to what is amorphously called the “middle class” (as divined by discretionary income or else the number of trees outside one's front window) and still others of us to claw against the blackened side of this country's borders; about the variance in scope and scale of ambition against the tapestry of discordant starting points and discordant outcomes that renders the fate of any “archetypical American,” or even the phrase itself, too obscure to contemplate.
What we did not talk about was what lay at the bottom of the well, the lives at the base of the ladder and the uneasy sense that there is no single point at which an American, simply by virtue of being an American, might cease to fall; instead we danced, in so many ways and in so many words, around the problem of finding a place for oneself in this country—socially, historically, culturally, ethically—in the absence of that safety net, in the absence of having inherited one. Generalized anxiety disorder, the diagnosis came back, which softened it. If melancholy is the fever dream that nevertheless fails to quite soothe us, anxiety is the night terror, a way of living inside the ambiguity of one's private fate, an apprehension of that ever-shifting blackness at the bottom of the well; I say “ever-shifting” because what lays at the bottom of the well is unknowable—that is the point—and hostile to all but the dread-ridden's private vantage point, amenable only to the dread-ridden's secret intuitions. In this regard anxiety, on top of everything else, is also a perversely lonely way of being: an experience of the world resistant to the world itself, resistant to the grandness of its theater (each of our fates, after all, being only one of untold billions), attuned only to the dark water lapping at the bottom of the well, to that encroaching point of no return, the place in the world that wouldn't open for us, the integration that never came.
How we discipline these intuitions is a matter of life or death. The integrated live parallel lives from the alienated.
The alienated go missing, the alienated trail off. The alienated catch a strobe of light in their irises and then vanish into the nocturnal black.
I think I'm finally touching the other side, my god.
I remember that night six and a half years ago, the night bin Laden died, the exhumation of sentiments that were at once so vivid and obscure to me, vivid because for once in our lives we were all aligned together on the same plane and obscure because exaltation in the company of others, as with indignation, as with indifference or goodwill and as with the homogenization of any sympathy that replicates itself by way of mutual affirmation, is at last unknown to itself. Homogenization seeks only to obscure this mist. “From lying so much to try to have the same opinion as everyone else, because there's no point in arguing, I've been paralyzed.” This is a sentence that appears in a letter written by Clarice Lispector to her sister Tania in 1946, and it is a sentence that has stayed in my mind ever since I first encountered it in Benjamin Moser's biography of Clarice Lispector this past fall. I carried it with me like an opiate to every social function, held it in my ear as the soft hues of melancholy dissolved into late-stage alienation, compressed it for its talismanic properties as the voices in the other room curdled into familiar configurations and I found myself gazing at a silent rendition of Paris When It Sizzles through a darkened window, alone on the fire escape.
The story of every empire is the story of replication.
Attitudes are replicated. Virtues are replicated. And above all allegiances are replicated, allegiances to this or that amulet, to this or that point of departure, to this or that way of untangling the world; truisms bleed into platitudes bleed into blind neglect bleed into self-serving indifference and amass into a miasma of “shared wisdom,” internal to each and every isolated pocket of people, and because so much of that shared wisdom is unobjectionable (even murderers and misogynists and pedophiles seldom welcome it when the harm they inflict on others is recreated in themselves), the miasma itself is rendered wholesale unobjectionable; and what we are left with are those accommodating people in whom the allegiances were replicated correctly, and the murderers and misogynists and pedophiles in whom they were not. To be replicated correctly is to be a candidate for everything else: the integrated absorb what they need to absorb to live graceful and productive lives—it is, in the final analysis, perhaps humanity's least intrusive way of holding disparate people with quarantined ambitions and quarantined fates together.
But to be replicated incorrectly is to be exposed—not necessarily cast into, not yet, but exposed—to the most routine and lacerating of humiliations that can befall a human being, that fundamentally social animal, in the course of ordinary life: alienation. Alienation is the means by which we, man, purport to repair the errors in our replication; and its regular application (from the scorn banally delivered about a colleague in passing to imprisonment and exile) is understood not only to be a matter of conventional necessity, but a delight to our sense of justice. A delight? Yes, a delight: what renders the retributive instinct so uniquely insidious is that an intrusion of self-consciousness need not spoil all the fun. “Good awaits the good,” justice is widely understood to counsel, “and evil shall await evil”—and if humanity has been less than fully thorough in seeing through the first half of the equation, it has been rapacious about seeing through the second. The miseries men dole out to men are no longer doled out capriciously, erratically (not in this day and age, not in the developed world, not in America); they are always “earned,” a feather in the cap of our moral compass. In the least equivocal of circumstances, if one's transgression is lurid enough (if one is a mass shooter, or if one is a pedophile, or if one has committed some lesser offense but looks or talks funny enough) the transgressor is flattened into a funhouse-mirror parody of human life, a boogeyman, a moral monster; and to speak of the monster's essential likeness to the rest of us is to perpetrate some further indignity, some further assault against the monster's casualties or else humanity's good name itself.
To be replicated incorrectly is to be at the indefinite mercy of the goodwill of the integrated.
In late-stage alienation even the general upward swing of human history has a tendency to disconsole. You begin to perceive each barrier rescinded, each glass ceiling shattered as less an intrusion into the palace than an encroachment upon some final exhaustion of the palace's good humor; the many rabid efforts of the integrated on behalf of the outsiders (“put an arm around the poor, the lonely, the downtrodden; and invite them in”) the prologue to some final depletion of possibility. Your eyes stay on the people out there. Who we keep out there will continue to be anomalous, passed over, unspoken for, “out there”: for them we have devised the miasma and we have devised the taboos and we have devised our little punishments for upsetting those taboos. And yet in those taboos the discarded shivers of truth glisten— I think I'm finally touching the other side, my god. In taboo the contrarian swims, in those fetid waters the artist is nourished, the writer is vitalized, the music is forever discordant. To chart a path through taboo is to probe for truth in a basin of error. The danger is on all sides: at each edge of some sublime discovery lies the putrid carrion of moral and intellectual decay, the ordure of human folly, falsehood after falsehood after falsehood. The air is rancid, but ah, such sweet rancid air! Such sweet respite to be banished by that miasma, to melt apart from those red-hot clusters of people, their solidified instincts, to forge a home away from common wisdom, those communal misgivings and communal affirmation, the sincere convictions, fashionably virtuous or else fashionably transgressive, the integration, the consolation. In his exile from miasma the alienated divines his final purpose, to sift through error for truth, to restore to its rightful place what the integrated have abandoned, the alienated, that intrepid trekker, fumbling toward that final solace: the perfection of common wisdom.
The aim of all literature should be the perfection of common wisdom.
I think I've finally touched the other side, my god.
I no longer think of August, that still and languorous summer afternoon. I'm no longer homesick for the love I had had or the love I have lost. I live on a fire escape now, ten stories tall. It isn't quite the home I had imagined for myself, and I suppose I could tell you that the isolation terrifies me, the howl I had heard as the melancholy shattered, I suppose I could tell you that the lights of this country undo me, America, that atomized empire, so rife with error and replete with avulsions, so awash in the sonorous peal of life stacked upon life, the cacophony of music liberated from every rupture, the place in the country that never opened up for me—but in fact it doesn't.
In fact it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.
Banner graphic source: Detail of an unfinished oil portrait of George Washington ("The Athenaeum Portrait") painted by Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828) in 1796 and used thereafter as the model for numerous other depictions of the first President, including the image which appears on the one-dollar bill. The painting is held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and is in the public domain. Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
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