DREARY

Since my life has become accounts & schedules & more bills each month than it is possible to pay largely for more house than it is possible to clean & maintain let alone decorate though there’s also of course clothes / food / health / the usual suspects multiplied by two or three & debts, I subscribe sometimes tentatively to the chat of colleagues who say time time time & time for because there is no time anymore to read anything except email or bulletins or maybe a few minutes of the New York Times online on Sundays so we lament our salad days of Dostoevsky & Derrida & Wittgenstein, the days when we could plunge all day & half the night in books & read right to the end waking up at nine or noon or three next day with that sweet weight of done while now even when we rise at four, am that is, the day one rapid stream of ruthless interruption, all of it banal or nothing to do with us really and we are no longer conscious of having a soul or even drawing breath to question but still we don’t get done but tentatively I say tentatively because even way back then in my leafy chlorophyll days I wondered about work & and was mighty impressed by friends who could buy big breakfasts, big fry-ups & toast & coffee—I once saw chocolate cake but it was his money he had the right to eat a hunk of chocolate cake for breakfast if he liked—in Bewleys not once in a blue moon but every day as a matter of course and think nothing of it but satisfaction this was their due and what else would you expect I’m going to work, half-read newspaper under arm & they would—in studio or newspaper office and even in my first graduate writing workshop when asked what I was working on I said my schedule and so tentatively not quite agreeing with my colleagues not quite disagreeing but in abeyance, I look back on Dostoevsky and De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre those starter documents which delivered me, after decades, to the over-scribbled date-book, detritus, of today.