Friday, August 26, 2005
I can't come up w/ a title
From Dorothy Parker's Clothe the Naked (Raymond's blind, around 7 yrs old):
"When they were gone, Raymond would start on his walk to the end of the street. He guided himself by lightly touching the broken fences along the dirt sidewalk, and as he walked he crooned little songs with no words to them. Some of the men and women at the windows would say hello to him, and he would call back and wave and smile. When the children, forgetting him, laughed again at their games, he stopped and turned to the sound as if it were the sun."
Laughter as the sun R couldn't see. Beautiful.
Such is my latest reading material. Enjoying J's copy of Dorothy Parker: Complete Stories, her silly/desperate/agonized/pitiful protagonists--"Hobie," she said, "is there a livery stable anywhere around here where they rent wild horses?" ... "Because if there is," she said, "I wish you'd call up and ask them to send over a couple of teams. I want to show you they couldn't drag me into asking who that was on the telephone"--as they struggle to uphold proper dating etiquette, which is essentially the same as today's, just not as fought-against. Don't show too much interest early on, don't ask about the others, you know. I have a few early favorites, one being Sentiment, which is about a woman prone to long and frequent bouts of sentimentality, something her friends insist is foolish: "You wouldn't catch me sitting alone and mooning." But our woman doesn't understand why everyone around her seems to shun feeling, blocking it out in favor of what shall I wear? and who to invite to dinner? This woman, forever hung up on an old flame, sees signs of him everywhere, thus she's constantly got an eye to the past. She's often overtaken by emotion, be it w/ regard to her own life or others' lives she glimpses--on the sidewalk, in a cab, wherever--and she's ever-curious about her impact on others, about how she affects others on an emotional level. "I wonder what she thought when our eyes and our lives met."
When our eyes and our lives met: certainly a lot to that. In a city crawling w/ a gazillion people, there are endlessly many of these chance, fleeting meetings day in and day out. Impressions are so fast, conclusions insubstantial. It can be fun to guess, to pretend to begin to know someone, although for highly sensitive types, the resulting frame of mind can weigh heavy.
Eek. It makes my head spin to think about all the psychology running around Manhattan. Financial ease/woes, love gone right/wrong, family, politics, sex, death, guilt... I'll stop. But really, what psychic energy the city has to offer!
Do visit.
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Best regards from NY!
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