It makes me smile to know that there's preciousness here and viewable, in its fullest extent. the importantly sad things like poor misconnections left off, little static sparks at the edges of fingers sliding off a handshake, saying goodbye, a brief pause at the top of a set of subway stairs watching a retreating black silhouette turn, then a check to whisper an inaudible goodbye, a self whisked out and up and back where it is the correct time now to go back to longing for the rooms up high and lit, pleasantly unfamiliar, to ground level with streetstepstrewn trash here and there, growingly winter chill becoming punctuation and punctuative thoughts walking along new york's now-placid broad-backbone.
Oh miz 11913 still says it best; at this movement point here on a december night, barely recognizeable by the building-toothed horizon's haze as a december day, I'm sitting thinking about regrets, nights past, excited actions, clear vectors dragging towards a future, direction, pointedness, directness. Now I'm a splayed weak-nosed compass pointing towards a magnetic nostalgia, forgetting true north. What does delillo have to say about this?
A girl taught me how to not underline books; instead I fold the corners over like I'm making mandu (against italicization-exoticization) or dumplings, knowing that if I don't find the justification for a page-fold that I'm looking for, it's not notable anyways, the idea being that the impressionable needs no bibliography. So I try it out; there's last summer's Delillo on my shelf and I scrape it out and down, flip through, there's a fold, here's a paragraph and my jumping heart:
"It was so humid some nights you could not close your door. You had to shoulder your door closed. Bridges expanded and sidewalks cracked and there was garbage in the streets and you had to sort of talk to your door before it would close for you.
She loved the nights that were electrical, a static in the air and lightning in soft pulses, in great shapeless beats, you can almost read the rhythmic pattern, slow and protoplasmal, and maybe Cinzano awning fixed to a table on a higher terrace – you can’t identify that gunshot sound until you spot the striped awning, edges snapping in the breeze.
Klara was happy in a guarded way, keeping it folded close. She had a sense of being favored, fairly well-regarded for recent work, feeling good again after a spell of back pain and insomnia, clear-minded after a brief depression, saving money after a spending spree, getting out and seeing friends and standing at parapets, quietly happy, looking better than she had in years – they all said so.
...
She stood at parapets and wondered who had worked the stones, shaped these details of the suavest nuance, chevrons and rosettes, urns on balustrades, the classical swags of fruit, the scroll brackets supporting a balcony, and she thought they must have been immigrants, Italian stone carvers probably, unremembered, artists anonymous of the early century, buried in the sky."
right, right. Am I not grateful? For music, for literature, for this current state. I'm rushing rushing to get things done, to keep myself aloft and afloat, doing this, rushing through. Sliding in. There are some things more important than work and some things less so, some things more temporary than the rising sun, new days. I pull the blinds up and I find red lights in the distance and suddenly I am glad for whatever civil engineering standard that holds red to be the color of brake and skyscraper warning lights, Korea and US and hopefully the rest of the world, the solidarity of shared connotation manifesting itself across national borders, sodium yellow lights providing similar recollections. right. am I not grateful?