Chapters (60)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Personae
- I: Early Days
- One. Control
- Two. Doubt
- Three. Fate
- Four. Same
- Five. Fine Arts
- Six. In Loco Parentis
- Seven. Settling
- Eight. Neighbors
- Nine. Prospects
- Ten. The Lucky
- Eleven. Instruction
- Twelve. Same
- Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
- Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
- Fifteen. The Reason
- Sixteen. That Person
- Seventeen. Predictably
- II: Writing Teacher
- Eighteen. Early Poems
- Nineteen. Motivation
- Twenty. Allegory
- Twenty-One. Grief
- Twenty-Two. A Portrait
- Twenty-Three. Veils
- Twenty-Four. Soft Power
- Twenty-Five. Lists
- Twenty-Six. A Break
- Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
- Twenty-Eight. Custom
- Twenty-Nine. Parity
- Thirty. Fortune
- III: Volta
- Thirty-One. Images
- Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
- Thirty-Three. Letters
- Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
- Thirty-Five. Love
- Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
- IV: Your Best Reader
- Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
- Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
- Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
- Forty. Détente
- Forty-One. Worlds
- Forty-Two. Recognition
- Forty-Three. Persistence
- Forty-Four. And Then
- Forty-Five. Mingling
- Forty-Six. You
- Forty-Seven. Persona
- Forty-Eight. Est et Non
- Forty-Nine. The Author
- Epilogue
- Afterword: The Libertine
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors
She is unsure, at this moment, what the story is in this, but she can feel the tension that once indicated to her a beginning. She isn’t sure if this familiar feeling is only imagined by her. She hopes she’s just imagining it. Nevertheless, she begins making a list of possible elements for the story. It feels fine to do this because she knows she will never manage to turn this into anything, find the reason for these clues. It’s too hard to begin.
• Paris
• College
• Father
• Courbet
• Lie by omission
Clare pauses, adds a sixth bullet:
• About recognition
Sixteen. That Person
Sixteen
That Person
Sometimes it seems to Harry that there is someone else. Who the person is doesn’t matter.
It’s just, someone else is here. The person, that person—mythic and free, an indefinite being—sifts through experience alongside Harry. You wouldn’t see that person, like, in real life, but Harry knows that person is there. The reason Harry knows is that often Harry thinks, or even sees, things that he couldn’t possibly think and see, or, for that matter, hear. Knowing this, about that other person who is there, that person, explains how Harry can sometimes be capable of acts of perception obviously beyond him.
Take, for example, today’s issue of The Sentinel. Harry has been underlining phrases that interest him. Sometimes when he finds a phrase, he writes it down on an index card. He then files the card away in a metal box with a hinged lid that he recently acquired via a tub of FREE STUFF (CLEAN) on the nicer residential block between here and the library.
Harry creates a card for civilian status, derived from an article on overseas deployment. Are there, he wonders, other statuses?
There are. Harry is living in America.
Harry knows, based on his limited poetical reading, but whatever, that he’s supposed to be using language that might “mean more than one thing” when he’s creating a poem. But it’s confusing to him how exactly this should work, from the point of view of production. For this reason, he’s developing a work-around. He’s decided to find language that definitely means one thing and then to try his best to use it in another way, so that it definitely cannot mean the very thing it usually means—which is to say, exclusively.
On one level, this seems complicated, but in practice it’s been simple. It’s like switching price tags in the grocery store. It’s so satisfying to remove that fragile gummy fragment. To place it on a different can.
Harry sighs.
He closes the top of his tin box and shakes. The cards make a sound.
There is some pressure to make a poem.
Harry flips to the crossword.
The Great Communicator is a nice clue, 23 across, so he writes that down on a card.
Harry stands, stares at the door, sits.