Sincerely, do I wish for such a life amidst this death—to be the one warm noodle on the plate of macaroni? . . . ummmmmm, thus I pretend to turn the problem over . . . ummm, so my fork grates upon the plate . . . um, yes. I wish. With my pen’s ultimate breath. It was Gide’s fear. He wondered, worried: would he be sincere? I had a fever, he wrote. My nose bled all day. That was true, no doubt, but was it sincere? What is sincere or not about a nosebleed? Ah, but deciding to say so or not; deciding to set it down, to smear a little blood upon the page . . . how was one to know what was sincere? Is it sincere to lecture yourself—my trade, my chalk-white workday? He gave himself rules like blows: want only one thing! stop puffing up your pride! dare to be yourself! no compromise! Was he sincere, or just a fool? Did he secrete his role in reality like a shell, and later become the snail, as one imagines Rilke did it, going from pose to poet; or did he begin as a sound and then exude some sweet pink conch to lie in like the sea’s ear? He wondered, worried, feared he was mere appearance, Well, he wasn’t born a moralist the way the wasp is born a wasp; no one’s a Prot but on unhappy principle; so we must seek our parts and make our beds, and envy the spider who calmly clouds a web around its world the way the weather does, out of its limitless need, its hunger. Gide upheld this fragrant sentiment this bonne foi—against the current moral cant, which he claimed was a systematic lie; but what was his sincerity but an excuse to be selfish out of love for a comfortable maxim? It’s a young man’s word against mine.

SINCERITY

I cannot find the right hat for my head, the right mesh vest, leaf for my loins.

EMPIRICISM

It’s true that classicists cannot soil themselves with simple-minded seeing the way empirics do: empirics are too dewy, eager, brash, young, innocent, naive. No. And not because experience couldn’t bring them to wisdom better than the Greeks, either, but because experience is broad and muddy like the Ganges, with the filthy and the holy intermixed in every wash; because it is itself the puzzle and the surd; because it teaches primarily through pain, defeat, disappointment, loss; and these leave a groveler inside the heart; to preside in the spirit, they appoint a hanging judge; and create a resentful cripple in the mind, bent to one side in the continuous clutch of its truth.

CLASSICISM

But the classicist has read too many words to believe in their referents; he has encountered so many intricate ills in his libraries, so many lucid riddles, fertile and ravenous as rats, all those terrifying, tormenting testimonies; yes he has felt up far too many facts during all his reading, in all those books, like a breast through the nubbles of a rough cloth, to have faith in their smooth plain names; yet texts tempt him like a willing woman—they moisten his membranes, elevate his energies; whereas I look for love in knotholes and other rounded ironies, and swing my scrotum like an emptied sack.