It was, I realized later, a day devoted to suffering through the conventional cycle of our sentiments about life, although the drama would not be as elaborately staged as Shakespeare had presented it, since he was more concerned, in that famous speech, with role or station than with mood and emotion alone; nor did it begin with the mewling puking infant, but with that eager, nervous youth, instead, who was half whining schoolboy, half a woeful lover like myself, with a passion for stealth, subterfuge, and superficiality, which was an apt match for those characters in Dime Novels or on the comics page; exclusively a paper hero, nonetheless, fearful yet hopeful as a laboratory mouse, and as easily roused as a shallow lake by any blow—in all, a mix of the Real, Romantic, and Disillusioned, which was much like the lemonade I made to sell at our curb in summer, beneath our cooling trees, for five cents a dinky Dixie cup, each cup rewashed at the outdoor tap until it was flimpy and buckled in the hand the way the day did.

The exuberant white peak was next, the pinnacle inside oneself, just as the mountaineering books had described it for me, where you stood in triumph if only for a moment, burned by the wind, but absurdly elevated by the height achieved, dazzled by the illusion of freedom and flight, when you were actually drowning in distance like a midge on the moon.

And this transcendental moment was routinely followed by that listless descent down the pallid slope of some supremely ordinary Sunday afternoon (though it was fitting that the hour hand should also sink, as if it were mercury marking, twice a day, the yearly approach of winter) —O it was a yawn across a chasm—it was my waiting for the echo of that yawn—and yet it was also an afternoon through which I sometimes raked the yard or burned leaves without once considering the nature of loss, grief, loneliness, or even invoking the poetry of change. In fact, despite my mood, I rather enjoyed the deep red flakes of fire the leaves became, the blue smoke too, like an Indian signal, although my head was clogged with the certainty, as if I’d come down with a cold, that everything would soon be over; that the open hours ahead of me were closing like a store; my free and undemanding time was passing as unboarded as a train; or that my pure, uncomplicated play—my movie, ballgame, picnic, the Wild West I daydreamed, the robbery of a train—or the sweet world of wish and rich invention—was coming to an end as every holiday does, and ending emptily, too—pushed out with a grunt like the last stool; and, of course, this conviction ate at life’s advancing edge the way a worm gnaws at a leaf; it shriveled the imagination like a frightened penis; for what could one hope to catch and keep of life with such a weakened net, or forlorn fling? so one suffered through one’s forties every seventh day, and became an accountant, as I have done, in self-defense: weighing the light lick the tongue first gave the cone, the cunt, the honey spoon, the licorice stick, against the envelope it wet, the postage stamp, dry nervous lips; measuring a few great words read right against the accumulated weight of the wishy-washy, of tons of trivia and tedium, of Nothing itself—the melancholy experience of pure durée.