John Ashbery: Blue Sonata

Long ago was the then beginning to seem like now

As now is but the setting out on a new but still

Undefined way. That now, the one once

Seen from far away, is our destiny

No matter what else may happen to us. It is

The present past of which our features,

Our opinions are made. We are half it and we

Care nothing about the rest of it. We

Can see far enough ahead for the rest of us to be

Implicit in the surroundings that twilight is.

We know that this part of the day comes every day

And we feel that, as it has its rights, so

We have our right to be ourselves in the measure

That we are in it and not some other day, or in

Some other place. The time suits us

Just as it fancies itself, but just so far

As we not give up that inch, breath

Of becoming before becoming may be seen,

Or come to seem all that it seems to mean now.

The things that were coming to be talked about

Have come and gone and are still remembered

As being recent. There is a grain of curiosity

At the base of some new thing, that unrolls

Its question mark like a new wave on the shore.

In coming to give, to give up what we had,

We have, we understand, gained or been gained

By what was passing through, bright with the sheen

Of things recently forgotten and revived.

Each image fits into place, with the calm

Of not having too many, of having just enough.

We live in the sigh of our present.

If that was all there was to have

We could re-imagine the other half, deducing it

From the shape of what is seen, thus

Being inserted into its idea of how we

Ought to proceed. It would be tragic to fit

Into the space created by our not having arrived yet,

To utter the speech that belongs there,

For progress occurs through re-inventing

These words from a dim recollection of them,

In violating that space in such a way as

To leave it intact. Yet we do after all

Belong here, and have moved a considerable

Distance; our passing is a facade.

But our understanding of it is justified.

John Ashbery: The Explanation

The luxury of now is that the cancelled gala has been

Put back in. The orchestra is starting to tune up.

The tone-row of a dripping faucet is batted back and forth

Among the kitchen, the confusion outside, the pale bluster

Of the sky, the correct but insidious grass.

The conductor, a glass of water, permits all kinds

Of wacky analogies to glance off him, and, circling outward,

To bring in the night. Nothing is too “unimportant”

Or too important, for that matter. The newspaper and the garbage

Wrapped in it, the over, the under.

You get thrown to one side

Into a kind of broom closet as the argument continues carolling

Ideas from the novel of which this is the unsuccessful

Stage adaptation. Too much, perhaps, gets lost.

What about arriving after sunset on the beach of a

Dank but extremely beautiful island to hear the speeches

Of the invisible natives, whose punishment is speech?

At the top of his teddy-bear throne, the ruler,

Still lit by the sun, gazes blankly across at something

Opposite. His eyes are empty rectangles, shaped

Like slightly curved sticks of chewing gum. He witnesses.

But we are the witnesses.

In the increasingly convincing darkness

The words become palpable, like a fruit

That is too beautiful to eat. We want these

Down here on our level. But the tedium persists

In the form of remarks exchanged by birds

Before the curtain. What am I doing up here?

Pretending to resist but secretly giving in so as to reappear

In a completely new outfit and group of colors once today’s

Bandage has been removed, is all.

John Ashbery: Introduction

To be a writer and write things

You must have experiences you can write about.

Just living won’t do. I have a theory

About masterpieces, how to make them

At very little expense, and they’re every

Bit as good as the others. You can

Use the same materials of the dream, at last.

It’s a kind of game with no losers and only one

Winner—you. First, pain gets

Flashed back through the story and the story

Comes out backwards and woof-side up. This is

No one’s story! At least they think that

For a time and the story is architecture

Now, and then history of a diversified kind.

A vacant episode during which the bricks got

Repointed and browner. And it ends up

Nobody’s, there is nothing for any of us

Except that fretful vacillating around the central

Question that brings us closer,

For better and worse, for all this time.

John Ashbery: The Whole Is Admirably Composed

In rainy night all the faces look like telephones.

Help me! I am in this street because I was

going someplace, and now, not to be there is here.

So billows pile up on the shore, I hear

the mountains, the tide of autumn pulls in

ever thicker like a blanket of tears, and

people go about their business, unconcerned

if with another. And to those whose loneliness

shouts envy in my face, I say I am here on this

last floor, room of sobs and of grieving.

It’s better you know to actually live it

since always some unexpected detail intervenes:

how he came to your house long ago

on a forgotten afternoon filled with birds’ wings

and the standard that stood then has crumpled

yet another has taken its place:

high up in the ivy where the water from the

falls disappears amid smooth boulders,

this renown, this envy. And most of all

the challenge sleep brings, how it coaxes

the dunce out of his lair, how meals are shared

and whispers passed around. Then the real boy

comes to you like a kite on wind that is flagging

through the needle hole of the hourglass—

as though this were the summit.

There is more to inconstancy than you will

want to hear, and meanwhile the streets have dried,

tears been put away until another time, and a smile

paints the easy vapor that rises from all

human activity. I see it is time to question trees,

thorns in hedges, again, the same blind investigation

that leads you from trap to trap before bargaining

to forget you. And this is only a bump

on the earth’s surface, casting no shadow, until

the white and dark fruits of the far pledge be

wafted into view again, out of control, shimmering

in the dark that runs off and is collected

in oceans. And the map is again wiped clean.

John Ashbery: ...by an Earthquake

A hears by chance a familiar name, and the name involves a riddle of the past.

B, in love with A, receives an unsigned letter in which the writer states that she is the mistress of A and begs B not to take him away from her.

B, compelled by circumstances to be a companion of A in an isolated place, alters her rosy views of love and marriage when she discovers, through A, the selfishness of men.

A, an intruder in a strange house, is discovered; he flees through the nearest door into a windowless closet and is trapped by a spring lock.

A is so content with what he has that any impulse toward enterprise is throttled.

A solves an important mystery when falling plaster reveals the place where some old love letters are concealed.

A-4, missing food from his larder, half believes it was taken by a “ghost.”

A, a crook, seeks unlawful gain by selling A-8 an object, X, which A-8 already owns.

A sees a stranger, A-5, stealthily remove papers, X, from the pocket of another stranger, A-8, who is asleep. A follows A-5.

A sends an infernal machine, X, to his enemy, A-3, and it falls into the hands of A’s friend, A-2.

Angela tells Philip of her husband’s enlarged prostate, and asks for money.

Philip, ignorant of her request, has the money placed in an escrow account.

A discovers that his pal, W, is a girl masquerading as a boy.

A, discovering that W is a girl masquerading as a boy, keeps the knowledge to himself and does his utmost to save the masquerader from annoying experiences.

A, giving ten years of his life to a miserly uncle, U, in exchange for a college education, loses his ambition and enterprise.

A, undergoing a strange experience among a people weirdly deluded, discovers the secret of the delusion from Herschel, one of the victims who has died. By means of information obtained from the notebook, A succeeds in rescuing the other victims of the delusion.

A dies of psychic shock.

Albert has a dream, or an unusual experience, psychic or otherwise, which enables him to conquer a serious character weakness and become successful in his new narrative, “Boris Karloff.”

Silver coins from the Mojave Desert turn up in the possession of a sinister jeweler.

Three musicians wager that one will win the affections of the local kapellmeister’s wife; the losers must drown themselves in a nearby stream.

Ardis, caught in a trap and held powerless under a huge burning glass, is saved by an eclipse of the sun.

Kent has a dream so vivid that it seems a part of his waking experience.

A and A-2 meet with a tragic adventure, and A-2 is killed.

Elvira, seeking to unravel the mystery of a strange house in the hills, is caught in an electrical storm. During the storm the house vanishes and the site on which it stood becomes a lake.

Alphonse has a wound, a terrible psychic wound, an invisible psychic wound, which causes pain in flesh and tissue which, otherwise, are perfectly healthy and normal.

A has a dream which he conceives to be an actual experience.

Jenny, homeward bound, drives and drives, and is still driving, no nearer to her home than she was when she first started.

Petronius B. Furlong’s friend, Morgan Windhover, receives a wound from which he dies.

Thirteen guests, unknown to one another, gather in a spooky house to hear Toe reading Buster’s will.

Buster has left everything to Lydia, a beautiful Siamese girl poet of whom no one has heard.

Lassie and Rex tussle together politely; Lassie, wounded, is forced to limp home.

In the Mexican gold rush a city planner is found imprisoned by outlaws in a crude cage of sticks.

More people flow over the dam and more is learned about the missing electric cactus.

Too many passengers have piled onto a cable car in San Francisco; the conductor is obliged to push some of them off.

Maddalena, because of certain revelations she has received, firmly resolves that she will not carry out an enterprise that had formerly been dear to her heart.

Fog enters into the shaft of a coal mine in Wales.

A violent wind blows the fog around.

Two miners, Shawn and Hillary, are pursued by fumes.

Perhaps Emily’s datebook holds the clue to the mystery of the seven swans under the upas tree.

Jarvis seeks to manage Emily’s dress shop and place it on a paying basis. Jarvis’s bibulous friend, Emily, influences Jarvis to take to drink, scoffing at the doctor who has forbidden Jarvis to indulge in spirituous liquors.

Jarvis, because of a disturbing experience, is compelled to turn against his friend, Emily.

A ham has his double, “Donnie,” take his place in an important enterprise.

Jarvis loses his small fortune in trying to help a friend.

Lodovico’s friend, Ambrosius, goes insane from eating the berries of a strange plant, and makes a murderous attack on Lodovico.

“New narrative” is judged seditious. Hogs from all over go squealing down the street.

Ambrosius, suffering misfortune, seeks happiness in the companionship of Joe, and in playing golf.

Arthur, in a city street, has a glimpse of Cathy, a strange woman who has caused him to become involved in a puzzling mystery.

Cathy, walking in the street, sees Arthur, a stranger, weeping.

Cathy abandons Arthur after he loses his money and is injured and sent to a hospital.

Arthur, married to Beatrice, is haunted by memories of a former sweetheart, Cornelia, a heartless coquette whom Alvin loves.

Sauntering in a park on a fine day in spring, Tricia and Plotinus encounter a little girl grabbing a rabbit by its ears. As they remonstrate with her, the girl is transformed into a mature woman who regrets her feverish act.

Running up to the girl, Alvin stumbles and loses his coins.

In a nearby dell, two murderers are plotting to execute a third.

Beatrice loved Alvin before he married.

B, second wife of A, discovers that B-3, A’s first wife, was unfaithful.

B, wife of A, dons the mask and costume of B-3, A’s paramour, and meets A as B-3; his memory returns and he forgets B-3, and goes back to B.

A discovers the “Hortensius,” a lost dialogue of Cicero, and returns it to the crevice where it lay.

Ambrose marries Phyllis, a nice girl from another town.

Donnie and Charlene are among the guests invited to the window.

No one remembers old Everett, who is left to shrivel in a tower.

Pellegrino, a rough frontiersman in a rough frontier camp, undertakes to care for an orphan.

Ildebrando constructs a concealed trap, and a person near to him, Gwen, falls into the trap and cannot escape.

John Ashbery: Gentle Reader

Abruptly, unassertively, the year starts,

as freeways close and roofs collapse,

and all kinds of incidents give nervure to the map:

a stitch in time, a local hero here,

boys falling in tune with the ageless argument.

So out of the turquoise turmoil a name

implodes like a star, having made its point.

And the seasons, welcome as you know,

are seen packing it in. Maybe add some rust

at a crucial jointure, no? But who am I

to be telling you your business. Next, young and beautiful,

emerging from a door, casting your essence

along the face of today’s precipice, you see “there’s no tomorrow,”

only avatars waiting in the wings, more or less patiently.

This is what it takes for you to do what’s best,

covering all the exits.

Oh, there is a danger there?

Who would have thought it in today’s heat?

But on the other hand, why just be standing

while its morose page rolls over,

an encumbrance to all, not just ourselves?

And when twilight licks appreciatively at the sky,

your answer will be there in the circuitry,

not bypassed. For you to hold,

to genuflect with.

A shadow of a flagon crossed your face:

The cease-fire is improving?

And in this starting to be in something, what had the older

children been doing? Taking lessons still to be paid for,

impinging on what comes next. Comes now.

Soon there is something to be said for everything,

he said, whiplash, whippets; why even my identity

is strange to me now, a curiosity. When someone comes later,

who will I be talking with? The erroneous vision

made no mention of this. Its conquering agenda is complete,

and we, of course, are incomplete, destined to ourselves

and its fitful version of eternity:

the one with chapter titles.

More worldliness to celebrate. And yet, someone

will take it from you, needy thing.

John Ashbery: Title Search

Voices of Spring. Vienna Bonbons.

Morning Papers. Visiting Firemen. Mourning Polka.

Symphonie en ut dièse majeur. Fog-soaked Extremities.

Agrippa. Agrippine. Nelly and All. The Day

the Coast Came to Our House.

Hocus Focus. Unnatural Dreams. The Book of Five-Dollar Poems.

Oaks and Craters. Robert, a Rhapsody. Cecilia Valdés.

The Jewish Child. Mandarin Sorcerers. The Reader’s Digest

Book of Posh Assignations. The Penguin Book of Thwarted Lovers.

The American Screwball Comedy.

Scenes of Clerical Life. Incan Overtures. The House on 42nd Street.

The Man in Between. The Man on the Box. The Motor Car.

Rue des Acacias. Elm Street and After.

The Little Red Church. The Hotel District.

I’ll Eat a Mexican. The Heritage of Froth.

The Trojan Comedy. Water to the Fountain. Memoirs of a Hermit Crab.

The Ostrich Succession. Exit Pursued by a Turkey.

In the Pound. The Artist’s Life. On the Beautiful Blue Danube.

Less Is Roar. The Bicyclist. The Father.

John Ashbery: Sleepers Awake

Cervantes was asleep when he wrote Don Quixote.

Joyce slept during the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses.

Homer nodded and occasionally slept during the greater part of the Iliad; he was awake however when he wrote the Odyssey.

Proust snored his way through The Captive, as have legions of his readers after him.

Melville was asleep at the wheel for much of Moby Dick.

Fitzgerald slept through Tender Is the Night, which is perhaps not so surprising,

but the fact that Mann slumbered on the very slopes of The Magic Mountain is quite extraordinary—that he wrote it, even more so.

Kafka, of course, never slept, even while not writing or on bank holidays.

No one knows too much about George Eliot’s writing habits—my guess is she would sleep a few minutes, wake up and write something, then pop back to sleep again.

Lew Wallace’s forty winks came, incredibly, during the chariot race in Ben Hur.

Emily Dickinson slept on her cold, narrow bed in Amherst.

When she awoke there would be a new poem inscribed by Jack Frost on the windowpane; outside, glass foliage chimed.

Good old Walt snored as he wrote and, like so many of us, insisted he didn’t.

Maugham snored on the Riviera.

Agatha Christie slept daintily, as a woman sleeps, which is why her novels are like tea sandwiches—artistic, for the most part.

I sleep when I cannot avoid it; my writing and sleeping are constantly improving.

I have other things to say, but shall not detain you much.

Never go out in a boat with an author—they cannot tell when they are over water.

Birds make poor role models.

A philosopher should be shown the door, but don’t, under any circumstances, try it.

Slaves make good servants.

Brushing the teeth may not always improve the appearance.

Store clean rags in old pillow cases.

Feed a dog only when he barks.

Flush tea leaves down the toilet, coffee grounds down the sink.

Beware of anonymous letters—you may have written them, in a word-less implosion of sleep.

John Ashbery: A Stifled Notation

No one ever oversleeps
until the time you are to improve your life, and then
what's one superstition more or less?
The lives, I guess. And it's best to be early
about things, not drink too much,
lest the pattern be seen in its undoing.
The judges march backward up the steps.

Well, you've solved this week's problem,
but the wind is wailing a little too enthusiastically
as the garden takes up the fugue at a point
where it's impossible to be lonesome and valid anymore.
The fishes swim, birds plod fustily
with heaven-dividing cries, until the whole world seems soaked
in the boredom of that sorrow you were promised,
but also
crazy with love and self-deception. Sometimes a charcoal sketch
of a refrigerator is supposed to be the edge.
How long you had no aim
for no other stream.

John Ashbery: On the Empress's Mind

Let's make a bureaucracy.
First, we can have long lists of old things,
and new things repackaged as old ones.
We can have turrets, a guiding wall.
Soon the whole country will come to look over it.

Let us, by all means, have things in night light:
partly visible. The rudeness that poetry often brings
after decades of silence will help. Many
will be called to account. This means that laundries
in their age-old way will go on foundering. Is it any help
that motorbikes whiz up, to ask for directions
or colored jewelry, so that one can go about one's visit
a tad less troubled than before, lightly composed?

No one knows what it's about anymore.
Even in the beginning one had grave misgivings
but the enthusiasm of departure swept them away
in the green molestation of spring.
We were given false information on which
our lives were built, a pier
extending far out into a swollen river.
Now, even these straws are gone.

Tonight the party will be better than ever.
So many mystery guests. And the rain that sifts
through sobbing trees, that excited skiff . . .
Others have come and gone and wrought no damage.
Others have caught, or caused darkness, a long vent
in the original catastrophe no one has seen.
They have argued. Tonight will be different. Is it better for you?

John Ashbery: Seasonal

What does the lengthening season mean,
the halo round a single note?
Blunt words projected on a screen
are what we mean, not what we wrote.

The halo round a single note
makes one look up. The careful blows
are what we mean, not what we wrote.
And what a lying writer knows

makes one look up. The careful blows
unclench a long-sought definition.
And what a lying writer knows
is pleasure, hallowed by attrition.

Unclench a long-sought definition:
what does the lengthening season mean?
Is pleasure, hallowed by attrition

blunt words projected on a screen?

John Ashbery: The Recital

All right. The problem is that there is no new problem. It must awaken from the sleep of being part of some other, old problem, and by that time its new problematical existence will have already begun, carrying it forward into situations with which it cannot cope, since no one recognizes it and it does not even recognize itself yet, or know what it is. It is like the beginning of a beautiful day, with all the birds singing in the trees, reading their joy and excitement into its record as it progresses, and yet the progress of any day, good or bad, brings with it all kinds of difficulties that should have been foreseen but never are, so that it finally seems as though they are what stifles it, in the majesty of a sunset or merely in gradual dullness that gets dimmer and dimmer until it finally sinks into flat, sour darkness. Why is this? Because not one-tenth or even one one-hundredth of the ravishing possibilities the birds sing about at dawn could ever be realized in the course of a single day, no matter how crammed with fortunate events it might turn out to be. And this brings on inevitable reproaches, unmerited of course, for we are all like children sulking because they cannot have the moon; and very soon the unreasonableness of these demands is forgotten and overwhelmed in a wave of melancholy of which it is the sole cause. Finally we know only that we are unhappy but we cannot tell why. We forget that it is our own childishness that is to blame.

That this is true is of course beyond argument. But we ought to look into the nature of that childishness a little more, try to figure out where it came from and how, if at all, we can uproot it. And when we first start to examine it, biased as we are, it seems as though we are not entirely to blame. We have all or most of us had unhappy childhoods; later on we tried to patch things up and as we entered the years of adulthood it was a relief, for a while, that everything was succeeding: we had finally left that long suffocating tunnel and emerged into an open place. We could not yet see very well due to the abrupt change from darkness to daylight, but we were beginning to make out things. We embarked on a series of adult relationships from which the sting and malignancy of childhood were absent, or so it seemed: no more hiding behind bushes to get a secret glimpse of the others; no more unspeakable rages of jealousy or the suffocation of unrequited and unrealizable love. Or at least these things retreated into their proper perspective as new things advanced into the foreground: new feelings as yet too complex to be named or closely inspected, but in which the breathless urgency of those black-and-white situations of childhood happily played no part. It became a delight to enumerate all the things in the new world our maturity had opened up for us, as inexhaustible in pleasures and fertile pursuits as some more down-to-earth Eden, from which the Utopian joys as well as the torments of that older fantasy-world had been banished by a more reasonable deity.

But as the days and years sped by it became apparent that the naming of all the new things we now possessed had become our chief occupation; that very little time for the mere tasting and having of them was left over, and that even these simple, tangible experiences were themselves subject to description and enumeration, or else they too became fleeting and transient as the song of a bird that is uttered only once and disappears into the backlog of vague memories where it becomes as a dried, pressed flower, a wistful parody of itself. Meanwhile all our energies are being absorbed by the task of trying to revive those memories, make them real, as if to live again were the only reality; and the overwhelming variety of the situations we have to deal with begins to submerge our efforts. It becomes plain that we cannot interpret everything, we must be selective, and so the tale we are telling begins little by little to leave reality behind. It is no longer so much our description of the way things happen to us as our private song, sung in the wilderness, nor can we leave off singing, for that would be to retreat to the death of childhood, to the mere acceptance and dull living of all that is thrust upon us, a living death in a word; we must register our appraisal of the moving world that is around us, but our song is leading us on now, farther and farther into that wilderness and away from the shrouded but familiar forms that were its first inspiration. On and on into the gathering darkness—is there no remedy for this? It is as though a day which had begun brilliantly in the blaze of a new sunrise had become transfixed as a certain subtle change in the light can cast a chill over your heart, or the sight of a distant thin ribbon of cirrus ebbing into space can alter everything you have been feeling, dropping you back years and years into another world in which its fragile reminder of inexorable change was also the law, as it is here today. You know now the sorrow of continually doing something that you cannot name, of producing automatically as an apple tree produces apples this thing there is no name for. And you continue to hum as you move forward, but your heart is pounding.

All right. Then this new problem is the same one, and that is the problem: that our apathy can always renew itself, drawing energy from the circumstances that fill our lives, but emotional happiness blooms only once, like an annual, leaving not even roots or foliage behind when its flower withers and dies. We are forced to recognize that we are still living in the same old state of affairs and that it never really went away even when it seemed to. Well, but what can we do about it? Because even though the hydra-headed monster of apathy can grow a new head each day to slash back at us with, more fearsome than the one we just succeeded in cutting off, so too nothing says that we aren't to fight back at it, using the sword that our condition of reasoning beings has placed in our hands. Although the task seems hopeless and there is no end to the heads in sight, we are within our rights in fighting back, the weapon is ours to wield, and it is possible that by dint of continually doing so we might at length gain a slight foothold or edge, for the enemy's powers though superhuman are not inexhaustible: we are basically certain that nothing is except the capacity for struggle that unites us, foe to foe, on the vast plain of life. We are like sparrows fluttering and jabbering around a seemingly indifferent prowling cat; we know that the cat is stronger and therefore we forget that we have wings, and too often we fall in with the cat's plans for us, afraid and therefore unable to use the wings that could have saved us by bearing us aloft if only for a little distance, not the boundless leagues we had been hoping for and insisting on, but enough to make a crucial difference, the difference between life and death.

"It almost seems—" How often this locution has been forced on us when we were merely trying to find words for a more human expression of our difficulty, something closer to home. And with this formula our effort flies off again, having found no place to land. As though there were something criminal in trying to understand a little this uneasiness that is undermining our health, causing us to think crazy thoughts and behave erratically. We can no longer live our lives properly. Every good impulse is distorted into something like its opposite; the people we see are like parodies of reasonable human beings. There is no spiritual model for our aspirations; no vademécum beckons in the light around us. There is only the urge to get on with it all. It is like the difference between someone who is in love and someone who is merely "good in bed": there is no vital remnant which would transform one's entire effort into an image somewhat resembling oneself. Meanwhile everything conspires to protect the business-as-usual attitude of the diurnal scenery—no leaf or brick must be found out of place, no timbre ring false lest the sickening fakery of the whole wormy apparatus, the dry rot behind the correct facade suddenly become glaringly and universally apparent, its shame at last real for all to see. Appearances must be kept up at whatever cost until the Day of Judgment and afterward if possible.

We are trying with mortal hands to paint a landscape which would be a faithful reproduction of the exquisite and terrible scene that stretches around us. No longer is there any question of adjusting a better light on things, to show them ideally as they may never have existed, of taking them out from under the sun to place them in the clean light that meditation surrounds them with. Youth and happiness, the glory of first love—all are viewed naturally now, with all their blemishes and imperfections. Even the wonderful poetry of growing a little older and realizing the important role fantasy played in the Sturm und Drang of our earlier maturity is placed in its proper perspective, so as not to exaggerate the importance in the general pattern of living of the disabused intellect, whose nature it is to travel from illusion to reality and on to some seemingly superior vision, it being the quality of this ebbing and flowing motion rather than the relevance of any of its isolated component moments that infuses a life with its special character. Until, accustomed to disappointments, it seemed as though we had triumphed over the limitations of logic and blindfold passion alike; the masterpiece we were on the point of achieving was classic in the sense of the Greeks and simultaneously informed by a Romantic ardor minus the eccentricity, and this all-but-terminated work was the reflection of the ideal shape of ourselves, as we might have lived had we been gifted with foreknowledge and also the ability to go back and retrace our steps. And so, pleased with it and with ourselves, we stepped back a few paces to get the proper focus.

Any reckoning of the sum total of the things we are is of course doomed to failure from the start, that is if it intends to present a true, wholly objective picture from which both artifice and artfulness are banished: no art can exist without at least traces of these, and there was never any question but that this rendering was to be made in strict conformity with the rules of art—only in this way could it approximate most closely the thing it was intended to reflect and illuminate and which was its inspiration, by achieving the rounded feeling almost of the forms of flesh and the light of nature, and being thus equipped for the maximum number of contingencies which, in its capacity as an aid and tool for understanding, it must know how to deal with. Perhaps this was where we made our mistake. Perhaps no art, however gifted and well-intentioned, can supply what we were demanding of it: not only the figured representation of our days but the justification of them, the reckoning and its application, so close to the reality being lived that it vanishes suddenly in a thunderclap, with a loud cry.

The days fly by; they do not cease. By night rain pelted the dark planet; in the morning all was wreathed in false smiles and admiration, but the daylight had gone out of the day and it knew it. All the pine trees seemed to be dying of a mysterious blight. There was no one to care. The sky was still that nauseatingly cloying shade of blue, with the thin ribbon of cirrus about to disappear and materialize over other, alien lands, far from here. If only, one thought, one had begun by having the courage of one's convictions instead of finishing this way,  but  "once burned, twice shy"; one proceeds along one's path murmuring idiotic formulas like this to give oneself courage, noticing too late that the landscape isn't making sense any more; it is not merely that you have misapplied certain precepts not meant for the situation in which you find yourself, which is always a new one that cannot be decoded with reference to an existing corpus of moral principles, but there is even a doubt as to our own existence. Why, after all, were we not destroyed in the conflagration of the moment our real and imaginary lives coincided, unless it was because we never had a separate existence beyond that of those two static and highly artificial concepts whose fusion was nevertheless the cause of death and destruction not only for ourselves but in the world around us? But perhaps the explanation lies precisely here: what we were witnessing was merely the reverse side of an event of cosmic beatitude for all except us, who were blind to it because it took place inside us. Meanwhile the shape of life has changed definitively for the better for everyone on the outside. They are bathed in the light of this tremendous surprise as in the light of a new sun from which only healing and not corrosive rays emanate; they comment on the miraculous change as people comment on the dazzling beauty of a day in early autumn, forgetting that for the blind man in their midst it is a day like any other, so that its beauty cannot be said to have universal validity but must remain fundamentally in doubt.

This single source of so much pleasure and pain is therefore a thing that one can never cease wondering upon. On the one hand, such boundless happiness for so many; on the other so much pain concentrated in the heart of one. And it is true that each of us is this multitude as well as that isolated individual; we experience the energy and beauty of the others as a miraculous manna from heaven; at the same time our eyes are turned inward to the darkness and emptiness within. All records of how we came here have been effaced, so there is no chance of working backward to some more primitive human level: the spiritual dichotomy exists once and for all time, like the mind of creation, which has neither beginning nor end. And the proof of this is that we cannot even imagine another way of being. We are stuck here for eternity and we are not even aware that we are stuck, so natural and even normal does our quandary seem. The situation of Prometheus, bound to the crags for endless ages and visited daily by an eagle, must have seemed so to him. We were surprised once, long ago; and now we can never be surprised again.

What is it for you then, the insistent now that baffles and surrounds you in its loose-knit embrace that always seems to be falling away and yet remains behind, stubbornly drawing you, the unwilling spectator who had thought to stop only just for a moment, into the sphere of its solemn and suddenly utterly vast activities, on a new scale as it were, that you have neither the time nor the wish to unravel? It always presents itself as the turning point, the bridge leading from prudence to "a timorous capacity," in Wordsworth's phrase, but the bridge is a Bridge of Sighs the next moment, leading back into the tired regions from whence it sprang. It seems as though every day is arranged this way. The movement is the majestic plodding one of a boat crossing a harbor, certain of its goal and upheld by its own dignity on the waves, a symbol of patient, fruitful activity, but the voyage always ends in a new key, although at the appointed place; a note has been added that destroys the whole fabric and the sense of the old as it was intended. The day ends in the darkness of sleep.

Therefore since today, a day that is really quite cool despite the deceptive appearance of the sunlight on things, is to really be the point when everything changes for better or for worse, it might be good to examine it, see how far it goes, since the far reaches of sleep are to be delayed indefinitely. It is not even a question of them any more. What matters is how you are going to figure your way out of this new problem which has again come home to roost. Will the answer be another delay, prolonged beyond the end of time, and disguised once again as an active life intelligently pursued? Or is it to be a definite break with the past—either the no of death shutting you up in a small cell-like space or a yes whose vibrations you cannot even begin to qualify or imagine?

As I thought about these things dusk began to invade my room. Soon the outlines of things began to grow blurred and I continued to think along well-rehearsed lines like something out of the past. Was there really nothing new under the sun? Or was this novelty—the ability to take up these tattered enigmas again and play with them until something like a solution emerged from them, only to grow dim at once and fade like an ignis fatuus, a specter mocking the very reality it had so convincingly assumed? No, but this time something real did seem to be left over— some more solid remnant of the light as the shadows continued to pile up. At first it seemed to be made merely of bits and pieces of the old, haggard situations, rearranged perhaps to give a wan impersonation of modernity and fecundity. Then it became apparent that certain new elements had been incorporated, though perhaps not enough of them to change matters very much. Finally—these proportions remaining the same—something like a different light began to dawn, to make itself felt: just as the first glimmers of day are often mistaken for a "false dawn," and one waits a long time to see whether they will go away before gradually becoming convinced of their authority, even after it has been obvious for some time, so these tremors slowly took on the solidity, the robustness of an object. And by that time everything else had gone away, or retreated so far into the sidelines that one was no longer conscious of those ephemera that had once seemed the very structure, the beams and girders defining the limits of the ambiguous situation one had come to know and even to tolerate, if not to love.

The point was the synthesis of very simple elements in a new and strong, as opposed to old and weak, relation to one another. Why hadn't this been possible in the earlier days of experimentation, of bleak, barren living that didn't seem to be leading anywhere and it couldn't have mattered less? Probably because not enough of what made it up had taken on that look of worn familiarity, like pebbles polished over and over again by the sea, that made it possible for the old to blend inconspicuously with the new in a union too subtle to cause any comment that would have shattered its purpose forever. But already it was hard to distinguish the new elements from the old, so calculated and easygoing was the fusion, the partnership that was the only element now, and which was even now fading rapidly from memory, so perfect was its assimilation by the bystanders and decor that in other times would have filled up the view, and that now were becoming as transparent as the substance that was giving them back to life.

A vast wetness as of sea and air combined, a single smooth, anonymous matrix without surface or depth was the product of these new changes. It no longer mattered very much whether prayers were answered with concrete events or the oracle gave a convincing reply, for there was no longer anyone to care in the old sense of caring. There were new people watching and waiting, conjugating in this way the distance and emptiness, transforming the scarcely noticeable bleakness into something both intimate and noble. The performance had ended, the audience streamed out; the applause still echoed in the empty hall. But the idea of the spectacle as something to be acted out and absorbed still hung in the air long after the last spectator had gone home to sleep.