Over the years the simple act of finding the precise words had seemed to mitigate his inner collapse. But they weren’t the right words; he’d been a fool.
Your long-awaited genius grant; your self-designed modernist house; your late career retrospective; your fond encomiums from friends and colleagues: zero, nada, zippo, zilch.
He’d finally reached a minimum level of accommodation to his perception of reality.
What you wrote, I thought about it what it might have meant, and I don’t think it meant anything.
What I wrote wasn’t about what I wrote. It was about what you might think about it.
That couple holding court over there, accomplished, attractive, older (my age?), she a composer and head of a department (the Composition Department, I would guess, if there is such a thing) and he a well-known painter, portraits of John Coltrane on black velvet, in kingly dress—I’d assumed undertaken with some irony, but having once mentioned this in his presence and receiving an embarrassed smile, as if he was embarrassed for me, apparently some internalized form of post-ironic sincerity.
When I am forced upon their radar, they regard me with a vague distaste that doesn’t quite come up to the level of dislike. I’ll show you later on—if we walk in that direction, the flurry of minute physical adjustments as they calculate whether they can safely avoid us without personal discomfort. Since the accident I’ve been pleased to detect a new note of fear in their uneasiness, as if I now represent the additional possibility of freakish misfortune that might befall anyone, no matter how charmed or lucky.
I bring this up because I owe my newfound awareness to you, the last time we met, when you mentioned that for you it would be hell on earth to know what other people really think of you. The way you said it, though, I got the impression that you really meant it would be hell on earth for me, and I haven’t been able to shake it.
Your thoughts and words become your prison walls.
Luckily someone has left the key.
A great artist and an excruciating bore.
After his death many of his journal and notebook entries were found to have the notation “FE.” His final post, in its entirety, was “failed experiment.”
With a year of hard work my project has grown from grandiose fantasy to lackluster reality.
He received the crushing news with a resignation born of decades of unrealized hopes.
