monster that seemed to have sprung from nowhere and made me a stranger to myself, on another level of mind, freed from thinking about what was now being attended to by Dr. Lichtman, I began to take hold of an idea that was wholly preposterous, Your Honor, beyond that it offered me an escape. The life I had chosen, a life largely absent of others, certainly emptied of the ties that keep most people tangled up in each other, only made sense when I was actually writing the sort of work I had sequestered myself in order to produce. It would be wrong to say that the conditions of such a life had been a hardship. Something in me naturally migrated away from the fray, preferring the deliberate meaningfulness of fiction to unaccounted for reality, preferring a shapeless freedom to the robust work of yoking my thoughts to the logic and flow of anotherâs. When I had tried it in any sort of sustained way, first in relationships, and then in my marriage to S, it had failed. Looking back, perhaps the only reason I had been happy, for a while, with R is that he had been as absent as I had been, or even more so. We were two people locked in our antigravity suits who happened to be orbiting around the same pieces of his motherâs old furniture. And then he had drifted off, through some loophole in our apartment, to an unreachablepart of the cosmos. After that there was a series of doomed relationships, then my marriage, and once S and I parted ways Iâd promised myself that it was the last time I would try. In the five or six years since then Iâd had only brief affairs, and when these men tried to turn it into something more I refused, and soon afterwards brought things to an end and returned alone to my life.
And what of it, Your Honor? What of my life? You see, I thoughtâOne has to make a sacrifice. I chose the freedom of long unscheduled afternoons in which nothing happens but the slightest shift in mood as captured in a semicolon. Yes, work was that for me, an irresponsible exercise in pure freedom. And if I neglected or even ignored the rest, it was because I believed the rest conspired to chip away at that freedom, to interfere and force upon it a compromise. The first words out of my mouth in the morning spoken to S, and already the constraints began, the false politeness. Habits are formed. Kindness above all, responsiveness, a patient show of interest. But you also have to try to be entertaining and amusing. Itâs exhausting work, in the way that trying to keep three or four lies going at once is exhausting. Only to be repeated tomorrow and tomorrow after that. You hear a sound and itâs truth turning in its grave. Imagination dies a slower death, by suffocation. You try to put up walls, to cordon off the little plot where you labor as something apart, with a separate climate and different rules. But the habits seep in anyway like poisoned groundwater, and all you were trying to raise there chokes and withers. What Iâm trying to say is that it seems to me you canât have it both ways. So I made a sacrifice, and let go.
The idea I began to entertain during that first session with Dr. Lichtman took hold, so that after seeing her ten or eleven times in almost as many days, and, aided by Xanax, having managed to scale the panic down from a nightmare to a threatening menace, I announced to her that I had decided, in a weekâs time, to take a trip. She was surprised, of course, and asked where I was going. A number of possible answers crossed my mind. Places I had, over the years,received invitations from that perhaps could be extended again. Rome. Berlin. Istanbul. But in the end I said what I knew I was going to say all along. Jerusalem. She raised her eyebrows. Iâm not going in order to claim back the desk, if thatâs what youâre thinking, I said. Then why? she asked, the light through her windows spinning her hair, the rising wave of hair drawn up high above the scalp, into
And what of it, Your Honor? What of my life? You see, I thoughtâOne has to make a sacrifice. I chose the freedom of long unscheduled afternoons in which nothing happens but the slightest shift in mood as captured in a semicolon. Yes, work was that for me, an irresponsible exercise in pure freedom. And if I neglected or even ignored the rest, it was because I believed the rest conspired to chip away at that freedom, to interfere and force upon it a compromise. The first words out of my mouth in the morning spoken to S, and already the constraints began, the false politeness. Habits are formed. Kindness above all, responsiveness, a patient show of interest. But you also have to try to be entertaining and amusing. Itâs exhausting work, in the way that trying to keep three or four lies going at once is exhausting. Only to be repeated tomorrow and tomorrow after that. You hear a sound and itâs truth turning in its grave. Imagination dies a slower death, by suffocation. You try to put up walls, to cordon off the little plot where you labor as something apart, with a separate climate and different rules. But the habits seep in anyway like poisoned groundwater, and all you were trying to raise there chokes and withers. What Iâm trying to say is that it seems to me you canât have it both ways. So I made a sacrifice, and let go.
The idea I began to entertain during that first session with Dr. Lichtman took hold, so that after seeing her ten or eleven times in almost as many days, and, aided by Xanax, having managed to scale the panic down from a nightmare to a threatening menace, I announced to her that I had decided, in a weekâs time, to take a trip. She was surprised, of course, and asked where I was going. A number of possible answers crossed my mind. Places I had, over the years,received invitations from that perhaps could be extended again. Rome. Berlin. Istanbul. But in the end I said what I knew I was going to say all along. Jerusalem. She raised her eyebrows. Iâm not going in order to claim back the desk, if thatâs what youâre thinking, I said. Then why? she asked, the light through her windows spinning her hair, the rising wave of hair drawn up high above the scalp, into
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