Alan > Recent Status Updates

I must think on the silence of snow.
Think how snow inhales sound,
How it might inhale "my" own voice, too, and the sound of birds.

Only snow, at last, once the wind stopes.
Only snow; completely noiseless, absorbing all sound.

When I write, I use my body. I use all the sensory details of seeing, of listening, of smelling, of tasting, of experiencing tenderness and warmth and cold and pain, of noticing my heart racing and my body needing food and water, of walking and running, of feeling the wind and rain and snow on my skin, of holding hands.

Why is the world so violent and painful?
And yet how can the world be this beautiful?

Late

It's so strange, he told himself. All my life I was famous for my punctuality, even for showing up earlier than required, and now that time has slipped my grasp, I'm going to be-well, I am—forever Late. The Late S. M. Arthur.

This struck him as funny and he began to laugh, too hard, almost a hysterical laugh. Control yourself, he thought. You're a dead man. Dead men don't have much to laugh about.

The Musician of Kahani

The name of that dynamic is revenge.
Best eaten cold.

The Musician of Kashmir

“My brilliant husband falls for a stupid fraud. My brilliant daughter falls for a stupid playboy. I am left alone in our home without the two people who were my whole world. But everyone says, 'Oh, Meena Contractor, she's tough, she can't be broken, she'll be fine. But guess what, I don't think I'm fine. I think I’m broken. And yes, you're right, there are things magic can't repair."

He was invigorated by Xavier's presence in the apartment, the whole of his being energized, as if he had suddenly shed years. He behaved like a man who had things to look forward to, and it was only in that mo-ment, I suppose, that I understood how limited it had become for him, the idea of our own future together, nothing more than a downward slope into old age.

In the South

"He was my shadow," he said to the woman with the wooden leg, "and I am his. Two shadows, each shadowing the other, to that we were reduced, that is so. The old move through the world of the young like shades, unseen, of no concern. But the shadows see each other and know who they are. So it was with us. We knew, let me say this, who we were.

In the South

"You look terrible," Junior told Senior, as he did every morning. "You look like a man who is only waiting to die."
Senior—nodding gravely, and also speaking in accordance with their private tradition-responded, “That is better than looking, as you do, like a man who is still waiting to live.”

“Well, here you have it: here is the law you were looking for. Congratulate yourself; you found it. We sent him because we needed to; we abandon him because we must. That is the discipline you
Admired." He turned to Smiley. "You too: I find you contemptible. You shoot us, then preach to the dying. Go away. We’re technicians, not poets…”

"Well, it isn't a conference then, is it? A conference isn't operational.
Not unless," she added with a giggle, "you're having it in the Kremlin."
"All right, it's not a conference. It's an operation. That's why I'm getting subsistence."
She looked at him cruelly. She was a thin, childless woman, her eyes half shut from the smoke of the cigarette in her mouth.

THE WEEK AFTER I MET XAVIER FOR LUNCH WAS A PEriod of extraordinary concordance in my marriage, a period I would later examine, one that I would remember. I had not been so closely attuned to Tomas in years, to the subtle weather of his moods, the cartography of his expression. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I thrilled to his presence, or that I had a new appreciation of his intelligence and kindness.

Two people who want the same thing will never generate the same intensity as two people who want different things, or one person who wants into an absence, a void as was in fact the case with Xavier, who wanted something from me that I could not give. More than that he wanted something that I could not begin to fathom, a desire with which it felt dangerous to collude or to involve myself.

It is a place of old faces and young bodies; of young faces and old bodies; where the tensions of war have become the tensions of peace, and voices are raised to drown the silence, and glasses to drown the loneliness; it is the place where the searchers meet, finding no one but each other and the comfort of a shared pain; where the tired watchful eyes have no horizon to observe.

Collision

“I know,” Gentry says. “You just want to do your time. It don’t work that way slick. See, you’re still thinking with your civilian mind. You have to start thinking with your prison mind.”

The Lunch Break

“Boone and Dave went to Brittany’s trailer to tell her that they’d just dismissed her assistant/drug mule.”

The North Wing

How close are the ties that bind a family? What would you do to protect your alcoholic, screwup cousin?

Final Score

Wow! Great story, what a start!!

There was so much to life, too much, more than Beaulieu could do justice to, more than any living thing could guess at or merit.

She loved it all, even humans, for without the miracle of human consciousness, love for such a world would be just one more of a billion unnamed impulses.

The full-scale Wabash Avenue once-over and then some. Has he ever been scrutinized quite this close before? Normally at about this point there begins to drift across the face of the broad in the scene a look of evasiveness Hicks has grown used to, followed by some form of "How cheapened has my life become that I have to put up with attention from palookas like this?"

"Yes, it was tragic," she said, with a voice like flint. And didn't say, as she might have done-at eighty she could be oracular: We are all fuel. We are born, and we burn, some of us more quickly than others. There are different kinds of com-bustion. But not to burn, never to catch fire at all, that would be the sad life, wouldn't it?

A sudden unexpected freedom flooded her. Her life was beginning, it was not ending, it had not ended. She would never be able to explain (or be required to) this illogical, enveloping inversion.
As if the day had turned inside out, as if what she was leaving behind was not enclosed, lost, entombed in a house. It had merged somehow-pouring itself outwards—with the air she was breathing.

In any case, as friends or perhaps even as lovers, or just as young Mister Paul and the new Beechwood maid he'd spotted one day in the post office in Titherton, they'd done all sorts of things together, in all sorts of secret locations.

It was a strange business, this Mothering Sunday ahead of them, a ritual already fading, yet the Nivens-and the Sheringhams-still clung to it, as the world itself, or the world in dreamy Berkshire, still clung to it, for the same sad, wishing-the-past-back reasons. As the Nivens and the Sheringhams perhaps clung to each other more than they'd used to, as if they'd become one common decimated family.

An Oral History of Atlantis

"Hans," my father said, "it's time for you to fly." Instead I walked all the way to Manhattan, arriving at noon. This was the day before the day the city blew up every bridge, back when they thought rats spread the dread virus MtPR, pronounced "Metaphor," which they wanted to contain or exclude, it was hard to remember which.

By the time Zoe was in college, she found many occasions to tell me that my generation had fucked up in every major way. We'd ruined the planet, we'd let a criminal 1 percent own everything, we'd gotten everyone used to constant war. Our current life-form was an invasive species, worse than kudzu, choking out anything around us.

Watch Your Step

"Listen," you said. "This afternoon my uncle had me over for lunch." And soon you were telling me everything. That was the problem: you enjoyed the narrative of your own im-portance. It made you a charming conversationalist but a very bad spy.

Our participation in the diminishment of nature is another form of self-betrayal; I want to give nature as much priority as I give myself, want to feel it as an extension of the same body that walks in my two boots over the ground. The grass is my thinker, my speaker, my twine.

…Wren says, "I basically feel like I've
been preparing for an apocalypse my whole life."

"I mean, most kids my age have been hearing about climate change since we were born and walk around with a sense of doom, knowing this world will be totally different before we are old. The crazy thing is that it sounds slightly thrilling to me. No rules! I like the idea of having to use my skills to survive."

The two valleys drop away and rise up again in layers; the sky feels huge above and beneath us, as if we stood on the prow of a ship and could fall into the sky like water. As the sun comes over the forest edge, white light blots out the hills, splashes down through the new leaves, and blinds us.