What is the connection between artistic expression and the joy of living? How can one best live a literary life? This book is a collection of small word-projects. Each examines a book, a moment, a story that helps to deepen the author's literary adv...
I'm at Lighthouse Point in Deerfield Beach...with my dad. We are laying out on the beach. I'm reading a book and he is just enjoying the feel of the sun. This could be the closest we will ever get to heaven.
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The digital wicked witch of the post-apocalypse knows me.
It knows how to pull the strings connected to both my hopes and fears. I know, though, that if I try to talk with my dad the world will freeze and disappear. I decide to run my hands through sand instead. There is no way to describe sand in prose. Sand is sand. But when I hold this sand, April sand, tight in a fist, it burns me, and reminds me that even computer programs can make me comprehend pain.
I look off into the distance and there is Jennifer.
"Pierce, I've grown old," she tells me sadly.
"I have also grown old," I say.
The blue sky fills up with my nightmares. Billboards in the distance advertise disease, unemployment, disappointment, decay, and worse...The blue sky of my dreams is soon papered over with my fears...
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"And now," I tell the vision of my dad the digital wicked witch has created, "there will be no space left for me to retreat into. I will have nowhere."
At twenty, the beach is a romantic space. Jennifer asks me how to draw my dad. I'm not sure what to tell her. He's thin and his face is blotchy with scars from the laser surgery where they cut the cancer out. They took the skin from his forehead to put it in his nose. He didn't leave the house for weeks. But he is beautiful. He is gentle. He is skinny, lean, old in his fifties, damaged, but beautiful.
"How do you draw a fading memory?" I ask out loud. "I hope you can draw these things, because the more I describe them, the more they seem like a city that just keeps getting further and further in the distance."
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I look at Jennifer. Her face seems to sink.
Perhaps I have just described her dream -- both of our dreams -- to keep walking toward a paradise that will never quite materialize.
We keep walking toward it. The more we walk, the farther away it gets. If we sit still, it stays the same size.
"Maybe we should try walking in the opposite direction. Maybe if we turn our backs on our dreams, that's when we'll finally achieve them."
Jennifer seems skeptical. Perhaps she thinks the whole system has been designed to make us do that exact thing.
If we turn our backs, we have done nothing more than admit defeat.
