I promised myself I would always look at my city as the train passed over the bridge. Our motion was like music you could see, the buildings, trees, and river appearing and disappearing behind the great blue-grey metal beams of the bridge, visible through the long rectangular windows of an in-bound train, seen through the windows of the out-bound train, each view and shadow passing in its own time.
You still think there might be an explanation for the silence. You wait for the email that explains what’s been in his head, but you know you won’t receive it. For four days you had that feeling like your heart is a helium balloon pushing its way beyond your chest and up into the atmosphere. You played the same song over and over again. The signs and omens seemed to promise happiness but long chatty emails turned into silence. You pushed your heart back down into your chest, swallowing the inevitable.
I’m on my way through the 190th St. station after stopping at my old apartment to pick up some stuff: laundry detergent, coffee beans, packing tape, a cabinet shelf divider. I press all three call buttons, one for each elevator, and it is the staffed elevator that arrives first. An older woman is getting off, a bit stooped, carrying bags. She stops in the doorway to finish her conversation with the elevator attendant. I wait to one side, then step in when she moves away. I say hi to the elevator operator.
“What she was telling me in Spanish was about an 82-year-old drug dealer,” he says.
We chat for a minute about the fact of it. She told him that they should just put him away. I’m not sure if that means lock him up for the rest of his life, or execute him. The attendant’s view is that we can’t be easy on crime, no matter how old the criminal - some might think we should cut the guy a break, but no, he’s an adult and knows what he’s doing.
“He’s certainly keeping up with the times,” I say.
The attendant cracks up. “I never thought about it like that,” he says.
The doors open. I wish him a good evening and am on my way.
From Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire:
All colors made me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs.
From The Aviator:
Howard Hughes: I feel like a little adventure.
Katherine Hepburn: Do your worst, Mr. Hughes.
*****
Katherine Hepburn: Howard, we’re not like everyone else. Too many acute angles. Too many eccentricities. We have to be very careful not to let people in or they’ll make us into freaks.
Howard Hughes: Kate, they can’t get in here. We’re safe.
The little redheaded boy shrieks as the train emerges into light. His redheaded mother, her arms covered with stars stamped in blue ink, lifts him onto the seat. He presses his face against the window, watches the rooftops go by.
In the stations near 125th St., where the train is submerged just beneath the hills of upper Broadway, light filters onto the track through grates in the sidewalk. Dark grey paint peels in thick flakes off the metal beams between the track and the grate. Shadows stir the light like waves and I feel we are underwater, trains sliding in and out of the station, divers exploring a reef, a kelp forest.
From The Names of Things by Susan Brind Morrow, a strange and wonderful book about her life, travel in Egypt, and the roots of language:
You could begin with the crab that scratches in the sand. The name of the animal is the action or sound it makes, or its color. The name parents other like meanings belonging to other things, leaving the animal behind: grapho (Greek–to scratch, and so, to write), gramma (the scratches), graph, grammar, grab. …
… Words begin as description. They are prismatic, vehicles of hidden, deeper shades of thought. You can hold them up at different angles until the light bursts through in an unexpected color. The word carries the living thing concealed across millennia.
The hapax legomenon, a word used only once in text or in a particular body of text: nortelrye in Chaucer, slaepwerigne in Old English. From there I find the nonce word, a word created for a particular need but not expected to be needed again: slithy, surlecultant, unidexter, quark (from James Joyce). Nonce words sometimes get picked up and used when they scratch the right language itch. Sniglets and portmanteau words follow.
Brind Morrow drops Arabic words here and there into her text, and in them, I see Turkish words. “Cairo is um a dunya, Mother of the World,” she writes. “Dunya” means “world” in Turkish, as well. Do these languages have similar grammatical structures, I wonder?
The window went white, then a brighter white, then the rooftops became grey forms visible as through a veil.
There’s something about this article and slideshow of Jill Freedman’s work that seems unspeakably sad to me. I mean, these are beautiful photographs. The subjects have so much dignity. To come back to New York and cry at the loss of the grittiness - well, I understand that, looking at these pictures, but it’s also sad, because to me vast change is as much a piece of New York as any one moment in its history. But maybe if I’d been there then, I’d feel differently.
From The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe:
One of the phrases that kept running through the conversation was “pushing the outside of the envelope.” The “envelope” was a flight-test term referring to the limits of a particular aircraft’s performance, how tight a turn it could make at such-and-such a speed, and so on. “Pushing the outside,” probing the outer limits, of the envelope seemed to be the great challenge and satisfaction of flight test. At first “pushing the outside of the envelope” was not a particularly terrifying phrase to hear. It sounded once more as if the boys were just talking about sports.
