A Liminal Time

Here we have a fantastic, gloomy case, a modern case, a situation of our times, when the human heart is clouded, when one hears cited the phrase that blood ‘refreshes,’ when peple preach a whole life of comfort. There are bookish dreams here, sir, there is a heart chafed by theories; we see here a resolve to take the first step, but a resolve of a certain kind— he resolved on it, but as if he were falling of a mountain or plunging down from a bell-tower, and then arrived at the crime as if he weren’t using his own legs.

—Crime and Punishment (456)

Why should he live? With what in mind? Striving for what? To live in order to exist? But even before, he had been ready to give his existence a thousand times over for an idea, a hope, even a fantasy. Existence alone had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was only from the force of his desires that he had regarded himself as a man to whom more was permitted than to others.

—Crime and Punishment (544).

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

—The DFW commencement speech I have been reading like scripture since coming across it in September. I’m trying to be aware, to stay aware, to be curious, to be kind and human “in myriad unsexy ways,” to will myself to leave the melodrama in my head as much as possible. I want an archive of this effort; it feels like a strange between-time, but I’m trying to accept that it’s all just time from here on out: an airplane will never fly overhead streaming a banner that reads, “You have arrived.”

“At Stadtklause he sang “Mamatschi” (“Dear Mama”), in which a poor boy grows up wishing for a little horse. The horse arrives years later pulling the hearse that bears his dead mother away.”

-NYtimes article on Bruno S three decades after being the subject of two Herzog documentaries

Sometimes, when ripping apart especially feeble student work, he drew smiley faces.

—The Corrections