(Untitled)

[grashupfer]

"There are two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see."

The strange narrator in James Salter's Light Years shortens the Great Gatsby to near Twitter length.

Comments

[proximoception]

"Every roof is agreeable to the eye, until it is lifted; then we find tragedy and moaning women, and hard-eyed husbands, and deluges of Lethe, and the men ask, 'What's the news?' as if the old were so bad."

"Only-but this is rare-
When a belovèd hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen'd ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd-
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life's flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze."

Seeing the breeze. Is that what Salter's after with the title? I had almost as bad a boredom problem with him as I did with Richardson, but maybe I should try again.

[grashupfer]

I hadn't read those Arnold lines closely before except where they might give a short story title in its phrases. Thanks for sharing.

There's a neat Paris Review page with images from Salter's scrapbooks showing his scribbles on possible titles. I think he made the best choice from his list but seems like a happy accident.

[nightspore]

Are you rereading? Such an amazing book.

[grashupfer]

I never really close that book. I sometimes take it out to read for a chapter to come down from a style like H James.