Coping

I’ve never cared much for dystopian novels, but I’d rather read about them than live in one as we are now. This is the age of muck and mire or rather musk and liar whose wet dream of scrupulously planned turmoil has been realized.

It may be mayhem to us but, as the elder Corleone said to Corleone the younger, it’s business, son just business. Everything done in the name of governance during this current regime is really all about business, about avarice, money and domination.

It remains for us to figure our way out of or through the carnage. If there is to be a wolf at the door let it be Wolfgang Puck or the novelist Tobias Wolfe rather than the bearer of bad news like Wolf Blitzer. Better yet, I might raid the local library’s shelf of Thomas Wolfe.

Nobody writes like Wolfe anymore. He gushes …but with eloquence. His spigot must have been missing a washer. He creates a torrent of words you find yourself swimming in, which is not a bad way of spending the next few years. Look Homeward Angel, a mere 662 pages, was a bestseller in the 1920s.

His next novel, Of Time and the River, was intended to rival Proust’s seven volumes. It came in at over a million words which he dumped on the desk of his editor, Maxwell Perkins. Over a thousand words got trimmed to a final heft of 912 pages. You Can’t Go Home Again was published posthumously.

If those three books aren’t enough sand to bury my ostrich head into, then I could turn to that other wolf, Virginia, spelled Woolf.

She wrote the way Monet painted. Phrases like brushstrokes. A gesture here, fraction of dialog there, shadows on the wall, a room in the silence of doilies. Images receive the lift of her language. Scenes drift, then return in mid-sentence. Time slides. I could happily dwell in the realm of her interior monologues as if in the music of a cello.

Two wolves, howling at the moon at opposite poles in their writing styles. One spare, one effusive. They died within three years of each other. He suddenly at age 38, she by suicide in 1941. Let their sentences have their way with me. My letters of transit.