I still experience the newness of things, the immediacy of objects that come under my scrutiny for the first time, or again after a long while. It's the only antidote to melancholy, which is pleasurable but deadly, like drinking poison.
The computer facilitates this tactile work, like the putting on of a new cotton shirt, or the first step into the mouth of an unknown trail through woods—seductive, full of unfamiliar bends and pockets where little brooks flow.
One by one I collected antique French chef's knives. The milky, pockmarked surface of the carbon steel blades thicken toward the bolster, heavy but perfectly balanced in the hand by the fastidiousness of an old craft. The metal is soft.
I discovered M.F.K. Fisher, the sensual, gin-quaffing food writer who was the world's Julia Child before the later model—puritan, striving, horsey and middle class—emerged. I collected the unpopular books, filled with her open-ended sentences like the floating metaphors of William Carlos Williams.
I lost myself in the dogma of the clarinet, the endeavor for good breeding in tone, a gigantic snobbery. The hand-tuned instruments of the 30s and 40s, asleep in their brittle cases aromatic with mold, are cool to the touch. The burnished ebony of the joints reflects the colors of brick and aubergine and even sky blue like soundless overtones.
I plunged my face into a copy of The Common Reader twice my age, inhaling the odor as if it were the overcoat Virginia Woolf filled with stones as she stood on the bank of the Ouse. The old paper became the smell of knowledge itself, of possibility.
I ate a buttered fresh beet, which I haven't done since 10, and life filled my mouth with its spice, not staled by its long absence—a frightening journey of loss, of adult pleasures that now seem childish, of towering commitments I couldn't honor.
The depressive and the manic—heartbreak and blissful curiosity, sugar and salt—continue under the noontime sun.
