Huge,
beautiful expanses of time. Quiet, cold, serene—like clean, untrodden
snow on the rolling lawns of a pretty college campus, twinkling in the
moonlight. Awesome stretches of time: seven months, two weeks and three
days. One year, four months, two weeks and one day. Three months, three
weeks and six days. Each period—containing events momentous and minute,
from the universal to the personal, calamities, births and deaths,
droughts, weddings, military coups and shooting sprees; crossing the
seasons; calendar pages flying into blackness—had its own quality, its
characteristics. Sweet, peaceful, sad or angry. Some were green. Some
were dark purple, or opalescent blue.
These were the periods when he didn’t write.
He
was a great nonwriter—maybe the best there ever was. An exquisite
craftsman of the empty page, a master story-not-teller. What other
people wrote was good or bad, maybe great sometimes. Probably not. But
what he didn’t write was transcendent. Others slaved at their screens,
sullying the page irretrievably with a single twisted, tortured glyph,
then a lonesome, woeful word, and—when they still might cut their losses
by shutting their laptops and seeing what’s on TV—deepening their
ignominy by following the first word with another and yet another after that, a dreary sentence even, then a hopeless paragraph, a tragic chapter, and ultimately, a lost and irredeemable novel.
While
he didn’t write window washers made their glacial progress down the
facades of great buildings, reached bottom, and started all over again.
Young couples moved into their first apartments, painted the walls in
trendy pastels, bickered, and wondered whether they’d made the right
decision. Two people were shoved to their deaths on New York City subway
tracks. All this time he didn’t write a word.
Some
strove to write about some of it, or all of it, even. Nothing they
produced could possibly do justice to the beauty, the horror and the
chaos. Only one thing could: not writing. And he was not writing
powerfully. Poignantly.
Wasn’t
most of the world not writing too? Yes—but no. He wrote from time to
time. He had to—that was the only way to frame his true work, his
anti-performance, his agraphic state of grace.
Thanks
to experience and great determination, he found that his periods of
writing grew shorter and farther between. Finally, he resolved to create
his masterpiece. He would never write another word as long as he lived.
For
years he kept at it. Nothing, silence. Nothing but the purest void, the
essence of the universe, indescribably beautiful—and duly undescribed.
Even as his body began to fail him—aches and debilities, minor at first
and then a little worse, like everybody else—his spirit grew stronger,
glowing within him like an ember that couldn’t die. He was the elderly
master in his glory, like deaf Beethoven, like Picasso holed up in the
south of France. Except death wouldn’t interrupt his work. It would
prolong it into eternity.
Then
one morning something happened. The garbage truck had come and gone. A
crust of toast remained on a saucer on the kitchen counter. Everything
was still. And he did something he immediately regretted. And he knew he
would, but he did it anyway. He hated himself for it. But there was
nothing he could do. He began to write.