History of a Disturbance

You said, "Do you love me?" Your voice was flirtatious, easy--you weren't asking me to put a doubt to rest. ... I said nothing. ... What was wrong with me? Did I love you? Of course I loved you. But to ask me just then, as I was taking in the night... Besides, what did the words mean?

     And if I hesitated, it was also because of you. There you were in the house. Already we existed in a courteous dark silence trembling with your crushed-down rage. How could I explain to you that words no longer meant what they once had meant, that they no longer meant anything at all?

--From Steven Millhauser's "Dangerous Laughter"

So here the healthy and successful forty-three-year-old man tries to tell Elena that words became meaningless to him. But how does he explain to his wife in words when the very act requires enough words to understand? She is undeniably confused, angry, stressed, in denial. And I don't believe he actually tells her, or even writes a letter. Perhaps he is talking in his mind, for words formed in that sacred space remains in that sacred space unless told or written. And so Elena never really gets to understand her husband's sudden loss of words. 

I must say the book is a little bit puffy. The pages are wavy and has another coat of thickness, a touch of antiquity, almost.

On Chesil Beach

"Then came a searchingly expressive Adagio of consummate beauty and spiritual power. Miss Ponting, in the lilting tenderness of her tone and the lyrical delicacy of her phrasing, played, if I may put it this way, like a woman in love, not only with Mozart, or with music, but with life itself."
     And even if Edward had read that review, he could not have known--no one knew but Florence--that as the house lights came up, and as the dazed young players stood to acknowledge that rapturous applause, the first violinist could not help her gaze traveling to the middle of the third row, to seat 9C.

--From Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach

Why did Edward forget Florence? Why did he not come to her debut performance and sit in seat 9C as he promised? How could he let her down when she played with every pulse in her heart? I was disappointed in Edward. And I can only imagine how much he hurt Florence. Because she played not as if she was in love with life itself, but with Edward only. And she wanted him to know that, but he wasn't there. Didn't even read the review. And how infinitely sad the narrator, to tell this story to me. 

How funny one must think to open the fridge in the morning and find a book lying next to last night's dinner. But that was what my science teacher in middle school told me to do: put a wet book in the fridge overnight and it will dry without wrinkles. So my water bottle leaked and soaked Steven Millhauser's Dangerous Laughter, which happens to be a library book. I think the fridge idea worked. A little. Because I was too impatient to wait a whole day so I just took it out only after a few hours.

The Room in the Attic

He himself would love to have a nice little breakdown, to use that word, though frankly he'd prefer to call it a fix-up, but he suffered from an embarrassing case of perfect health, he couldn't even manage to catch a cold, something must be wrong with him. --From Steven Millhauser's "The Room in the Attic"

My brother used to be very sick once. Had fevers and I couldn't see him for a while. He got better, eventually, but I wondered why I was too healthy. Had perfect memory of names, faces, time, places. But it's funny one day during spring break I woke up thinking: "It would be so weird if you wake up one day and think you skipped a day. Either you overslept or just don't remember." Common symptoms of junioritis.

The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman

What bothered me wasn't so much the disappearance itself, since I had scarcely known her, or even the possible ugliness of that disappearance, but my own failure of memory.

--from Steven Millhauser's "The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman"

I wanted to see if there was more of Ian McEwan in the library. There wasn't. Instead I picked up Steven Millhauser. 

I like his sentences. Particularly: "One night I dreamed that I was playing basketball with Elaine Coleman. The driveway was also the beach, the ball kept splashing in shallow water, but Elaine Coleman was laughing, her face was radiant though somehow hidden, and when I woke I felt that the great failure in my life was never to have evoked that laughter" (Millhauser, 33). 

Made me think about dreams that I wake up from, not because they're bad dreams but because of some invention called an alarm clock. And so you wish you could hold on to that dream, to hear someone laugh again, or to make him laugh, but you're already awake.