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In Memoriam
David Park  | |
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I told them I could be free by the twenty-first, and that I'd come home the twenty-second. | |
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It had more to do with belonging to a tradition in music and staying in it and working at in in any capacity you can fit into - playing what's being written, and what's been written, composing too if you want to and can, but mostly trying to keep it alive and separate the chaff from the grain and keep them separate. Know which is which, and care, and that's a life work. He quit teaching because it irked him to have to meet appointments - to shave by the clock and put on a tie and arrive at a particular place at a particular time over and over. It wasn't that way in Athens. A teacher in the golden age could stay in his bath however long he happened to wish to, and when he got out, some youth would be there with a towel and dry him off, and by the time he was dry and robed, the work would have got around and the young men would have gathered to question and to be questioned and end up convinced that the unexamined life is not worth living. We were raised that way ourselves; our father was Socrates, we were the youth and we sat at his feet. Either this or that. But. But I'd never try to have it both ways, I'd never, I swear I'd never choose to come home with a stranger and enact before our household gods the brutal double ceremony of the destruction of Athens and the founding of something that could never at its best equal it. Or come anywhere near it. Or be spoken of in the same breath. From heights you can only descend. Ask anyone. Ask me, preferably. I hadn't thought about it as being anything peculiar, because I was going home, and one of the things about belonging somewhere is that you can go there without permission because it's where you belong. But did I? Did I belong, at such a time, where plans were being made and questions of policy being decided, matters of great moment like for example do they have sterling silver of stainless steel? But I seldom get praised for the hard things I do, and I do some of the hardest things. Things like waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night, all all alone except when I'm with someone; and it's getting harder and harder for me to be really with anyone. A simple word like yes, for example, can take on fantastic implications if the one-sided hearer is forced to invent the question it's in answer to. I took a sip and a half of brandy and realized that no matter how elaborately you try substitutions you end up thinking about people. I couldn't even think about a bat without personifying it. So I tried again, at random, as I believed, and I was thinking this time about black widow spiders, which gran also tried to teach us to beware of as deadly. But they never have shown any interest in biting anyone or causing trouble. All on earth they want is to spin a good thick web in a woodpile or under a chair, get rid of their husbands and live in peace. People again. If right now there were nothing for me but blankness and despair, meaningless loves, pleasureless drinking, no faith in anything except the decayed memory of us as a family, living in a fortress, being self-sufficient and superior - if it were that way for me, Cass would take over and get me out of it, bring me back, convince me, get me to the shore, turn me into a great musician, a whole-souled human being, a tee-total, anti-barbituate, true believer. She would. She'd do it for me.
But I didn't need it, and I couldn't quite decide whether to rejoice for my sake, or regret it for hers. Same thing everywhere I'd ever looked. Large amounts of safety; very few risks. Let nothing endanger the proper marriage, the fashionable career, the non-irritating thesis that says nothing new and nothing true. That's how they do it. They go along. All but papa, who prefers the skeptics and Five-star Hennessy. And me who what. Who nothing. Who less than nothing. Who tried, but didn't. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
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"By the time I went back into the bedroom I had my mind made up. As I said, it wasn't really hard, because I couldn't stand what was going to happen, and I knew I couldn't, not now, keep it from happening. So go, girl. We should have been one person all along, not two..."
It is the hottest June 21st since 1912, and the longest day of the year. Casandra Edwards-tormented, intelligent, mordantly witty - leaves her doctoral thesis and her Berkeley flat to drive through the scorching heat to her family's ranch. There they are all assembled: her philosopher father smelling so sweetly of five-star Hennessey, her kind, fussy grandmother, her beloved, her identical, her inseparable (soon to be separated) twin sister Judith. For the occasion is Judith's marriage to a young Connecticut doctor; though it won't be if Cassandra can help it ... | |
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▾Book descriptions Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0860682447, Paperback)
Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-wracked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding. Dorothy Baker's entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events in which her heroine appears variously as conniving, self-aware, pitiful, frenzied, absurd, and heartbroken—at once utterly impossible and tremendously sympathetic. Cassandra reckons with her complicated feelings about the sister who she feels owes it to her to be her alter ego; with her father, a brandy-soaked retired professor of philosophy; and with the ghost of her dead mother, as she struggles to come to terms with the only life she has. First published in 1962, Cassandra at the Wedding is a book of enduring freshness, insight, and verve. Like the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides and Jhumpa Lahiri, it is the work of a master stylist with a profound understanding of the complexities of the heart and mind. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:20 -0400) ▾Open Shelves Classification The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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