Blue Nights

24

I find myself leafing today for the first time through a journal she kept in the spring of 1984, a daily assignment for an English class during her senior year at the Westlake School for Girls. “I had an exciting revelation while studying a poem by John Keats,” this volume of the journal begins, on a page dated March 7, 1984, the one-hundred-and-seventeenth entry since she had begun keeping the journal in September of 1983. “In the poem, ‘Endymion,’ there is a line that seems to tell my present fear of life: Pass into nothingness.”

This March 7, 1984, entry continues, moves into a discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger and their respective understandings of the abyss, but I am no longer following the argument: automatically, without thinking, appallingly, as if she were still at the Westlake School and had asked me to take a look at her paper, I am editing it.

For example:

Delete commas setting off title “Endymion.”

“Tell,” as in “a line that seems to tell my present fear of life,” is of course wrong.

“Describe” would be better.

“Suggest” would be better still.

On the other hand: “tell” might work: try “tell” as she uses it.

I try it: She “tells” her present fear of life in relation to Sartre.

I try it again: She “tells” her present fear of life in relation to Heidegger. She “tells” her understanding of the abyss. She qualifies her understanding of the abyss: “This is merely how I interpret the abyss; I could be wrong.”

Considerable time passes before I realize that my preoccupation with the words she used has screened off any possible apprehension of what she was actually saying when she wrote her journal entry on that March day in 1984.

Was that deliberate?

Was I screening off what she said about her fear of life the same way I had screened off what she said about her fear of The Broken Man?

Hello, Quintana? I’m going to lock you here in the garage?

After I became five I never ever dreamed about him?

Did I all her life keep a baffle between us?

Did I prefer not to hear what she was actually saying?

Did it frighten me?

I try the passage again, this time reading for meaning.

What she said: My present fear of life.

What she said: Pass into nothingness.

What she was actually saying: The World has nothing but Morning and Night. It has no Day or Lunch. Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep. When I tell you that I am afraid to get up from a folding chair in a rehearsal room on West Forty-second Street, is this what I am actually saying?

Does it frighten me?