The Jukebox And Other Essays On Storytelling

ESSAY ON THE SUCCESSFUL DAY

A self-portrait by William Hogarth, an eighteenth-century moment, showing a palette divided approximately in the middle by a gently curving line, the so-called Line of Beauty and Grace. And on my desk a flat, rounded stone found on the shore of Lake Constance, dark granite, traversed diagonally by a vein of chalky white, with a subtle, almost playful bend, deviating from the straight line at exactly the right moment and dividing the stone into two halves, while at the same time holding it together. And that trip in a suburban train through the hills to the west of Paris, at the afternoon hour when as a rule the fresh air and clean light of certain early-morning departures are vitiated, when nothing is natural any longer and it seems likely that only the coming of darkness can bring relief from the closeness of the day, then suddenly the tracks swing out in a wide arc, strangely, breathtakingly high above the city, which unexpectedly, along with the crazy reality of its enigmatic structures, opens out into the fluvial plain — there on the heights of Saint-Cloud or Suresnes, with that unforeseen curve, an instant transition changed the course of my day, and my almost abandoned idea of a “successful day” was back again, accompanied by a heartwarming impulse to describe, list, or discuss the elements of such a day and the problems it raises. The Line of Beauty and Grace on Hogarth’s palette seems literally to force its way through the formless masses of paint, seems to cut between them and yet to cast a shadow.

Who has ever experienced a successful day? Most people will say without thinking that they have. But then it will be necessary to ask: Do you mean “successful” or only “happy”? Are you thinking of a successful day or only of a “carefree” one, which admittedly is just as unusual. If a day goes by without confronting you with problems, does that, in your opinion, suffice to make it a successful day? Do you see a distinction between a happy day and a successful one? Is it essentially different to speak of some successful day in the past, with the help of memory, and right now after the day, which no intervening time has transfigured, to say not that a day has been “dealt with” or “got out of the way,” but that it has been “successful”? To your mind, is a successful day basically dif ferent from a carefree or happy day, from a full or busy day, a day struggled through, or a day transfigured by the distant past — one particular suffices, and a whole day rises up in glory — perhaps even some Great Day for Science, your country, our people, the peoples of the earth, mankind? (And that reminds me: Look — look up — the outline of that bird up there in the tree; translated literally, the Greek verb for “read,” used in the Pauline epistles, would signify a “looking up,” even a “perceiving upward” or “recognizing upward,” a verb without special imperative form, but in itself a summons, an appeal; and then those hummingbirds in the jungles of South America, which in leaving their sheltering tree imitate the wavering of a falling leaf to mislead the hawk …) — Yes, to me a successful day is not the same as any other; it means more. A successful day is more. It is more than a “successful remark,” more than a “successful chess move” (or even a whole successful game), more than a “successful first winter ascent,” than a “successful flight,” a “successful operation,” a “successful relationship,” or any “successful piece of business”; it is independent of a successful brushstroke or sentence, nor should it be confused with some “poem, which after a lifetime of waiting achieved success in a single hour.” The successful day is incomparable. It is unique.

It is symptomatic of our particular epoch that the success of a single day can become a “subject” (or a reproach). Consider that in times gone by more importance was attached to faith in a correctly chosen moment, which could indeed stand for the whole of life. Faith? Belief? Idea? In the remote past, at all events, regardless of whether you were herding sheep on the slopes of Pindus, strolling about below the Acropolis, or building a wall on the stony plateau of Arcadia, you had to reckon with a god of the right moment or time-atom, a god in any case. And in its day, no doubt, this god of the moment was more powerful than all seemingly immutable embodiments of gods — always present, always here, always valid. But in the end he, too, was dethroned — or, who knows? — mightn’t it have been your god of “now!” (and of the eyes that meet, and of the sky which, formless only a moment ago, suddenly took on form, and of the water-smooth stone, which suddenly showed the play of its colors, and, and) that was dethroned by the faith that came after — no longer image or idea, but faith “born of love” in a new Creation, in which all moments and epochs are fulfilled through the Incarnation, death, and Resurrection of the Son of God, and thus in so-called eternity, a gospel whose missionaries proclaimed first that it was not made to the measure of man, and second that those who believed in it would transcend the mere moments of philosophy and enjoy the aeons, or, rather, the eternities of religion. There then followed, distinct from both the god of the moment and the God of eternity, though without sufficient zeal to demolish the one or the other, a period of purely immanent, or, to state it plainly, secular power, which put its reliance — your kairos-cult, your Greeks, your heavenly beatitude, your Christians and Muslims mean nothing to me — on something intermediary, on the success of my here-and-now, of the successful individual lifetime. Faith? Dream? Vision? Most likely — at least at the start of this period — a vision: the vision of people who have been disillusioned with all faith of any kind; a sort of defiant daydream. Since nothing outside me is thinkable, I will make the utmost of my life. Thus the era of this third power was superlative in word and deed: labors of Hercules, world movements. “Was”? Does it follow that this era is past? No, the idea of a whole life made successful by activity is of course still in force and will always remain fruitful. But apparently there is little more to be said about it, for the epics and romances of adventure of the pioneers, who resolutely lived the original dream of the active life, have already been told and provide the models for today’s successful lives — each one a variant of the well-known formula: Plant a tree, get a child, write a book — and all that’s left to talk about are strange little variations or glosses, tossed off at random, something for example about a young man of thirty, married to a woman whom he was confident of loving to the end, a teacher at a small suburban school, to whose monthly magazine he contributed occasional theater or movie notes, who had no further plans for the future (no tree, no book, no child), telling friends, not only since the completion of his thirtieth year, but on his last few birthdays as well, with festively lit-up eyes, of his certainty that his life had been successful (the words sound even weirder in the French original, “j’ai réussi ma vie”—“I’ve made a good thing of my life”?). Was the epochal vision of the successful life still at work in this man of today? Was his statement still an expression of faith? It is a long time since those words were spoken, but in my imagination, regardless of what may have happened to the man since, I feel sure that if anyone asks him he will still automatically give the same reply. So it must be faith. What sort of faith? — What can have become of that young “successful life”?

Do you mean to imply that, unlike successful lives, your so-called successful day is more meaningful today than any mere glosses or copies or travesties? Is it so very different from the motto from the Golden Age of Rome, “carpe diem,” which today, two thousand years later, can serve equally well as a brand of wine, an inscription on a T-shirt, or the name of a nightclub. (Once again it all depends on how you translate it: “Make the best of your day”—as it was understood in the century of action—? “Gather the day”—whereby the day becomes one great favorable moment—? or “Let the day bear fruit”—whereby Horace’s famous dictum suddenly comes close to my today-problem—?) And what is a successful day anyway — because thus far you have only been trying to make clear what it is not? But with all your digressions, complications, and tergiversations, your way of breaking off every time you gain a bit of momentum, what becomes of your Line of Beauty and Grace, which, as you’ve hinted, stands for a successful day and, as you went on to assure us, would introduce your essay on the subject. When will you abandon your irresolute peripheral zigzags, your timorous attempt to define a concept that seems to be growing emptier than ever, and at last, with the help of coherent sentences, make the light, sharp incision that will carry us through the present muddle and in medias res, in the hope that this obscure “successful day” of yours may take on clarity and universal form. How do you conceive of such a day? Give me a rough sketch of it, show me a picture of it. Tell me about this successful day. Show me the dance of the successful day. Sing me the song of the successful day!

There really is a song that might have been called “A Successful Day.” It was sung by Van Morrison, my favorite singer (or one of them), and it actually has a dif ferent title, the name of a small American town that is otherwise of no interest. It tells the story in pictures of a car ride on a Sunday — when a successful day seems even more unlikely than on any other day of the week — rbr two, a man and a woman, no doubt, in the we-form (in which the success of a day seems an even greater event than for one person alone): fishing in the mountains, driving on, buying the Sunday paper, driving on, a snack, driving on, the shimmer of your hair, arriving in the evening, with roughly this last line: “Why can’t every day be like this?” It’s a very short song, maybe the shortest ballad ever, it hardly takes a minute, and the man who sings it is almost elderly, with a few last strands of hair, and it talks more than it sings about that day, without tune or resonance, in a kind of casual murmur, but out of a broad, powerful chest, suddenly breaking off just as it swells its widest.

Nowadays, the Line of Beauty and Grace might be unlikely to take the same gentle curve as in Hogarth’s eighteenth century, which, at least in prosperous, self-sufficient England, conceived of itself as a very earthly epoch. Isn’t it typical of people like us that this sort of song keeps breaking off, lapsing into stuttering, babbling, and silence, starting up again, going off on a sidetrack — yet in the end, as throughout, aiming at unity and wholeness? And isn’t it equally typical of us late-twentieth-century people that we think about a single successful day rather than some sort of eternity or an entire successful life — no, not only in the sense of “Live in the present,” and certainly not of “Gather ye rosebuds,” but also in the urgent, needful hope that by investigating the elements of this one period of time one might devise a model for a greater, still greater, if not the greatest possible period, because now that all the old ideas of time have gone up in smoke, this drifting from day to day without rule or precept (except perhaps with reference to what one should not do in one’s lifetime), devoid of ties (with you, with that passerby) or the slightest certainty (that the present moment of joy will be repeated tomorrow if ever), though bearable in youth, when it may even be accompanied or encouraged by carefreeness, gives way in time to more frequent dissatisfaction and, with advancing age, to indignation. And since age, unlike youth, cannot rebel against heaven, against present conditions on earth, or anything else, my indignation turns against myself. Damn it, why aren’t we together anymore? Why at three o’clock this afternoon has the light in the country lane, or the clatter of the train wheels, or your face ceased to be the event it was this morning and promised to remain forever and ever. Damn it, why, quite unlike what is supposed to happen as one grows older, am I less able than ever to remember, hold fast, and treasure the moments of my life? Damn it, why am I so scatterbrained? Damn, damn, damn. (And while we’re at it, look at those gym shoes drying on the windowsill of the gabled house across the street; they belong to the neighbor kid we saw last night in the floodlight of the makeshift football field, plucking at the seam of his jersey while running to intercept a pass.)

So, to judge by what you say about the successful moment, the successful life, whether eternal or individual, you regard the idea of the successful day as a kind of fourth power. And that leads you to endow this successful day with a fragrance that will never evaporate but, regardless of what may happen to you tomorrow, will somehow linger on. Thus it is time to ask once again: “How precisely do you envision a successful day?” I can give you no precise picture of a successful day. I have only the idea, and I almost despair of showing you a recognizable contour, bringing out the design, or tracing the original light trail of my day, or disclosing it in simple purity, as I longed to do at the start. Since there is nothing but the idea, the idea is all I can tell you about. “I’d like to tell you an idea.” But how can an idea be told? There came a jolt (the “ugliness” of this word has often been held up to me, but once again there is no other way of saying it). It grew light? It widened? It took hold of me? It vibrated? It blew warm? It cleared? It was day again at the end of the day? No, the idea resists my narrative urge. It provides me with no picture to serve as an excuse. And yet it was corporeal, more corporeal than any image or representation has ever been; it synthesized all the body’s dispersed senses into energy. Idea means this: It provided no picture, only light. This idea was not recollection of well-spent childhood days; it cast its beam exclusively forward, on the future. If it can be told, then only in the future form, a future story, such as “On a successful day, day will dawn again at noon. It will give me a jolt, two jolts: one pressing me onward, the other reaching deep inside me. At the end of the successful day, I shall have the effrontery to say that for once I had lived as one should live — with an effrontery corresponding to my innate reserve.” No, the idea was not about childhood days, the days of yore; it was about a grownup day, a future day, and the idea was in reality an action, it acted, intervened beyond the simple future, as a hortative form, with the help of which, for example, Van Morrison’s song might be rendered more or less as follows: “On the successful day, the Catskill Mountains should be the Catskills, the turn-off to the rest area should be the turn-off to the rest area, the Sunday paper should be the Sunday paper, nightfall should be nightfall, your radiance beside me should …” Of course, but how is that sort of thing to be brought about? Will my own dance be enough? Or should it be “Anmut” or “Grazia” or “Gnade” instead of “Grace”? And what does it signify that the time when the idea of the successful day first crossed my mind was not a long period of near-despair? The monster of speechlessness has given way to silence. In broad daylight his dream about the bird’s nest made of hay, flat on the ground, with the naked, cheeping chicks in it, recurred. The particles of mica in the stone sidewalk glittered close to my eyes. His memory of his mother’s warmth that day when she gave him all the money she had for a new watch strap, and his memory of the maxim: “God loveth a cheerful giver.” The flying blackbird’s wing that grazed the hedge far down the road grazed him at the same time. On the asphalt platform of the Issy — Plaine station the overlapping marks of a thousand different shoe soles imprinted by yesterday’s rain have now dried into a lighter color. As he passed the unknown child, the child’s cowlick repeated itself in his mind. The steeple of Saint-Germain-des-Près, across from the cafés, the bookshop, the salon de coiffure, and the pharmacy, was simultaneously translated to another day, removed from the “current date” and its moods. Last night’s deadly fear was what it was. The splintered shop window was what it was. The disorders beyond the Caucasus were what they were. My hand and her hip — they were. It was the warmth of earth colors from the path along the railroad to Versailles. A dream of the all-encompassing, all-absorbing book, long gone from the world, long dreamed to an end — was back again all of a sudden; or renewed? here in the daytime world, and needed only to be written down. A Mongoloid woman, or perhaps a saint, with a knapsack on her back ran across the pedestrian crossing in an ecstasy of terror. And that night there was only one customer in the bar of another small-town station; while the patron was drying glasses, the house cat was playing with a billiard ball between the tables, the jagged shadows of the plane-tree leaves were dancing over the dusty windowpane, and the urgent need arose to find a different word from “blinking” for the lights of a moving train seen through a curtain of foliage — as though the discovery of a single appropriate word could make this entire day successful in the sense that “all phenomena (or, in contemporary, secular terms: all forms) are light.”

Then at last, in disregard of logic or timeliness, a third voice, obscure, dim of outline, stuttering-stammering, a storytelling voice that seemed to come from below, from the underbrush, from far away, butted into our essay on the successful day. — At last? Or unfortunately? To its detriment?

Fortunately or not, an “unfortunately” is in order, for a while at least; for in the following a relapse into hairsplitting cannot be avoided. Does Van Morrison’s song tell of a successful day, or only of a happy one? Because in the present context a “successful day” was dangerous, fraught with obstacles, narrow escapes, ambushes, perils, tempests, comparable to the days of Odysseus on his homeward wanderings, a story of days that can end only in eating, drinking, reveling, and the “godlike bedding of a woman.” But the dangers of my present day are neither the boulder from the giant’s sling nor any of the other well-known perils; the dangerous part of my day is the day itself. Most likely this has always been the case, especially in epochs and parts of the world where wars and other catastrophes seemed far behind (how many diaries from how many so-called Golden Ages begin in the morning with resolutions for that one day and in the evening record their failure) — but when was such a day, yours or mine, ever seen before? And in an even more golden future mightn’t its problem be even more timely and acute? At least for people like you and me, here and now in our halfway peaceful regions, the “specific demands of the day,” quite apart from its duties, struggles, distractions — days as such, available days, each moment of which offers possibilities to be grasped at — have become a challenge, a potential friend, a potential enemy, a game of chance. But if such an adventure, or duel, or mere contest between you and the day, is to be withstood, conquered, made to bear fruit, it is essential that you receive no decisive help from any third factor, neither a piece of work nor the most delightful pastime, nor even from Van Morrison’s bumpy ride; indeed, even such a distraction as “a short walk” would seem to be incompatible with a successful day — as though the day itself were the undertaking to be accomplished and brought home folded and packaged by me, preferably right here on the spot, while lying, sitting, standing, or at the most taking a few steps back and forth, doing nothing but looking and listening, or perhaps just breathing, but that involuntarily — with no effort on my part, as in every other segment of life on such a day — as though total involuntariness were prerequisite to this success. And would it thus give rise to a dance?

And now two fundamentally different versions of the individual’s adventure with this day can be plotted. In the first he succeeds, the moment he wakes up, in casting off those dreams that are mere ballast that would encumber him on his course, and taking with him those that will form a counterweight to world events and the happenings of his day; in the morning air the earth’s continents merge; at the same time a crackling is heard in the leaves of a bush in Tierra del Fuego; the alien light of the afternoon, unbewitched from one moment to the next through knowledge of a fata morgana emanating from yourself; and from then on what’s needed for success is just to let night fall without losing your eyes for the dusk. And then, though nothing has happened, you must have it in you to go on interminably about your day. Ah, the moment when at last there was nothing but the old man in the blue apron in the front garden! And the opposite version? It must be short — preferably something like this: Paralyzed by the gray of dawn, a bundle of misery is cast adrift; his ship, named The Adventure of the Day, capsizes in the waters of the forenoon, so he never gets to know the silence of midday, let alone the hours after that — and ends up deep in the night at the exact same place from which our hero should have started out at the crack of dawn. To tell the truth, the words and images with which to relate the failure of his day do not exist, except for such worn-out allegories as we have just been using.

Thus it would seem that, before you can regard a day as successful, every moment from waking to falling asleep at night must count, or, more specifically, represent a trial (or danger) faced. But aren’t you struck by the fact that for most other people a single moment counts as a successful day (and that there is something smug about your conception so different from the prevailing view)? “When I stood at the window in the dawning light, a little bird darted by and let out a sound which seemed to be meant for me — that in itself was a successful day” (Narrator A). — “The day became successful at the moment when the phone — though you had no other plan than to go on reading the book — communicated to me the Wanderlust of your voice” (Narrator B). — “To be able to tell myself that the day is successful, I had no need of a particular moment — all I needed on waking was a mere breath, un souffle, or something of the sort” (a third narrator). And hasn’t it occurred to you that as a rule the question of whether a day is to be successful has been decided before the day has properly begun? a

Here at least we shall not count a single moment, however glorious, as a successful day. (We shall count only the whole day.) Nevertheless, the moments I have mentioned, especially the first moments of full consciousness after the night’s sleep, may well provide the starting point for the Line of Beauty and Grace. And once the starting point for the day is set, let the day proceed point by point in a high arc. As I listen for a tone, the tonality of the whole day’s journey reveals itself to me. The tone does not have to be a full sound, it can be indifferent, as often as not a mere noise; the essential is that I make myself all ears for it. Didn’t the clicking of the buttons, when I stripped my shirt off the chair this morning, provide me with a kind of diapason for my day? And when yesterday morning, instead of reaching blindly and heedlessly for the first thing I needed, I did so carefully, with open eyes, didn’t that supply me with the right rhythm for taking hold of things all the rest of the day? And mightn’t the continual sensation of wind and water in the new morning — or, instead of “sensation,” wouldn’t it be preferable to say “awareness,” or simply “feeling” in my eyes, my temples, and wrists — mightn’t this sensation attune me to the coming elements of the day, prepare me to dissolve into them and let them work on me? (Answer reserved for the present.) Such a successful moment: Viaticum? Impulse? Nourishment with breath as spirit for the rest of this one day; for such a moment gives strength, and in telling about the next moment one might, drawing on another literal translation of “moment” again from a Pauline epistle, begin with “And with one casting of the eye …”: With one casting of the eye the sky turned blue, and with the next casting of the eye the green of the grass became a greening, and … Who has ever experienced a successful day? But who has ever experienced a successful day? Not to mention the difficulty of tracing the curve of that line!

The clouds of the still invisible dog’s breath came puffing through the cracks in the fence. The few remaining leaves on the trees trembled in the foggy wind. The forest began just behind the village railroad station. Two men were washing the telephone booth; the one outside was white, the one inside was black.

And if I fail to seize a moment of this kind, does it mean that my whole day has failed? If this last apple, instead of being carefully picked, were torn blindly from the branch — would all the preceding consonances between the day and me be nullified? If I were insensitive to the glance of a child, evaded the beggar’s glance, were unable to face the glance of that woman (or even of that drunk) — would that mean a break in my rhythm, a fall from my day? And would it be impossible to make a fresh start that same day? Would that day’s failure be irrevocable? With the consequence that for me the daylight would not only diminish as it does for most other people, but also, and this is where the danger lies, that brightness of form might degenerate into the hell of formlessness? Thus, for example, if the musical clicking of the buttons against the wood were repeated on such an unsuccessful day, I should be condemned to hear it as noise. Or if in a moment of carelessness I were to reach out “blindly” for a glass and drop it, causing it to shatter into smithereens, wouldn’t that be a catastrophe and far more than a mere mishap, though of course everyone else in the room would deny it — the incursion of death into the current day? And would I be condemned — and rightly so — as the most presumptuous of beings, because in aspiring to live a successful day I had wanted to be like a god? For the idea of such a day — to move onward and ever onward on the same level while carrying light — is, after all, a project fit only for our ill-fated Lucifer. Does this mean that my attempt at a successful day is in danger of degenerating at any moment into a story of murder and mayhem, of running amok, devastation, annihilation, and suicide?

You are confusing a successful day with a perfect day. (No need to say anything about the latter or its god.) At the end of a thoroughly imperfect day, you might cry out in spite of yourself: “A successful day!” Conceivable, too, is a day during which you have been painfully aware of unsuccessful moments, and yet at the end of which you report at length to your friends on “a striking success.” Your leaving the book which, as you sensed in reading the first line, started the day off right, in the train, needn’t mean that you’ve lost your fight with the angel of the day; even if you never find the book again, your reading that began so full of promise may well continue in a different manner — perhaps more freely, more spontaneously. The success of my days seems to depend on how I evaluate (another ugly word, but the brooding writer finds no better—“appraise”? “estimate”?) deviations from the line, my own as well as those imposed by Madame World. The success of our “successful day” expedition seems to presuppose a certain indulgence toward myself, my nature, my incorrigibilities, as well as an insight into the hazards of daily life even under favorable circumstances: the insidiousness of objects, evil eye, that one word spoken at the wrong moment (even if only overheard by someone in a crowd). Thus in my undertaking, everything hinges on the handicap I allow myself. How much mucking around, how much carelessness or absentmindedness I tolerate in myself. How much incomprehension, impatience, unfairness, how much clumsiness, how many heartless remarks, spoken without thinking (or not even spoken), how many newspaper headlines, or advertisements that catch my eye or ear, how many stitches in my side will it take before I lose my openness to the shimmering that corresponds to the episodic greening and blueing of grass and sky, and the occasional “graying” of stone, signifying that on a certain day the “coming of day” carries over to me and to space. I am too hard on myself, not indifferent enough about my mishaps with things, too full of demands on the times, too convinced that everything is going to the dogs: I have no standard for the success of a day. Indeed, what with myself and the kind of things that happen regularly or irregularly, the situation would seem to call for a special kind of irony — the affectionate kind — and of humor, of the sort named after the gallows. Who has ever experienced a successful day?

His day began promisingly. A few lance-shaped pencils lay on the windowsill along with a handful of oval hazelnuts. Even the numbers of both sets of objects contributed to his sense of well-being. He had dreamed about a child lying on the bare floor in a bare room, who said when he bent down to him: “You’re a good father.” On the street the postman whistled as he did every morning. The old woman in the house next door was already closing her dormer window for the rest of the day. The sand in the columns of trucks en route to the building site was as yellow as the drifting sand that made up the hills of the region. By letting the water in the hollow of his hand act on his face, he had gained awareness not only of the water in the village here but also of the “water of Ioannia on the far slope of the Pindus,” of the “water of Bitola in Macedonia,” of the water that morning in Santander, where the rain seemed to be pelting down, but when he went out proved to be so fine a curtain that he hardly got wet when passing through it. With the sound of a turning book page in his ears, he heard from far beyond the gardens the clanking of the local train slowing down in the station and at the same time, amid the squawking of the crows and the whining of the magpies, the lone cheeping of a sparrow. Then he looked up, never before had he seen the bare, solitary tree high up on the edge of the wooded hill, through whose branches as they shifted in the wind the brightness of the plateau shone down into the house, while on the table at which he sat reading, the letter S, sewn into the tablecloth, revealed a picture of an apple and of a smooth, black, rounded stone. When he looked up again—“work can wait, I can wait, it and I, we can both wait”—the day was literally whirring, and he noticed now, without having looked for the words, he was thinking to himself: “Sacred world!” He went out into the forest to chop wood for a fire in the fireplace, which it seemed to him would be better suited to such a day rather than to the evening. As he was sawing the thick, tough tree, the blade stuck, breaking his rhythm; he tugged violently, but it refused to budge; he could only give up, pull — or better, “wrench” the saw out — and start in a different place. The whole comedy repeated itself — the blade stuck in the heartwood, he pushed and shook until he had almost reached the point of no return … and then with stunning force the log, more mangled than sawed, fell on the foot of the would-be hero of the day. Finally, after a first flaring and a subdued hissing, his fire collapsed, and he cursed the holy day in the exact same words for which his rustic grandfather had been known throughout the village: Shut up, blasted birds, beat it, sun. Later, it sufficed for his pencil point to break, and not only the day, but the future as well, was compromised. By the time he realized that these very mishaps might have made something of the day, it had long since become a different day. If he had observed it with care, he would have recognized that this vain attempt to light a fire — hadn’t the smothering and blackening of the flame represented a mysterious moment of community? — was the quintessence of all futilities, and not only those of a personal nature. If he had recognized this, he would have stopped trying and exercised patience. And similarly, the blow of the log on his toes had given him something more than pain. It had also touched something else in him, at the same place; something like the friendly muzzle of an animal. And that again was an image — an image in which all the logs from his childhood down to the present moment united to fall — or rather, to roll, bounce, dance, or rain down on all his different shoes, socks, and variously sized child or adult feet; for that other contact was so miraculously gentle that if he had merely taken note of it for a moment he would have been all amazement. And similarly, as he realized later on when he looked back at a distance, his setbacks while sawing wood provided him with a complete parable, or fable? for the success of his day. The main thing was to begin with a jolt and find the right starting point for the saw’s teeth, a groove in which the saw could continue to function. After that, the sawing took on a rhythm. For a time it went easily and gave him pleasure; one thing led to another; sawdust sprayed from both sides, the tiny leaves of the nearby box tree curled, the crackling of the foliage caught in it mingled with the squeaking of the saw; the rumble of a garbage can was followed by the droning of a jet plane high in the sky. And then, gradually as a rule and, provided he kept his mind on what he was doing, perceptible in advance, the saw entered into a different layer of the wood. Here it became necessary to change his rhythm — to slow down, but that was the risky part of it — to do so without halting or skipping a beat; even when the rhythm changed, the general sawing movement had to maintain its regularity; otherwise, the saw would be sure to stick. Then, if at all possible, one had to pull it out and reapply it, preferably, as the fable taught, not in the same place or in one too close to it, but in a totally different place, because … If the change of place was successful at the second try, and the sawing was finally successful in the lower half of the tree trunk — long after the exhilarated sawyer had lost sight of the saw’s teeth — already he was elsewhere in his thoughts, making plans for the evening or sawing a human enemy in two instead of the tree — then a new danger threatened, if not a forking branch he had overlooked, then (usually no more than a finger’s breadth from the point where the piece of wood, having been cut through that far, would fall of its own accord) that narrow but extremely tough layer in which steel would strike against stone, nail, and bone all in one, and just before the finale, so to speak, the undertaking would come to grief. For a brief moment, music to the ears of a stranger but to the sawyer himself caterwauling — and that was the end of it. And yet he had been so close to success that sawing for its own sake, just being with the wood, its roundness, its smell, its grain, just traversing the material, while studying its special characteristics and resistances, became the ideal embodiment of his dream of disinterested pleasure. And likewise the breaking pencil point … and so forth and so on, all day. Thus, he reflected later, in an attempt at a successful day, everything, at least in moments of misfortune, of pain, of failure, when things were going wrong — the essential was to summon up the presence of mind needed for a different variety of this moment and thus to transform it, by a liberating act of awareness or reflection, whereby the day — as though this were the prerequisite for its success — would acquire its elan and its wings.

You make it sound as though your successful day were child’s play.

No answer.

By then it was noon. The night’s hoarfrost had thawed even in the shaded corners of the garden, and as the bowed, stiff blades of grass straightened up, a soft breeze blew through them. A stillness arose, became a picture when he walked in the sunlight on the untraveled noonday road, with those pairs of varicolored butterflies which, emerging unexpectedly out of the void, seemed to be moving backward and came so close to the wayfarer that he seemed to feel in his outer ears the vibration of their wings, which instantly communicated itself to his steps. For the first time he heard, in the interior of the almost uninhabited house, the midday bells of the village church mingling with those of the next village (which, as usual in this part of the country, began without transition or interval, on the other side of the street) ring out with a palpable message: a call in all directions to all isolated beings. The city of Paris lay deep at the bottom of a bowl, surrounded by stony desert mountains, and in the soundless dusk the fervid calls of the muezzins poured down upon it from every peak and slope round about. Involuntarily he looked up from the line he was reading and went out with the cat, crossing the garden in a long, curving diagonal; it passed through his mind how long ago another cat had announced the onset of rain by galloping to shelter under the overhanging roof the moment the first drop from the distant horizon fell on its fur. He looked around, noted, as he had done for weeks, how the garden’s last fruit, one enormous pear, still hung on the otherwise empty tree, and hefted it for a moment in the hollow of his hand, while across the street, in the neighboring village, a black-haired Chinese girl carrying a varicolored back satchel kept stroking a blue-eyed Alaskan dog through the fence (though he could not hear it, the dog’s whimpering was all the more prolonged in his imagination), and a little farther on, in the gap between the houses at the distant junction of two streets, the sun’s reflection on a passing train lit up the grass of the embankment for a moment, the length as it were of a word, a monosyllable, during which he glimpsed an empty seat in one compartment, slashed with a knife and mended with fairytale care, cross-stitch after cross-stitch in the stiff plastic fabric, and he felt himself gripped by the faraway hand that was pulling the thread tight. Thus his forehead grazed his dead; he watched them just as they watched him, he who was doing nothing but sitting there, sympathetically, not at all as in their lifetime. What more was there to do, to discover, to recognize, to discover in a day? Behold: no king of eternity, no king of life (and if so only a “secret” one) — No, here stands the king of the day! The only odd part of it was that at this point a trifle sufficed to topple him from his imperious throne. At the sight of the passerby who came sauntering out of the side street, with his coat over his arm, stopped, patted his pockets, and quickly turned back, my sympathy turned to desperation. Stop! But once in ecstasy I could no longer find the way back into myself: There, the blackbird’s yellow bill. And, at the end of the avenue, the brownish edge of the one mallow still in bloom. And that leaf — tugging at an invisible thread as it falls, and apparently rising back into the sun — it looks like a bright-colored kite. And the horizon, black with a swarm of monumental, meaningless words! Stop! Leave me in peace! (To him ecstasy meant panic.) But enough! Stop! — No more reading, gazing, being-in-the-picture, no more day — this couldn’t go on. What now? And unexpectedly, after the procession of leaping forms and ecstatic colors, long before nightfall, death barred the passage through this day. At one stroke, its sting punctured the whole extravaganza. After that, could anything be more crackbrained than the idea of a successful day? Mustn’t his essay on it start all over again, with a radically new attitude, that of gallows humor? Is it impossible to lay down a line for the success of a day, not even a labyrinthine line? But must one not infer that this constant starting the essay from scratch is itself a possibility, the possibility specific to the project? The essay must be. Quite possibly the day (the object named “day”) had now become my mortal enemy, an enemy that cannot be transformed into a helpful living-and-traveling companion, a luminous model, a lasting fragrance, quite possibly the “successful day” project is diabolical, an invention of the devil, the disrupter, a veil dance with nothing behind it, a maddening tongue play, followed directly by a devouring, a road pointer which, if you follow it, closes into a noose; that may be, but I fail to see why, in view of all the failures I have met with in my quest for a successful day, I am still unable to say that the idea of a successful day is a snare and a delusion, and consequently that cannot be the case. I can say, however, that the idea is indeed an idea, for I didn’t think it up or get it from my reading; it came to me in a time of distress, and it came with a power which for me has always carried credibility — the power of the imagination. Imagination is my faith, the idea of a successful day was conceived in its most ardent moment, and after each one of my countless shipwrecks, on the following morning (or afternoon) it lit the way for me anew, just as in Morike’s poem a rose “vorleuchtet” (shone before), and I was able with its help to make a fresh start. The success of the day was something that had to be attempted — even if in the end the fruit turned out to be hollow or dry: thus this vain labor of love was superfluous at least for the foreseeable future, and then the road would be open for something different. And another dependable insight was that a “nothing” day (a day marked not even by changing lights, a day without wind or weather) gave promise of the utmost richness. Nothing was, and again there was nothing, and again there was nothing. And what did this nothing and again nothing do? It signified. More was possible with nothing but the day, far far more both for you and for me. And that was the crux: the main thing was to let the nothing fructify from morning to night (or even midnight). And I repeat: the day was light. The day is light.

The blackness of the nameless pond in the woods. Snow clouds above the Île de France horizon. The smell of pencils. The ginkgo leaf on the boulder in the garden of La Pagode cinema. The carpet in the topmost window of the Velizy railroad station. A school, a pair of children’s glasses, a book, a hand. The whirring in my temples. For the first time this winter, the powerful cracking of the ice under the soles of my shoes. In the railroad underpass, he acquired eyes for the substance of light. Reading in a crouch, close to the grass. While I was breaking off leaves, suddenly a whiff in my nostrils resembling the essence of the declining year. The word for the sound of the train pulling into the station had to be “thumping,” not “clanking.” And the last leaf falling from the tree didn’t “crackle,” it “clicked.” And a stranger involuntarily exchanged greetings with him. And again the old woman hauled her pushcart to the weekly village market. And the usual disorientation of a foreign car driver in this out-of-the-way place. And then in the forest, the greening of the path where he used to take a walk with his father whenever there was something to talk over, a path that even had a name in his language, zelena pot, “the green path.” And then in the bar near the church of the next village, the pensioner, whose grandfather’s watch chain extended in a curved line from his belly to his trouser pocket. And for once he overlooked the evil eye cast by one of the old inhabitants. And the proverbial “Thanks [instead of disgruntlement] for your trouble”; for once the transformation was successful. But why then in the middle of the enjoyable afternoon, fear of the rest of the day, of nothing but the day? As though there were no getting through the coming hours (“This day will be the end of me”) — no way out. The ladder leaning against the early-winter tree. So what? The blue of the flowers deep in the grass of the railroad embankment — so what? Paralysis, consternation, a kind of horror, and the serene silence shattered by more and more speechlessness. Eden is burning. And, on the other hand, it becomes evident that there is no formula for the success of a day. “0 morning!” The exclamation doesn’t work. No more reading, no more day? No more possession of words? No more day? And such muteness excludes prayer, all but such impossible prayers as “Morning me,” “Early me,” “Begin me again.” Who knows whether certain mysterious suicides were the secret consequences of such a quest for the successful day, begun energetically on the so-called ideal line. But, on the other hand, doesn’t my failure to stand up to the day tell me something? That my internal order is wrong? That I’m not made for a whole day? That I shouldn’t look for morning at nightfall? Or perhaps I should?

And he made it start again. The day when the idea of the successful day had come to live in him on the tangent of the suburban train high above gigantic Paris — how had it been as a whole? What was before that flare-up? What came after it? (“Ausculta, o filii, listen, my son,” said the angel in the church on Lake Constance, where the chalky vein had copied Hogarth’s Line of Beauty and Grace for him on the black stone.) — What had gone before, he remembered, was a nightmarish night spent on a mattress in an otherwise totally deserted house in a southern suburb of Paris. This dream had consisted of nothing, or so it had seemed, but a night-long motionless image, in which, amid unchanging twilight and soundless air, he was exposed to the elements on a bare, towering cliff, alone for the rest of his life. And only one thing happened, but that happened perpetually, heartbeat after heartbeat, utter forlornness — the planet was congealed, but in his heart tempestuous fever. When he finally awoke, it was as though his night-long fever had consumed his forlornness — for a time at least. Over the half-parched garden the sky was blue, for the first time in a long while.

He helped himself out of his feeling of dizziness with a dance step, “the dizzy man’s dance.” The world went green before his eyes, that was the cypresses along the garden wall. Under the sign of grief and of this green he began his day. What would I be without a garden? he thought. I never want to be without a garden again. And still there was pain in his breast, a dragon devouring him. Sparrows landed in the bushes, once again the birds of the right moment. I saw a ladder and wanted to climb it. A mason’s straight edge was floating in the gutter, and farther down the street the young postwoman was pushing her bicycle with the yellow saddlebags. Instead of “propriete privée, défense d‘entrer,” he read “ … défense d’aimer.” It was late morning, and as he walked he let the quietness of the place blow through his parted fingers. Temples, inflated sails. He was supposed that day to finish an article on translation, and at last he had an image for that sort of activity: “The translator felt himself gently taken by the elbow.” Work or love? Get to work, that’s the way to rediscover love. The man behind the counter in the North African bar was just starting up: “0 rage! O désespoir …” and a woman on her way in remarked “It doesn’t smell of couscous here. It smells of ragout, that’s because the sun is back again — merci pour le soleil.” Give me the day, give me to the day. After a long bus ride through the southern and then the western suburbs and a hike through the forests of Clamart and Meudon, he sat down at a table in the open beside a pond, finished his piece about translation, an activity which he abjured in his last sentence: “Not the confident, lowered glance at the existing book, but an eye-level glance into the uncertain!” The wild strawberries at the edge of the path seemed to look on and blush. “The wind took him over.” He thought of the raven which bellowed “like a bazooka” into his dream of forlornness. By the pond of the next forest he ate a sandwich on the terrace of the fishermen’s bar. A fine rain was falling in spirals, as though enjoying itself. And then, in the middle of the afternoon, that train ride circling around above Paris, first eastward, then northward in an arc, then back in an eastward arc — so that in a single day he had almost circled the entire metropolis — during which the idea of the successful day recurred, no, “recurred” was not the right word, it should have been “was transformed”: during which the idea of the successful day was transformed from a “life idea” to a “writing idea.” His heart, which still ached from his nightmare, expanded when he saw the “Heights of the Seine” at his feet. (Suddenly he understood the name of the department, Les Hauts-de-Seine.) Illusion? No. The true element of life. And then what? Now, half a year later, in the late autumn, he remembered how after the excessively bright life of the “casting of the eye,” he had positively welcomed the dark, underground stretch near La Defense. Exhilarated, he let himself be jostled by the after-work crowd in the hall of the Gare Saint-Lazare, which in French is known as the Hall of the Lost Steps. At the American Express Company near the Opera he provided himself with as much cash as possible after waiting in a long line with rare, and in his own opinion rather alarming, patience. Amazed at the size and emptiness of the toilets, he stayed there longer than necessary, looking around, as though there were something to be discovered in such a place. One of a crowd, he stood watching television in a bar on the rue Saint-Denis; a World Cup soccer match was on, and to this day he remembers his annoyance at not having quite succeeded in repressing all side glances at the streetwalkers who were overflowing from every doorway and back court of that street — as though ability to overlook were a part of such a day. And then what? He seemed to have lost consciousness of everything else, except for a moment later in the evening when he sat with a child on his lap at a kind of school desk, putting the finishing touches to his sketch about translation — in his memory, a strange picture of juggling with two hands — and for some time late at night when in a garden café I found myself unintentionally exchanging stories with the man sitting across from you — which had the effect of the gentlest possible way of breaking you open and sharing you with myself. Then as now the day seemed marked by that gigantic S-curve of the railroad line, which can be seen only in bird’s-eye view, but can be felt deep down inside to be the most beautiful of all meanders, parallel to that of the Seine below but swinging much wider, rediscovered a month later in a quiet corner of the Tate Gallery in the furrow in Hogarth’s palette, and yet another month later in the white vein in the stone found on the shore of the stormy, autumnal Lake Constance, at the present moment running in the same direction as the pencils here on my table: that is the enduring outline of the day. And its color is chiaroscuro.

And its adjective, like that of the idea which it gave me, is, as it should be, “fantastic,” and its noun, after my solitary night of peril, the word “with.”

So your idea of writing an essay about a successful day was itself a successful day?

That was before the summer. Over the garden the swallows were flying “so high!” I shared a young woman’s pleasure in smoothing out the curved brim of a straw hat; the Pentecost fête was lively in the night wind of our village, the cherry tree stood fruit-red beside the railroad tracks, the workaday garden came to be called the Garden of the Step Taken — and now it was winter, as, for example, it revealed itself on the railroad curve repeated yesterday for my reassurance as I could see by the handrail and the gray flowering of the clumps of wild grapes against the misty network of the Eiffel Tower, the snowberries whishing past the distant towers of La Defense, the acacia thorn jerking past the barely discernible hazy whiteness of the domes of Sacré-Coeur.

Once again: In the light of all this, was that a successful day?

No answer.

I think no, thanks to my imagination, I know it was. How much more could be done with that day, with nothing but that day. And now its momentum is in my life, in your life, in our epoch. (“We lost our momentum,” said the captain of a baseball team, which had been about to win the game.) The day is in my power, for my time. If I don’t give the day a try now, then I’ve missed my chance of enduring; more and more often, I realize, all the while growing angrier at myself, how as time goes on more and more moments speak to me and how I understand, and above all appreciate, less and less of what they say. I must repeat, I am furious with myself, over my inability to maintain the morning light on the horizon, which just now made me look up and come to rest (into rest, we read in the Pauline epistle), so that, when I start reading, the blue of the heather still occupies the middle ground, a few pages farther on it is a vague spot in the Nowhere, and by the onset of dusk the motionless form of the blackbird in the bush is still “the outline of Evening Island after a day on the open sea,” and a tick of the watch later is nothing more — meaningless, forgotten, betrayed. Yes, that’s how it is: more and more as the years go by — the richer the moments seem to me, the louder they denounce me to high heaven — I see myself as a traitor to my day, day after day, forgetful of the day, forgetful of the world. Again and again I resolve to remain faithful to the day, with the help, led “by the hand” (“maintenant,” hand-holding, that’s your word for “now”) of those moments. I would like to hold them, think about them, preserve them, and day after day, no sooner have I turned away from them than they literally “fall” from my hands, as though to punish me for my infidelity, for, it can’t be denied, I had turned away from them. Fewer and fewer of the increasingly frequent significant moments of the day ripe, yes, that’s the word, ripen anything for me. The moment of the children’s voices this morning in the lane ripened nothing; now in the afternoon, with clouds drifting eastward, it produces no aftereffect — though at the time they seemed to rejuvenate the wintry forest … Should that be taken to mean that the time for my essay on the successful day is past? Have I let the moment slip by? Should I have gotten up earlier? And rather than an essay, mightn’t the psalm form — a supplication presumed in advance to be in vain — have been more conducive to the idea of such a day? Day, let everything in you ripen something for me. Ripen the ticking of the lanceolate willow leaves as they fall through the air, the left-handed ticket agent deep in his book, who once again makes me wait for my ticket, the sun on the door handle. Ripen me. I’ve become my own enemy, I destroy the light of my day, destroy my love, destroy my book. The more often individual moments resound as pure vowels—“vowel” is another word for such a moment — the more seldom I find the consonant to go with it, to carry me through the day. The glow at the end of the sandy path to the nameless pond: Ah! but a moment later it has faded, as though it had never been. Divine Being, or “Thou, the more-than-I” that once spoke through the Prophets and later on “through the Son,” dost thou also speak in the present, purely through the day? And why am I unable to hold, grasp, pass on what thus speaks through the day, and, I believe, or rather, thanks to my imagination, know, starts speaking anew at every moment? “He who is and who was and who will be”: why can what once was said of “the god” not be said of my present day?

On a successful day — attempt at a chronicle of this day — globules of dew on a raven feather. As usual, the old woman, though perhaps not the same one as yesterday, stood around in the newspaper shop long after completing her purchase, and spoke her mind. The ladder in the garden — embodiment of his need to get out of himself — had seven rungs. The sand in the trucks moving through the village was the same color as the façade of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. The chin of a young girl in the library touched her neck. A tin bucket took its shape. A mailbox turned yellow. The market woman wrote the bill on the palm of her hand. On a successful day it happens that a cigarette butt rolls in the gutter, that a cup smokes on a tree stump, and that a row of seats within the dark church is bright in the sunshine. It happens that the few men in the café, even the loudmouth, keep silent together for a long moment, and that the stranger to the village keeps silent with them. It happens that my sharpened hearing for my work also opens me up to the sounds in the house. It happens that one of your eyes is smaller than the other, that the blackbird hops under the bush, and that when the lower branches rise I think “updraft.” Finally, it even happens that nothing happens. On the successful day, a habit will be discontinued, an opinion vanish, and I shall be surprised by him, by you, by myself. And along with “with,” a second word form will dominate; namely, “and.” In the house I shall discover a corner that has hitherto been overlooked, where “someone could live!” As I turn into a side street, “Where am I? I’ve never been here before” will be a sensational moment; when I see the light-dark space in a hedge, the “New-World explorer” feeling will set in, and when I walk a little farther than usual and look back, a cry of “I never saw that before” will escape me. Your repose, as sometimes happens in children, will also be amazement. On the successful day, I shall simply have been its medium, simply have gone along with the day, let the sun shine on me, the wind blow on me, the rain rain on me, my verb will have been “let.” In the course of the day, your inwardness will become as varied as the outside world, and by the end of the day you will have translated Odysseus’ epithet, “the much-buffeted,” to yourself as “the many-sided,” and that many-sidedness will have made you dance inwardly. On a successful day, the hero would have been able to “laugh” at his mishaps (or would at least have started to laugh at the third mishap). He would have been in the company of forms — if only of the various leaves on the ground. His I-day would have opened out into a world-day. Every place would have acquired its moment, and he would have been able to say: “This is it.” He would have arrived at an understanding with mortality. (“Never has death spoiled the sport of the day.”) His epithet for everything would have been an unchanging “In view of”: In view of you, in view of a rose, in view of the asphalt, and matter, or “corporeity”? would have cried out to him, time and again for creation. He would have put on a show of good cheer and cheerfully done nothing, and from time to time a weight on his back would have kept him warm. For a moment, for a “casting of the eye,” the time of a word, he would suddenly have become you. And at the end of the day he would have called out for a book — something more than a mere chronicle: “The fairy tale of the successful day.” And at the very end, he would have gloriously forgotten that the day was supposed to be successful …

Have you ever experienced a successful day? Everyone I know has experienced one; most people have actually had many. One was satisfied if the day hadn’t been too long. Another said something like: “Standing on the bridge, with the sky over me. In the morning, laughed with the children. Just looking, nothing special. There’s happiness in looking.” And in the opinion of a third, simply the village street through which he had just passed — with the raindrops dripping from the enormous key of the locksmith’s sign, with the bamboo shoots cooking in somebody’s front garden, with the three bowls on a kitchen windowsill containing tangerines, grapes, and peeled potatoes, with the taxi parked as usual outside the driver’s house — was in itself a “successful day.” The priest, whose pet word was “longing,” considered a day when he heard a friendly voice successful. And hadn’t he himself, who longed time and again for an hour in which nothing had happened, except that a bird turned about on a branch, that a white ball lay at the bottom of a bush, and that schoolchildren were sunning themselves on the station platform, thought in spite of himself: Has this been the whole day? And often in the evening, when he called the events of the past day to mind — yes, it was a kind of “calling”—didn’t the things or places of a mere moment occur to him as names for it. “That was the day when the man with the baby carriage went zigzagging through the piles of leaves.” “That was the day when the gardener’s banknotes were mixed with grass and leaves.” “That was the day when the café was empty when the refrigerator rumbled and the light went out …” So why not content ourselves with a single successful hour? Why not simply call the moment a day?

Ungaretti’s poem “I illuminate myself with the immeasurable” is entitled “Morning.” Couldn’t those two lines just as well be about the “afternoon”? Were a fulfilled moment or a fulfilled hour really enough to make you stop asking if you had failed again that day? No use attempting a successful day — why not content ourselves with a “not entirely unsuccessful one”? And if your successful day existed, wasn’t your fantasy, however richly and wonderfully it whirred, accompanied by a strange fear of something like an alien planet, and didn’t your usual unsuccessful day appear to you as part of the planet earth, as a kind of — possibly detested — home? As though nothing here below could succeed; except perhaps in grace? in mercy? in grace and mercy — if nowadays that didn’t imply something improper, undeserved, perhaps even accomplished at someone else’s expense? Why now does “successful day” remind me of my dead grandfather, who in his last days did nothing but scratch the wall of his room with his fingernails, lower down from hour to hour. In view of all the general failure and loss, what does a single success amount to?

Not nothing.

The day of which I can say it was “a day,” and the day when I was only passing the time. At the crack of dawn. How have people handled their days up to now? How is it that in old stories we often find “Many days were fulfilled,” in place of “Many days passed”? Traitor to the day: my own heart. It drives me out of the day, it beats, it hammers me out of it, hunter and hunted in one. Be still! No more secret thoughts. Leaves in my garden shoes. Out of the cage of revolving thought. Be still. Bend down under the apple tree. Go into a crouch. The crouching reader. At knee height, things coalesce to form an environment. And he prepares for the daily injury. Spreads his toes. “The seven days of the garden.” That’s what the unwritten sequel to Don Quixote should be called. To be in the garden, to be on earth. The rate of the earth’s rotation is irregular, that’s why the days are of unequal length, especially in view of the mountain ranges’ resistance to the wind. The success of the day and passivity. Passivity as action. He let the fog drift outside the window; he let the grass blow behind the house. Letting the sun shine on one was an activity; now I’m going to let my forehead be warmed, now my eyeballs, now my knees — and now it’s time for teddy-bear warmth between my shoulder blades. The sunflower head does nothing but follow the sun. Compare the successful day with Job’s day. Instead of “value the moment,” it should be “heed” the moment. The course of the day — thanks precisely to its rough spots, if taken to heart — is in itself a kind of transubstantiation — more than anything else, it can tell me what I am. Pause in your endless restlessness, and you will find rest in your flight. And by resting in his flight, he began to hear. Hearing, I am at my peak. Thanks to my keen hearing, I can hear the whirring of a sparrow’s wing through the noise. When a leaf falls on the line of the distant horizon, I hear it deep inside me as a ringing. Listening as a safecracker with his jimmy listens for the clicking of the gears. Slowed by flight, the blackbird’s hop-skip-jump over the hedge is humming a tune for me. Just as some people hum when reading a book. (But the most you can expect of a newspaper reader is a whistling between the teeth.) “Seeing you are dull of hearing,” stormed the zealot in one of his epistles, and in another: “Stop disputing over mere words, it does no good and only bedevils those who listen.” A pure tone. If only I could produce a pure tone once for a whole day. Perhaps more important than hearing is pure presence — Picasso’s last wife, for example, is said to have done nothing, just to have been present in his studio. A successful day, a hard day. Suddenly, as I was raking the garden leaves, a rooster’s foot gleamed candlelight yellow from out of the pile of brownish leaves. Colors darken, form brightens. In the shady corner, where the ground is still frozen hard, my footsteps sound as they did that day in the rushes.

When I look up, the sky is a vault. What did “snow cloud” mean? Rich whiteness with a blue cast. Cracking hazelnuts in the palm of my hand, three of them. In Greek there used to be a word for “I am,” which was simply a long-drawn-out “O”; it occurred in such sentences as “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” And the word for what just passed through the cypress tree was: “lightwave.” Look and keep looking with the eyes of the right word. And it began to snow. It is snowing. Il neige. To be silent. There was silence. He was silent in the sign of the dead. One should not say: “He (she) blessed the temporal world” (He [she] passed away) but: “He, she, the dead, bless the temporal world for me, provided I leave them alone.” And at the same time wanting to stammer: he wanted to stammer. In the suburbs everything is supposedly so “individual” (a suburbanite speaking). The one-legged stance of the garbage collector at the back of his truck. The bumps placed on the roads at regular intervals were called “decelerators.” A single day may not have been sufficiently far-reaching as a model; perhaps it was a model only to itself — which gave pleasure? During the lunch break I help the roofers carry slats down from the ridge. Shouldn’t I have stayed home all day, doing nothing but “dwelling”? Bring about a successful day by pure dwelling? To dwell, to sit, to look up, to excel in uselessness. What did you do today? I heard. What did you hear? Oh, the house. Ah, beneath the tent of my book. But why are you going out now, instead of staying in the house, where you were in your place with your book? Because what I’ve read — I want to digest it out of doors. And look at the corner of the house, which is called “Travels”: a small suitcase, a dictionary, hiking shoes. The ringing of bells in the belfry of the village church: the pitch is just right for this noon hour, and up here in the dark dormer window all that can be seen of them is a whirring as of bicycle spokes. Deep within the earth, there are occasional tremors, the so-called slow tremors, and for a while, so it is said, the planet reverberates with them: “the bell movement,” the ringing of the earth. The silhouettes of a man and a child with a back satchel sway in the railroad underpass, as if the man were riding on a donkey. According to Goethe, life is short but the day is long, and I seem to remember Marilyn Monroe singing a song that went: “One day too long, one life too short …” and another: “Morning becomes evening under my body.” Let the quick ellipse described by the last of the leaves of the plane tree in falling provide the line for the ending of my attempted successful day — Abbrevia- tion! Hogarth’s Line of Beauty is not actually engraved in the palette; it is stretched over it like a curved rope or a whiplash. The successful day and succinctness. (And, alongside it, the desire to postpone the end — as though I, I in particular, could learn more from my essay with each passing day.) The successful day and joyful expectation. The successful day and the discoverer’s aberrations. Morning a still life — afternoon a muddle: a mere pseu-dolaw? Don’t let yourself be ruled by these daily pseudo-laws. And once again St. Paul. For him “the day” is the Day of Judgment — and for you? The day of measurement; it will not judge, but measure you; you are its people. Who here is talking to whom? I’m talking to myself. The dead silence of the afternoon. Nevertheless, the sound of children running, heard through the wind. And high up there the flower heads of the plane trees are still dangling: “his (her) heart is in it” (from the French). And at any moment, in the rustling of the withered dwarf oaks, now, for instance, I become you. What would we be without that rustling? And what word goes with it? The (toneless) yes. Stay with us, rustling. Keep pace with the day — speak in cadence with the day (homology). What became of that day on the curve high above all Paris, between Saint-Cloud and Suresnes, not far from the Val d’Or station. It hung in the balance. The bright-dark shimmer that day when the swallows veered in the summer sky, and the black-white-blue moment now: the magpies and the winter sky. The S-line again, a few days ago, on the shoulder, neck, and throat of John the Evangelist at the Last Supper over the portal of Saint-Germain-des-Près, his whole trunk lies there on the table next to the Lord Jesus — for, like the other stone figures, he had been beheaded by the Revolution. The successful day and again history’s glorious forgetfulness: instead, the endless lozenge pattern of human eyes — on the streets, in the corridors of the Métro, in the trains. The gray of the asphalt, the blue of the evening sky. The shakiness of my day, the solid and enduring? Set your footprint upon the snow of the station platform beside the print of a bird’s foot. A hard day once began to teeter when a single raindrop struck my inner ear. The shoe brush on the wooden stairs at sunset. A child writing its name for the first time. Keep going until the first star. Van Morrison in his song doesn’t sing about “fishing in the mountains,” but “out all day,” about bird watching. He lets his tongue sing, and barely begun, his song is at an end. The moment of the mud-spattered forester’s car in the row of clean cars. The doors of the forest open with a creak. Revolving door of a successful day: in it, things as well as people flare up as beings. The successful day and the will to divide it. Constant, wild obligation to be fair. Oh, hard day! Successful? Or “saved”? Unexpectedly, still in the dark, the thrust of joy in carrying on. Yes, a modified word — a proof correction that stands for the day: “thrust” instead of your usual “jolt.” Stop on your night walk: the path is brightening — for once you can say “my path”—and increasing awareness of secrecy, “behold, she comes with the clouds,” comes with the wind. Triad of the screech owl. Blue moment of the boat in one woodland pond, black moment of the boat in the next pond. For the first time in this suburb, behind the Heights of the Seine that hide the lights of Paris, caught sight of Orion high in the winter night, behind it parallel columns of smoke from factory chimneys, and under it the five stone steps, leading up to a door in a wall, and Ingrid Bergman in Stromboli, who collapses after an almost fatal night on the black, rocky slopes of the volcano, revives at sunrise, and can’t get over her amazement. “How beautiful! What beauty!” In the 171 night bus a lone passenger, standing. The burned-out telephone booth. Collision between two cars at the Pointe de Chaville: from one of them leaps a man with a pistol. Glaring television lights in the front windows of the Avenue Roger Salengro, the house numbers on which go up to over 2000. The thunder of the bombers taking off from the military airfield in Villacoublay, just beyond the wooded hills, more frequently from day to day with the approach of war.

“But now you’re losing the line completely. Go home to your book, to writing and reading. To the original texts, in which for example it is said: ‘Let the word resound, stand by it — whether the moment be favorable or not.’ Have you ever experienced a successful day? With which for once a successful moment, a successful life, perhaps even a successful eternity might coincide?”

“Not yet. Obviously!”

“Obviously”?

“If I had experienced anything even remotely resembling that, I imagine, I should have to fear not only a nightmare for the following night but the cold sweats.”

“Then your successful day is not even an idea, but only a dream?”

“Yes, except that instead of having it, I’ve made it in this essay. Look at my eraser, so black and small, look at the pile of pencil shavings below my window. Phrases and more phrases in the void, to no good purpose, addressed to a third incomprehensible something, though the two of us are not lost. Time and again in his epistles, not to the congregations, but to individuals, his helpers, Paul, from his prison in Rome, wrote about winter. For example, ‘Do try to get here before winter. And when you come, bring the cloak I left with Carpus at Troas …’”

“And where is the cloak now? Forget the dream. See how the snow falls past the empty bird’s nest. Arise to transubstantiation.”

“To the next dream?”