The Common Wilderness- Excerpt

Time may, or it may not, skip a heartbeat thinking of it. It may scuttle away from the sight of it, like the draft and emblematic rush hour it is often imagined to be, or it may simply remain seated, so that the proud calligraphy of its profile may be admired, with one passive paw raised like the ampersand thus: & - sign which sees nothing, yet seems to know it all. Or it may be that stylized eye which looks awful whenever it sees an additional soul, in sort of buglike maneuver, try to force itself through a tiny crack into the future. Before going any further, would not this be a good time to ask the birds to come out and cheep more lucidly, if not more gaily, between the syllables?

Confound his innocence, confound it now and always. He and his possessive case. Quite nimble at deception by nature, he foists it on the first slow-thinking sucker he meets because he, Joe, has misbehaved, and knows it, and so must have something quick to sweeten his existence, that is, something in lieu of an answer to that question which is not his only, that question which is beginning to be piped so pathetically by so many everywhere, do I still belong to you, world, do I? What? No more talk of owning it, only of belonging to it.

Trample on the roses, and throttle on the nightingale, if the war-waging begin to quack, and the murderous to quake, how is anyone to know what topsy- turvy item will be tossed at him next? Indeed when a man regards the mollycoddle of today with his supersubtle life of a lunatic, with his neurotic concern with the shadow instead of the substance, with his bloated penances, interior and personal, he is pricked by nostalgia for the singular brutality of the past which can be measured, weighed, and dissipated, for the olden days of the roysterer with his red cheeks and his smouldering soul which was never easily bruised or easily made to feel sorry. It may not be wise to praise so a pagan interlude. But Joe might well drop his head and suck his finger as he tries to assimilate it. How significant it is, and typical of him too, that his brilliant venture of yesterday should seem to him today like the fuzzy invasion of a caterpillar of a clean and communal wall onto which it had quietly crawled, and as quietly clung, another hairy affair, cockily baking in the sun, musing on its metamorphosis, feeling so sure of itself, and so safe.