1.
Who needs leaves when there are so many tiny white lights to string on the trees? The sleight of hand of winter recognizes the chicanery of the age of electricity. The snow announces its ingenuity with all the sang-froid of a cloud machine. The photographs of staircases gestured to ingress and egress, while denying us, the viewers, either one.
2.
Just because your last name is “King” doesn’t mean you descend from royalty. The formal garden was a fitting antidote to the disarray growing wild in her mind. Wasn’t symmetry a “natural” phenomenon, as natural as a replica, as a graph? He had always thought we’d be happier like snails, coiled tightly up inside spiral shells.
3.
After all, utopia means noplace. Of course the new office towers were gleaming. Naturally the view from the rooftop garden was spectacular. After the TV show, the young girl wanted to wear her hair in braids like a Chinese communist and shout slogans in the street; but the bicycles, one by one, were all going the way of the horse.
4.
We knew nothing about it, sitting a world away at our sidewalk café. Funny, you remarked, how a small country doesn’t feel small when you’re in it. Drags of vastness are always at hand for those who know how to grasp them. Afterward we headed off to the exhibit of trompe l’oeil paintings, but somehow we never were able to find it.
5.
“There will always be a certain segment of the population,” said the erstwhile social worker, “that is poor.” “Just as there will always be a certain segment of the population,” said the cosmopolitan fingering her pearl earring, “that is chic.” Oh we were sick to death of chic, overseen by laws that no one can identify but the chic themselves.
“Architecture is really about well-being”
6.
He liked to wander through big glamorous cities and feel excluded, up and down staircases at dusk as intimations of belonging were lit up window by window. He understood the relation between exclusionary and inclusionary zones in every individual’s life, and how a delicate balance of each keeps one proportionately human.
7.
Blue pencil poised, she kept forgetting that there are no right angles in nature. The city council voted at last to rebuild the castle, vanished for fifty years, but upon closer questioning acquiesced that there’d be no need to build inside the façade, since there was no need to rebuild queen’s quarters for queens that, after all, don’t exist.
8.
Ah, but who doesn’t tremble before the majesty of a real façade? At the factory of fake Wedgwoods we brooded on the fur of facsimile as we filled up our plastic baskets with powder-blue-and-white teapots and bowls. She was a great adherent of democracy, she said, but that didn’t mean she didn’t harbor secret totalitarian thoughts.
9.
We looked at the photograph called “Self-Portrait of the King’s Portraitist.” Right where the portraitist’s face should have been was your face in the glass. I wouldn’t say it was exactly like finding money in the pocket of a coat you haven’t worn since last winter, but it was a little like the universe’s seeming gift of something that was yours all along.
1.
And then it was the first of August. The remainder of the summer suddenly seemed so fragile that we willed its demise even while watching apprehensively as day declined into day declined into day. Even the leaves on the trees seemed ransomed. The summer was nothing but a stage set, but we performed our summer roles.
2.
Standing in front of the new building, we wondered what the architect could possibly have been thinking. We didn’t mind that we were reactionaries who wanted Palladio back on the pedestal. A column, a portico, a finial, a turret, an oriel, an ogival arch. O in Venice we were ecstatic with ogives, ogives, ogives.
3.
The story is always forming to adorn reality. Which version is more magnetic, more true? The ivory-billed woodpecker glimpsed in the bayou, or the dinosaur skeleton discovered in the heart of the desert by a French countess dressed as a man? They said it was just beyond the next dune, after the third oasis, the fourth mirage.
4.
In the cabinet of wonders dismantled into the glass case there were ivory miniatures: saints, castles, madonnas, migrations — carved by a patience it is impossible even for the elephant to remember. “We” are no longer tantalized by the tiny. And what of the entire book of Exodus carved into a single cherry pit?
5.
An oasis may or may not be a mirage, said the camel on its knees in the dark caravansaray. Oh the oasis was real, all right, but when we left it we could not have said if the mirage had been in us or if we had been in the mirage. There is a viewfinder through which everything is seen — mirages, and oases, and —
6.
Every mind has a curiosity cabinet, in which curious objects “intended for private reflection” mount up to protect it against an incurious world. The spectacled cormorant sits in its engraving, in its frame, in its museum, in its country it never heard tell of. A ship must have its naturalist. A zoo must have its metaphysician.
7.
The architects, we said, have failed us, and turned slowly away. We ate pink petit-fours. It was less painful to be in the new cities, which had never known the beauty they would now never have, than the old cities, desperate to be new. In the new city we undressed each other with great care, as if we were unwrapping fragile glass.
“the necessary transactions of decline”
8.
Every mind has its own curiosity cabinet, which is why everyone is, at bottom, an aristocrat. She knew that she was imprisoned in a garden of giant man-eating nostalgia flowers as she reminisced, and reminisced, and reminisced. Nostalgia is memory decayed to sugar, she thought on a bench in the plaza of a massive glass box.
9.
Two sisters from a small American town both confessed to an attraction for the exotic. But for one the exotic meant India, and for the other it meant Japan. Why? A story is always forming to adorn reality. The last passenger pigeon opened its long, slim tail and flew up, high, high into the bright white clouds of extinction.
10.
Childhood is miniature. Memory is miniature. The stars are, after all, miniature. The summer was not miniature, is never miniature, the summer among the towers, among the cloverleaf highways. The first day of August was followed by the first night of August. You fed me pink petit-fours and I dreamed of destruction.
11.
An oasis may or may not be a mirage, but a mirage is always an oasis. The room I’m reading in is only one of legions in the speculative castle. This domain is eminent. The architects have failed us, but aren’t we all somehow, in the end, to blame? By the time we applied our eye to the viewfinder, the great auk was gone.
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