From "Crossroads" - Jonathan Franzen

“As she sat with him now and received the word of God, muted but not defeated by Dwight Haefle’s delivery of it, she wondered what the purpose of a person’s life was. Almost everything in life was vanity—success a vanity, privilege a vanity, Europe a vanity, beauty a vanity. When you stripped away the vanity and stood alone before God, what was left? Only loving your neighbor as yourself. Only worshipping the Lord, Sunday after Sunday. Even if you lived for eighty years, the duration of a life was infinitesimal, your eighty years of Sundays were over in a blink. Life had no length; only in depth was there salvation.”

- Jonathan Franzen

From "A Fan's Notes" - Frederick Exley

"I tried a number of places in Watertown before settling on The Parrot; though it was not exactly the cathedral I would have wished for, it was--like certain old limestone churches scattered throughout the north country--not without its quaint charms. It was ideally located on a hill above the city; sitting at the bar I was seldom aware of the city's presence, and when I was, I could think of it as a nostalgic place beneath me, a place with elm trees and church towers and bone-clean streets; sitting at the bar, the city could be thought of as a place remembered, and remembered as if from a great distance….

Sunday afternoons, with the music stilled and the blinds thrown open allowing the golden autumn sunlight to diffuse and warm the room, I would stand at the bar and sip my Budweiser, my 'tapering-off' device; munch popcorn from wooden bowls; and in league with the bartender Freddy, whose allegiance to the Giants was only somewhat less feverish than mine, cheer my team home. Invariably and desperately I wished that the afternoon, the game, the light would never end.”  

   - Frederick Exley, 1968

Mark Bradford - Five From the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2011

From Ermanno Olmi's "The Tree of Wooden Clogs" (1978)

“And remember that paradise begins with the love
that we show each other here on earth.”

From James Schuyler's "Seasons"

Climbed with unholy purpose
holy stairs, by a cypress
the simple blasphemy. Grape-
green moonlight on a wine-
red damask bedspread. The
nightingale song: movement
and stasis, that way of
life is a way of death. A
string shopping bag, cab-
bages, sausages, savour
of day-to-day swelling
Jacopo’s bronze doors at
Bologna: creation and fall.

Unmorticed loosely fitted
stones, straw and candles,
on the Rome road. A cute
church! Refinement of deso-
lation, pink and sulphur
teatime fog on stone, on
a Bailey bridge splintering
beneath jeeps, bikes, carts,
feet. A beggar knelt at an
approach, blew on a grass
blade, “Lili Marlene.”

Michael Burkard - "How I Shaded the Book"

I was in the town before my end.  I knew more deeply
than before I was in trouble with drinking.
I received a copy of a Graham Greene novel, The End of the Affair, in the mail.
I sat down to read it one night, sure I would not like it,
but I could not stop reading.
I felt the romance of the book was validating one more wild prolonged fling,
alcohol at the center of the fling. I had no one in mind but I knew there would be
someone. And I knew it would be trouble.
The novel made me feel as if I could see it all.

In the middle of the night there was a knock on the door.
A neighbor—I had met no one in the few days I had been in town—
asked if I would drive her and her daughter to the hospital.
Her daughter was sick, she had no car. She had seen my light.
For some reason I was glad to do so. I took the book.
The wait was long, the mother finally told me I could leave,
she could call a relative if they had to leave the hospital.

I saw them on the street days later—she hardly spoke—I wondered if it was because
we were of different races. She simply nodded when I asked if her daughter
was all right.
They left their house within a month. The house became a place for itinerants.
Six families in six months. One afternoon I heard screaming and cackling
and looked out the window to see an overweight man who could hardly walk
limping and tilting away from the old woman on the porch.
She both screamed and cackled. The overweight man finally
hobbled off like an old wagon.

I want to thank the woman and her child for interrupting my reverie.
Although I proceeded to wildly continue an affair for drinking
I feel that couple as a pull from life, a pull
from a source I was for a final time denying.
The book meant more than life. How I shaded the book
meant more than anything, anyone.