21 February 2001

a.

It is fitting that I’m again in a coffeeshop with my suitcase, three hours before the plane leaves. It’s probably also correct that while I felt uncannily at home in the Starbucks I had never visited, here in the Someday where I came often I am almost certain that something is different. True, I was usually here only at night, but something is different in the arrangement of chairs or the color of the paint–or else I remember it imperfectly it is quite the same.

And so we have a contrast between a place that has no true identity and a place that indisputably unique. It is the same tension between the Boston of my mind and the Boston that continues to exist; between Augustine’s Carthage and Carthage qua ipso. The oddity may be Starbucks and the Back Bay, which failed to depart from my images of them: they are not much more than abstractions. Or never were, whereas Somerville and Davis square, by virtue (only) of my repeated contact with them, descended or ascended into the Real. And once there cannot escape: like Arthur Miller says, you can’t come back once a year expecting nothing to have changed.

…

w.

I am now going to take this leaky pen and try to write the final story for today. Apparently i am on another planet: it’s covered by a vast sheet of ice. There are fissures and ripples in the surface, and it must have been here for a long time. It may also be only that we are flying over the north pole of earth but then i will end up in the wrong city, tokyo, mosco, beijing.

this would be unsurprising in two respects: one, i rarely understand anyone and two, i am surrounded, as if in a movie, by unrealistically beautiful people.

ah yes: time is running backward, or repeating itself in an inversion. we approached a sliver of light going east that broadened into daylight, and now, going west, we approach another band of light that narrows into night. such omens, in truth, need no interpretion.