Notes from the Editor's Desk -- 10/23/19

Yesterday was long and suffused with impressions. From sights of the ponds girding the islands, a direct appreciation of the black present in water's movements, and absent the sky, turned irreconcilable when the mind worked over it to discern understanding by virtue of the motions. Writing has come to a complete stop day by day. It will require working discipline into our relationship. Today is remarkably slow at the coffeeshop. Last night, reclining for hours, I read T—’s translation, turned pages to the floor, and they loosely piled there as time passed. My immediate basis of comparison for Hajnoczy are Hemingway and Bernhardt. The narrative voice that makes matter of fact statements on the subject of life, and that rests authority by the indisputable appearance of these claims, is foreign to me. Hemingway stows authority by mystery with far greater artistry, but Hajnoczy is still readable. In reading elements of Hajnoczy, meditations of the dynamics of character, of character’s pre-eminence, and perhaps the outmoded nature of character, came to form. Imagination cannot make whole the narrator’s remembrance of a Bhuddist’s self-immolation, nor a remark about the Holocaust, not, at least, by way of an individual and memorable constitution of character. Joyce’s characters were the swan song of modernism, an apogee at the nadir.