so when’s it coming? this last new great movement that I can join?

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about people and beautiful things and negative capability. If you’ll allow me a couple of minutes and perhaps the impression that I am anxiously smoking a chain of cigarettes speaking to someone who is lying on a couch reciting the Jesus Prayer, I’ll try and explain.

Let’s say you like John Keats. Or you like anything. Say you like Tom Waits or Virginia Woolf or movie posters or little kids who eat ice-cream, anything. Basically, it doesn’t matter what you like. I don’t know what I’m saying here. Let’s just say there’s something you like, or a lot of things. Say you go around all day liking things and seeing what’s fundamentally good about them — I mean fundamentally, objectively good, if there is any such thing. And you think these nice things are the only thing that’s really any good at all about the world and you’re the only one who is still interested in looking for them.

The narrator picks her cigarette from the ashtray and finds it has gone out. She searches her pocket for matches.

It’s like when you and your friends were fifteen and everyone was secretly, separately convinced that they were Holden Caulfield and nobody else really understood, and so there were whole classes and years of Holdens feeling crummy about everything and thinking nobody understood, while in fact if anything everybody was simply vibrating with understanding and being too shy to say anything. Therefore, you come to the conclusion that the world must be full of Holdens, and yet in your daily life you often feel there are too many small, mean things going on to really see who is Holden and who isn’t, and some days everyone is and on other days you’re the only one. And on those days, when you’re reading your Hemingway or the selected letters of John Keats, it seems that all the Holdens are dead, even Salinger is dead, and sometimes it can seem — sometimes it must seem — that you are alone in a world of dead friends and living strangers who don’t even see anything nice about a little kid eating ice-cream.

Cigarette lit, she exhales with the confidence of one who has not quite made any points, but sees one beginning to form in the distance.

The point is I guess that lately I’ve come to the dazzling, almost mystical idea lately that the person you are looking for, the person who can see beautiful things, one who sees so many beautiful things, in fact, that they sometimes get a little pain in their hearts just looking around them: there is no one who isn’t that person. Even awful people, even the ones who just want to sit around and throw their ego at you, even they know what that little pain is like.

Here the narrator puts out the cigarette in an ashtray, regarding with detached sympathy their sibling on the couch.

Maybe they’ll never show it to you and maybe you’ll never see it, but to know anything at all you have to know that. It’s just that sometimes it’s easier to see what’s beautiful about Holden Caulfield than that guy that comes into your work and gets mad when you make one tiny mistake even when you really didn’t mean to. So here’s the idea.

Imagine who in the world you would most like to be. It can be you. Then write a letter from that person to somebody imaginary and send it to this address and somebody imaginary will write back. Just so when we’re busy dying over little kids eating ice-cream at least we won’t be so goddam alone all the time.

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