Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.
. . .
The things of the body are as a river, and the things of the soul as a dream and a vapor; and life is a warfare and a pilgrim’s sojourn, and fame after death is only forgetfulness.
. . .
I don’t need anybody’s pity, least of all my own.
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Carpe diem. Was there ever a more useless piece of advice?
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Maybe you need to start trying to focus on the distractions instead, maybe then they wouldn’t be so distracting.
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In the end, everything was only a ceaseless flow of static, fundamentally no different from silence. The background noise of creation. The implacable flood of time.
. . .
His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time.
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When people start looking at other people, people not like them, one thing they often end up liking about those people is their music.
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On the old Silk Road, you know, between Europe and China. It’s all tribes and deserts, and then you’ve got this long, hard journey, take you a couple of years to get there if you go quick. It’s a hard road, it has bandits, sandstorms. You carrying the light of all the civilizations back and forth, but all around you, the tribes just want to keep up their warring, and killing, and keeping track of what makes them better than everybody else. Like you know how every tribe’s name, when you translate it, turns out to mean ‘the people,’ like nobody else but them is really human? But you keep on because you are trying to earn a little cheese, right, and you spreading the collective wisdom back and forth. Forging that Creole style. And every often, every few hundred miles, maybe, you got these oases, right, these caravansaries, where they all get together and chill, hang out, listen to good music, swap wild tales of exaggeration.
. . .
Like so many kinds of masculine loyalty, it was really only a manifestation of cowardice.
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The elephants were his partnership with Archy, and Aviva’s with Gwen, and the turtle was his belief that real and ordinary friendship between black people and white people was possible, at least here, on the streets of the minor kingdom of Brokeland, California. Here along the water margin, along the borderlands, along the vague and crooked frontier of Telegraph Avenue. Now that foundational pileup of bonds and beliefs was tottering, toppling like the tower of circus elephants in Dumbo. Not because anybody was a racist. There was no tragic misunderstanding, rooted in centuries of slavery and injustice. No one was lobbing vile epithets, reverting to atavistic tribalisms. The differences in class and education among the four of them canceled out without regard for stereotype or cultural expectation: Aviva and Archy both had been raised by blue-collar aunts who worked hard to send them to lower-tier colleges. The white guy was the high school dropout, the black woman upper-middle-class and expensively educated. It just turned out that a tower of elephants and turtles was no way to try to hold up a world.
