Talking Big

It was mainly, knowing that his father, too, felt a particular kind of contentment, here, unlike any other, and that their kinds of contentment were much alike, and depended on each other.

James Agee, A Death in the Family

You cannot retrospectively disguise yourself as a child. To yourself. I cannot. It would be better for me to say that I cannot. Moments of mutual contentment must have existed. They must have. When I was five or six. The age of Rufus at the start of Agee’s great novel. But the way these things work, newer memories color the older. And those newer ones are themselves now old. Twenty years old, the newest memories of my father. He died at forty-seven, and in a scattering of weeks, I will be forty-seven. He was a good man, but he was born for combat with the world. You know the type of person. Utterly devoid of patience. This made him funny, but you never wanted to be in his line of sight in that moment. He had perfect vision and a grim, inarticulate veracity. But this is crankier than I wanted it to be. There was something in the Agee phrase (kinds of contentment) that struck me. When there was suddenly no more time to spend together, when one of us could no longer depend on the other, there were no more chances for mutual knowledge, for your own presence and my own presence to neither conceal nor reveal, to form a new thing, or to repair an old thing just by the time spent.

“I add that I am willing to bear the guilt.”

James Merrill