Evening

"Human beings are narrative animals: every culture countenances itself as culture via a story, whether mythopoeic or politico-economic; every whole person understands his lifetime as an organized, recountable series of events and changes with at least a beginning and middle. We need narrative like we need space-time; it’s a built-in thing."

For the minimalists in the room: which of the following sentences is more pleasing: note the sentences describes his (the narrator's) state of mind when, prior to going on medication, he was on a bus during an accident where he witnessed the driver get seriously injured:

I felt unbelievably sorry for him and of course the Bad Thing very kindly filtered this sadness for me and made it a lot worse. It was weird and irrational but all of a sudden I felt really strongly as though the bus driver were really me. I really felt that way. So I felt just like he must have felt, and it was awful. I wasn’t just sorry for him, I was sorry as him, or something like that.

Or

I felt sorry for him. It was irrational, but I felt as though the driver were me. I wasn’t just sorry for him, I was sorry as him.

Cast your vote below.

Lady Bird Johnson tells one of the President’s aides in the great story “Lyndon”:

"[Lyndon’s] hatred of being alone is a consequence of what his memoir will call his great intellectual concept: the distance at which we see each other, arrange each other, love. That love, he will say, is a federal highway, lines putting communities, that move and exist at great distance, in touch. My husband has stated publicly that America, too, his own America, that he loves enough to conceal deaths for, is to be understood in terms of distance."

You say, how was your day? And I tell you a story.

At 6:30 P.M. I arrived home to find my wife sitting at the table on the computer. Let's trip plan, I said.

at 6:45 P.M. S went downstairs and shouted upstairs to me that she was in need of paper towels.

At 9:23 P.M. S asked me where the night had gone. The night had gone at least seven different directions and none of which we were eager to follow. Is the puddle in the basement from condensation from our uninsulated/too high humidity ducts? Or is it from a rainstorm and our, at the very least, partially clogged drain? I'm not sure all that I know, is that in another life I hope I come back as some kind of bird, so I can live on an island beyond a blue bay, between the edge of the sky and the edge of the sea.

Facts from a DFW fragment:

FACTS:
• Italian stigmatist Padre Pio carried bloodless wounds,
which penetrated the left hand and both feet medially
throughout his lifetime.

• The Umbrian St. Veronica Giuliani presented with
wounds in one hand as well as in her side, which wounds
were observed to open and close on command.

• The 18th century holy woman Giovanna Solimani permitted
pilgrims to insert special keys in her hand’s wounds
and to turn them, reportedly facilitating those clients’ own
recovery from rationalist despair.

• According to both St. Bonaventure and Thomas de Chilano,
St. Francis of Assisi’s manual stigmata included baculiform
masses of what presented as hardened black flesh
extrudant from both volar planes. If and when pressure
was applied to a palm’s so-called ‘nail,’ a hardened black
rod of flesh would immediately protrude from the back of
the hand just exactly as if a real so-called nail were passing
through the hand.

And yet, fact:
• Hands lack the anatomical mass required to support the
weight of an adult human. Both Roman legal texts and
modern examinations of 1st century skeletons confirm that
classical crucifixion required nails to be driven through the
subject’s wrists, not his hands, hence the ‘necessarily simultaneous
truth and falsity of the stigmata’ that existential
theologist E.M. Cioran explicates in his 1937 Lacrimi şi
Sfînţi, the same monograph in which he refers to the human
heart as ‘God’s open wound.’