Read Online Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy by Joshua Corey - Free Book Online
Authors: Joshua Corey
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Time, enough.
Hang
up the phone now. Now. The new reader is almost here.
Not an electronic book, not a heads-up display, not a cybernetic prop for
reading, but a brand-new reader, organized by, for, the page. She does not
compile, she does not calculate probabilities, she is
no search engine. She is found wherever readers are still found: on buses,
under trees, in grimy break rooms, in beds beside sleeping husbands. She props the book on her knees and worries a ragged
thumbnail with her teeth. The book is hushed momentarily under her gaze, a cat
with arched spine and ruffled pages. It is the new novel, always the new novel,
the one that everyone who still reads is talking about, the one landing on
important desks in Los Angeles and New York, an old-fashioned paper brick,
surprisingly heavy. It doesn’t matter who the writer is (but it’s a man). It
doesn’t matter that everywhere old readers are gathering in front of television
sets and computers and podcasts to hear the book discussed by other old
readers. It doesn’t matter that in the academies the oldest readers of them all
scoff at this book and its readers, then turn themselves and their bored
charges back toward tending the classics, the immortal beloveds of literature,
bricks in the picturesque ruins of our civilization’s self-image, held up not
by other bricks but by hands and backs, bent, having grown deformed and nearly
human under the strain of bearing its colossal weight. The new reader is
coming. She grips the uppermost corner of the recto page, ready to turn it, but
does not turn, lingering over the last lines, shining black in the matte white sea of rectangular space. What is the nature of her
pleasure, reflected in dilated pupils, in the blush response, in breath ever so
slightly roughened in contrasting tempo to her husband’s even breathing?
Whatever its nature, she takes her pleasure from that page, that arrangement,
that musical score so perfectly attuned to the syntax of human synapses that
have been evolving for thousands of years toward this moment, this pleasure. Lux,
calme et volupté —she remembers, the new
reader has an imperfect memory, an ordinary memory, a random-access memory,
that lights brilliantly like a landing strip when touched by an incoming
stimulus, a word or phrase or image or character’s gesture or rhyme in the plot
that activates the blazing network, that stirs vivid sensations in
half-remembered languages: Madame Follet’s eighth-grade French class, for
instance—a contoured plastic seat, a jagged replica of the Eiffel Tower (made
by Mr. Bund, the metal shop teacher, rumored to be sweet on Madame Follet), the
chocolate eclairs on behalf of which her mother descended from her air of
rarefied sorrows for an afternoon to help her prepare for Foods of France day,
the irregular verbs between being and having, her bitter disappointment at
coming down with chicken pox three days before the class trip, the milder
disappointment mixed with amusement when she finally sees Paris in the
springtime a dozen years later, strolling the boulevards on the arm of her
not-yet husband, not yet the father of her unconceived child, who won’t put his
camera down even in their hotel room (only incidentally erotic, the lens
pointed outward in a doomed attempt to capture the quietness of a quiet street
of the Marais, the naked pear of his body photographed by her eyes in her
memory from her prone position on the hard, undersized bed), the framed
photograph of her lying back in her overcoat with her eyes closed on a cold
sunny morning in a chair in the Tuileries, the fight they had in the Rodin
museum, the image of her husband pouting in the sculpture garden while she
gazed down from the second-story window, stiff shape of the back of his neck
and shoulders, the rigid inverted U of his arms as he lifted his camera,
framing tight lips, a stubborn chin, an Adam’s apple, the Bande
dessinée shop they paused in on their way back to the
Time, enough.
Hang
up the phone now. Now. The new reader is almost here.
Not an electronic book, not a heads-up display, not a cybernetic prop for
reading, but a brand-new reader, organized by, for, the page. She does not
compile, she does not calculate probabilities, she is
no search engine. She is found wherever readers are still found: on buses,
under trees, in grimy break rooms, in beds beside sleeping husbands. She props the book on her knees and worries a ragged
thumbnail with her teeth. The book is hushed momentarily under her gaze, a cat
with arched spine and ruffled pages. It is the new novel, always the new novel,
the one that everyone who still reads is talking about, the one landing on
important desks in Los Angeles and New York, an old-fashioned paper brick,
surprisingly heavy. It doesn’t matter who the writer is (but it’s a man). It
doesn’t matter that everywhere old readers are gathering in front of television
sets and computers and podcasts to hear the book discussed by other old
readers. It doesn’t matter that in the academies the oldest readers of them all
scoff at this book and its readers, then turn themselves and their bored
charges back toward tending the classics, the immortal beloveds of literature,
bricks in the picturesque ruins of our civilization’s self-image, held up not
by other bricks but by hands and backs, bent, having grown deformed and nearly
human under the strain of bearing its colossal weight. The new reader is
coming. She grips the uppermost corner of the recto page, ready to turn it, but
does not turn, lingering over the last lines, shining black in the matte white sea of rectangular space. What is the nature of her
pleasure, reflected in dilated pupils, in the blush response, in breath ever so
slightly roughened in contrasting tempo to her husband’s even breathing?
Whatever its nature, she takes her pleasure from that page, that arrangement,
that musical score so perfectly attuned to the syntax of human synapses that
have been evolving for thousands of years toward this moment, this pleasure. Lux,
calme et volupté —she remembers, the new
reader has an imperfect memory, an ordinary memory, a random-access memory,
that lights brilliantly like a landing strip when touched by an incoming
stimulus, a word or phrase or image or character’s gesture or rhyme in the plot
that activates the blazing network, that stirs vivid sensations in
half-remembered languages: Madame Follet’s eighth-grade French class, for
instance—a contoured plastic seat, a jagged replica of the Eiffel Tower (made
by Mr. Bund, the metal shop teacher, rumored to be sweet on Madame Follet), the
chocolate eclairs on behalf of which her mother descended from her air of
rarefied sorrows for an afternoon to help her prepare for Foods of France day,
the irregular verbs between being and having, her bitter disappointment at
coming down with chicken pox three days before the class trip, the milder
disappointment mixed with amusement when she finally sees Paris in the
springtime a dozen years later, strolling the boulevards on the arm of her
not-yet husband, not yet the father of her unconceived child, who won’t put his
camera down even in their hotel room (only incidentally erotic, the lens
pointed outward in a doomed attempt to capture the quietness of a quiet street
of the Marais, the naked pear of his body photographed by her eyes in her
memory from her prone position on the hard, undersized bed), the framed
photograph of her lying back in her overcoat with her eyes closed on a cold
sunny morning in a chair in the Tuileries, the fight they had in the Rodin
museum, the image of her husband pouting in the sculpture garden while she
gazed down from the second-story window, stiff shape of the back of his neck
and shoulders, the rigid inverted U of his arms as he lifted his camera,
framing tight lips, a stubborn chin, an Adam’s apple, the Bande
dessinée shop they paused in on their way back to the
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