Disappointing!

There’s a guy who shows up at my local Starbucks. He’s at least eighty, and has the judicious, grave face of someone who’s approaching death with all faculties intact. He looks in equal parts like a kindly grandfather and an emeritus professor. The other day he sat at the next table and spent the hour writing. He used a black felt-tip pen, inscribing block letters on ruled paper. I considered the possibility that he was a writer of some accomplishment. He wrote slowly and unhesitatingly, like someone whose mind is familiar to him. (He made me think of a dowager who can reach into her cupboard and immediately pull out the exact item she wants.) Maybe this is what writing is like at the end of a long career, I thought. It gets easy; there’s no more struggle. The words just come.

I couldn’t tell if he was writing poetry or prose. If he was writing poetry, it was Merwin-esque in its wisdom and loveliness—or so I imagined. If he was writing prose, it was fearless and erudite like, say, Dwight MacDonald’s. He traced those letters one block at a time, skipping lines. Nabokov wrote on index cards while standing at a lectern. The greater the writer, the quirkier the habits.

Oh, how disappointing it was to see him yesterday, accompanied by a pair of softcover books about spirituality, the cheap self-published kind. The cover art screamed whimsy and intellectual flabbiness. It got worse. A young man sat down with him and the two started talking about karma. The old man hauled the conversation, as though he were speaking to a novice. He spoke with utter conviction about things utterly speculative, and occasionally patted his books, citing them as confirmation. His metaphysics was a web of clichés. He had an answer to every question. Imponderables didn’t bother him. He blabbered like a fool.

Which must be why he looked so happy and serene.

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