V

[[[[[[He is almost sixty. Married half his life. What is the half-life of a marriage. His daughter has been married and out of state for the last three years. Moved south, the husband an artist. A painter, a pauper, his daughter lost to Bohemia, maybe?Steven Cantwell is an actuarial. He is an obsessive maker of lists, not a poet, a listmaker. He of the boundless reserves of empathy is so removed emotionally from his immediate family, his only daughter, his wife. This is apparently common with people of boundless empathy, they have no patience for those closest to them, hence the ease of crusading for people in far away lands. Ideals work better as big pictures, rather than toiling through the barbarous details. Like a beautiful dream, a grand design, that becomes too familiar, mired in minor imperfections, the slip-start of everyday, it becomes grotesque. But then his life has become a dream, or if not a dream an endless, unthinking ritual, numbers. It is through his lists that he feels, that he ponders that he touches. His most meaningful relationship an old college friend, a poet and professor, he lunches with every month. He and his wife have lives in parallel, parallel only in space. He is emotionally estranged from his daughter, married and on another state. At what point did he slip away? Who slipped away? Is it a mutual slipping away. Love becomes a ritual, what's a thirtiest anniversary? Did she mention renewing vows. Things become unmoored. Things run adrift, if you don't watch them. Is modern life like a slow psychosis? You become so adept at the motions of a life, the work, the shallow, hollow commitments of family, and you stop living a meaningful life, hunger and apathy, delusion and fulfillment, these things walk hand in hand. Childhood memories of his daughter show how he was distant even then, when she was supposedly daddy's little girl. And with his wife those halcyon days of courting and love, a proper love, even in the throes of young passion, was this empty itself. his empathy lies these days with the subjects of his work, people in the face of fate, the tides of chance and injury. Maybe he cast a spell, put them in a bubble, timeless and unalterable, the heart tires. Love is holding the fragile glass heart beyond the railings above the dark abyss, this is where love thrives. All the safest houses, the fastest, surest cars.]