In Williamsburg catching some jazz
‘Lost’ Creators Promise Answers in Last Season
As someone who has watched every episode, this quote makes me nervous that accessibility will trump storytelling for the final season. We’ll see!
That passengers thank the pilot when they leave the plane is a testament that stuffing people into a metal tube, hurtling them in the air, and landing on a few square feet of rubber is scary, miraculous shit.
Friday night I saw some hipsters crouched down on the sidewalk of Graham Ave playing dice. Crinkled bills and all.
In what seems like a different life, it was so long ago, a friend proffered to me the central theme upon which he wanted to base a novel: afterlife only exists for as long as one is remembered. When people forget you, your afterlife ends.
I’m reading another book on Abraham Lincoln. For all his spiritualism and kind-heartedness, Lincoln never believed in an afterlife. The deaths of his mother, sister, son, first love, and the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who never returned home from the Civil War were an immense, internalized emotional burden. In the case of the soldiers, Lincoln believed their noble deaths would allow them to “live on” in the continued existence of the United States. I don’t think Lincoln dwelled on his own death much, for he was too busy dealing with the death that surrounded him.
It is with the hope that my friend’s idea is somehow true, that I am going to transcribe a short story from Team of Rivals (by Doris Kearns Goodwin):
In 1908, in a wild and remote area of the North Caucasus, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was the guest of a tribal chief ”living far away from civilized life in the mountains.” Gathering his family and neighbors, the chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for hours with tales of Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were as strong as the rock… His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.”
“I looked at them,” Tolstoy recalled, “and saw their faces all aglow, while their eyes were burning. I saw that those rude barbarians were really interested in a man whose name and deeds had already become a legend.” He told them everything he knew about Lincoln’s “home life and youth… his habits, his influence upon the people, and his physical strength.” When he finished, they were so grateful for the story that they presented him with “a wonderful Arabian horse.” The next morning, as Tolstoy prepared to leave, they asked if he could possibly acquire for them a picture of Lincoln. Thinking that he might find one at a friend’s house in the neighboring town, Tolstoy asked one of the riders to accompany him. “I was successful in getting a large photograph from my friend,” recalled Tolstoy. As he handed it to the rider, he noted that the man’s hand trembled as he took it. “He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer, his eyes filled with tears.”
