nameabledays Archive One

He taught us to guffaw with good literature, even if the mirth became tearful and the laughter became maniacal. The world was a slaughterhouse, but no matter how ugly, it was funny because, if you opened its wounds, it was secretly beautiful. We felt good even as we bled. And we kept laughing with him. And then we went on to listen to other voices, other laughter, almost forgetting him along with our youth, our inchoate pains taken over by a jadedness and skepticism that we partly inherited from him, and forgetting in the process the living, though bloodied, faith beneath the wounds that have become scars, that he first showed us. Then we forgot to read him until he passed by like a wraith in our awareness and we remembered some of his favorite words: And so it goes.

(New York Times photo by Fred Conrad)