The Lovers: Chapter 3 prose section 1
Who by Fire: a serial novel full audio of chapter in link below
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The Lovers, section one of chapter 3
When I was a child, I put out a candle flame with my fingers. A trick. I thought the blue place in the center was cold. “Is it?” I asked my father. He said, “No,” said something about oxygen—its presence, its absence—“air,” he said. Breath, I think now. I know, of course, that the hottest part of the flame is just above the blue core, that temperatures vary inside the flame. He said, “It does seem impossible, doesn’t it? No burn?” We looked at my fingers. He said, “Consider it a paradox.”My father and I are alike in that we pride ourselves on not being driven by our passions—unlike Isaac and Lena. We’re driven by our intellect, our need to know things, our rational powers to sort things out. Also, in my father’s case—and Isaac’s—we’re driven to grow things in orderly rows; I got up at five and farmed with my father as soon as I was big enough; that work, which I got away from as soon as I was old enough, and the gift of the rising sun, which I rarely see anymore, are early memories. I don’t grow anything anymore; I mow the grass in orderly rows. My father survived the all-too-common small farmer’s demise because he ran the farm with a businessman’s head. He and I are both driven by our need to understand economic markets—in my case, what I do at my computer, for a living—finding order in seeming chaos (not unlike Lena, who read poetry, studied Shakespeare as if he’d give her answers; she quoted when she was upset—one of the things I picked up from her though I’m not as good at it).
The poet Frost (forgive the pun on cold-fire, unintentional), who said, “From what I’ve tasted of desire/ I hold with those who favor fire,” in a masculine rhymed couplet and perfect meter that I find annoying, also said in rhythmic variation that suits my sense of sound, “All is an interminable chain of longing.”
The year before Lena died, she gave me the scores for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, the “Emperor”; for Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major, the “Titan”; for Schubert’s Piano Quintet in A Major, D667, the “Trout”; and for Stravinsky’s “The Firebird.” She gave me these books with their multiple staffs of notes—“The Firebird” with notes for two piccolos, two flutes, two oboes, an English horn, three clarinets, a bass clarinet, three bassoons, three trombones, a tuba, violins, the piano and many others—when I was no longer playing the old black Steinway baby grand that I hadn’t tuned in over a year.
The piano lay quiet like the word piano but sat there hard, visible, concrete. Like Isaac.
Like Isaac, who leaves his dried-up watercolors in his potting shed, and wants minimalism, wants geometry, the thing that insists on being only itself, I left my piano to sit like a minimalist statement. Like Isaac, who had stopped painting, I knew I could never play well enough to satisfy.
Prose section 2 of “The Lovers” (coming next)
Full audio of “The Lovers”
Table of Contents
Note to readers: Full audio of chapters 1 thru 5 now up; see Table of Contents
Love,
Thank you, @Tim Burns xo
A painful chapter. It makes me wonder what I've given up for similar reasons.