Member-only story
The Dangers of Being Too Good at What You Do
Keep flying for too long, and you’ll forget how to land
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By feigned remoteness in the windowpane.
- Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Thump
I didn’t hear it hit the window.
I had already gone to bed. I’ve been carrying some mysterious illness around with me for weeks now, ever since an ill-advised trip to Canada. It lives inside me like a second brain, sucking the energy out of me cell by cell, leaving me drained and blue-lipped and gasping after the slightest physical exertion.
I was already in bed before it got dark. I was already in bed before my wife called up the stairs that there was a bird in the garden.
Again.
Nothing is better than the evening
God, we are told by those who have always claimed to know such things, walked in the garden in the cool of the day. In Hebrew, it’s more direct. The ruach, the wind of the day, when the heat dies off and the earth starts to breathe.
He had all the world as his garden then. This was before we built temples to house him, before we started writing words to cage him between…
