Attempting To Do Now Again Poem by gershon hepner

Attempting To Do Now Again



ATTEMPTING TO DO NOW AGAIN


Wondering if I should create
a longer now,
I realize now really isn't so great,
and disavow
attempts to do longer or larger or better
or now again,
since no one recaptures a now in a tête-à-
tête with then.

Time that flows away like water
beneath a bridge
resists attempts to make it shorter.
We can't abridge
the time we don't enjoy like books
which may be shortened.
We have to take it as looks,
most self-important.


Dwight Garner reviews two books ("The Inner Lives of Airports and Voyagers, " NYT,10/27/10) , A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton and In Motion by Tony Hiss:

There's a funny, revealing moment in Alain de Botton's new book, "A Week at the Airport, " when he discovers that the largest bookstore at Heathrow Airport, in London, does not stock his books. He decides to have a conversation with Manishankar, the shop's manager, about what else might be available. "I explained, " Mr. de Botton writes, "that I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange." Manishankar, confused, wonders if Mr. de Botton might want a magazine instead.
Mr. de Botton, of course, has just delivered a not bad description of his own oeuvre. From "How Proust Can Change Your Life, " the book that put him on the map in 1997, to last year's "Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, " he has consistently issued books that are intimate, fastidious and shyly geeky, books that tinker with the profound. He's what you'd get if Linus, from "Peanuts, " grew up to read philosophy at Oxford. That quotation is telling, too, because it underscores what's off-putting about Mr. de Botton's work. It can be precious, humorless and perceptively self-satisfied. His coolly inquisitive voice sometimes feels laid-on, as if its placidity were covering up more roiling emotions….
Mr. Hiss's book — a dead thing about being alive — moves on to ideas like creating "longer nows" in our lives, which sounds like tantric sex without the good bits. Reading "In Motion" is among the longest nows you'll experience this year.


4/26/12 #10,014

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