The Snow Queen: A Novel

“You really weren’t going to jump?”

“No. I mean, I thought about it. I was thinking about jumping, I wasn’t going to. There’s a difference, right?”

“I suppose there is.”

You know, if you’re hopeful, if you’re even a little bit happy about something that might happen, it doesn’t affect the outcome. You could still give yourself a period of optimism, even if it all falls apart.

It’s hardly ever the destination we’ve been anticipating, is it? Our hopes may seem unrealized, but we were in all likelihood hoping for the wrong thing. Where did we—the species, that is—pick up that strange and perverse habit?

He gathers himself, re-collects himself, gets himself ready to give it, once again. The whole thing: the hopes designed to be trampled; the image of a new life that’s probably not much more than clownish optimism.

“What if your whole life wasn’t about writing songs?”

“I don’t like the sound of that, frankly.”

“I don’t mean give it up. I mean, what if you were a man who’s living a life, and writing songs is part of it?”

He says, “Step away, devil.”

Two thousand six. The world is fucked.

Semi-fucked. Pre-fucked.

what could be more depressing than delivering to one’s audience the anticipated outcome?

Barrett is a humble shopboy. He moves the merch. And in private, for his own benefit, he’s compiling his Unified Field Theory of Everything, which, like so many projects worth undertaking, is doomed, and at least semi-delusional.

Happy 2006? Do the names John Roberts and Samuel Alito ring a bell? Did the hey-that’s-too-bad approach to Katrina make an impression? Does it bother you, even a little bit, that we’re living through the SECOND TERM of the worst president in history?

As it turns out, the mortally ill can be rendered more, rather than less, irritating by the authority impending demise confers upon them. Who knew?