Thursday, July 29, 2010
3:20 AM. Good morning, Ernest. On page 81, Baker quotes one of your Nick Adams stories, in which Nick is getting married. “He wondered if it would be this way if he were going to be hanged. Probably. He never could realize anything until it happened.” That last sentence captured me, for some reason, and I couldn’t help wondering what it meant. He could never realize anything until it happened. What did you mean?
Nothing particularly important. I could imagine things in lots of ways, but I couldn’t really make them real to myself, couldn’t grasp a new fact ahead of time. Sort of how you felt as the year 1999 turned into 2000 and you found yourself in a new century forever and couldn’t quite grasp it. You felt like you should feel differently, somehow, and instead you were just you, where you were, and although the century had changed there was nothing to tell it to you but an abstract idea.