The letter. More often than not, it is not what we listen to that is
beautiful but the listening itself. I was on the line taking morning sessions on
the stopping all stations to Upfield. I was listening to two young
woman-talking shoes and spray tans. They slouched, legs akimbo, sharing an Ipod
and cigarette. Their voices were unusually melodious. It was mid morning and I
had an appointment at Batman at midday with a forty-something academic, having
a crisis. After forty-odd-years he discovered that his life was complete
nonsense. Frankly, I could have told him that this was a realization that hit
us all eventually, but he wouldn’t have believed me. If he did nothing,
concentrated on his garden, took up crosswords, his problems would soon vanish.
He had been singing socialist folk songs from the age of six. He furthered his
unhappiness by moving west to live with the ‘real people’. He subdued his monsters
with whisky, rock bands, saving the world through responsible architecture and
slaughtering his own livestock in his garage. I didn’t get the connection. He
was too cheap to hire a proper psychiatrist and that’s where I fit in. One of
his doctorial students recommended me; the outsourcing councilor. Four
fifteen-minutes sessions later we seemed to be getting nowhere. It was like we
were talking in different languages. Today, I would tell him there was no
expedient prescription for happiness, bar acceptance of one’s shifting destiny.
As an ageing rocker, I think you would like the novels of Kate Christensen, particularly The Astral and The Great Man. One is about an ageing poet, the other is about a dead artist and the women he left behind. I love Christensen's troubled male characters and how she gets inside their heads, dissects their relationships, and does it all with such insight, humour and grace. Her female characters are quite magnificent, too. They are enormously fallible, but real, and strangely sympathetic.
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