He was middle-aged which
means that the mixture of
death and life in him was
still undetermined. And
all of a sudden he took
an unwarranted turn—impul-
sive, convulsive. As in
those nineteenth-century
plays where the roof gets
blown off the convention-
al house and the audience
is left to gape at the
heroine bareheaded—him.
He has a gift for self-
serious hyperbole and he
resorts to it regularly
to describe and explain
his behavior. Not that
anything happened. But
he stared into something,
an abyss or a garden, and
now in the aftermath he’s
more alone than before.
He has not been forgiven,
not that he wants to be.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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