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.The man I was writing about was a practical man, a man whose life wouldn’t admit many clauses or qualifications, many refinements—he would see his life as one headlong statement, without pauses or the luxury of separations or second thoughts, lacking a certain inwardness, and I wanted that rhythm in the story.That’s the most autobiographical part of the story, this whole silly personal drama about punctuation.When the writer first sent me a manuscript of the novel I kept marginal notes as I read, objecting to passages, characterizations, factual discrepancies.Your father wasn’t like that, your mother, your sister, your brother, etc.Or: This never happened, that’s not quite accurate, what about when, etc.Partway through the book I gave up, realizing I was arguing raw material, debating the very nature of life itself, fighting against history, memory, language, failed love, death, faith, everything.I felt claustrophobic, suffocated, having at that old life, those dead arguments.I really didn’t like the book as an experience, but I wasn’t sure how to say that, because.just because, let’s say.In the end I gave her some notes that I thought were pretty balanced and sane but probably were not.When I received a signed copy of the book a few months later, I wasn’t sure what to do with it.I put it on the kitchen table, set it on the floor, took it across the yard to my writing shed and stuck it on the bookshelf, brought it back to the house, held it, stared at it, then finally carried it out to the shed again, where it sat for a while, behind me, on an old gray typing table.But it was giving the room bad juju and I could feel a knot building between my shoulder blades as I worked.I stopped writing and took half a milligram of lorazepam and right about the time the benzo softened my bad mood, I picked up the book again and found my name—my real, actual name—in the acknowledgments, where the writer thanked me for being a great reader and a true friend.Degrees of Gray in Philipsburgby Richard HugoYou might come here Sunday on a whim.Say your life broke down.The last good kissyou had was years ago.You walk these streetslaid out by the insane, past hotelsthat didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured tryof local drivers to accelerate their lives.Only churches are kept up.The jailturned 70 this year.The only prisoneris always in, not knowing what he’s done.The principal supporting business nowis rage.Hatred of the various graysthe mountain sends, hatred of the mill,The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girlswho leave each year for Butte.One goodrestaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,a dance floor built on springs—all memory resolves itself in gaze,in panoramic green you know the cattle eator two stacks high above the town,two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapsefor fifty years that won’t fall finally down.Isn’t this your life? That ancient kissstill burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeatso accurate, the church bell simply seemsa pure announcement: ring and no one comes?Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesiumand scorn sufficient to support a town,not just Philipsburg, but townsof towering blondes, good jazz and boozethe world will never let you haveuntil the town you came from dies inside?Say no to yourself.The old man, twentywhen the jail was built, still laughsalthough his lips collapse.Someday soon,he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.You tell him no.You’re talking to yourself.The car that brought you here still runs.The money you buy lunch with,no matter where it’s mined, is silverand the girl who serves your foodis slender and her red hair lights the wall.Degrees of Gray in PhilipsburgThe streets of Philipsburg do indeed seem laid out by the insane.Beyond West Broadway pavement gives out, and from then on the roads and streets are a seasonal affair, running with mud or bleached by dust or silent under new snow.Many of the streets that cut through town barely qualify as such; they are paths beaten in the grass, two tracks where trucks lurch over rocks with a clatter of bad linkage, roads of gravel or red cinder that skirt empty pastures and a few last houses until they head, somewhat pointlessly now, into the hills and mountains where men once worked.One can imagine many things about these evocative streets, and in some ways that’s all that remains, imagination haunting a town where even history, usually the last to leave, has given up and gone away.One can imagine, for instance, that the roads are the ripped seams of a civilization, rents in the fabric that have led to a general unraveling, to the vacant storefronts and faded signs and a rusting school bus, still yellow, inexplicably parked in front of a hotel whose last guest signed his name to the register, one vanished afternoon, years ago.Perhaps the bus died there, the children walked to school that morning, and it was convenient and reasonable—since weeds had already grown up around the red brick steps and the windows were gone and the hotel, it was agreed, by some vague assent, was never coming back—to leave the bus where it was, like the carcass of a whale washed to shore.Time would take care of it, as it had the hotel
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