October, Without the Wanting

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The anticipation has gone. The ability to notice its absence, unfortunately, remains in magnificent working order.

I can describe the missing feeling. I can distinguish it from several neighboring varieties of misery. I can stand over the absence with a clipboard, metaphorically speaking, and produce an exceptionally tedious account of its dimensions. What an achievement. The machinery has stopped, but the fault-reporting mechanism could apparently run a small country.

October is here.

That sentence used to contain something besides information.

There was a time when a approaching celebration could make an ordinary day feel secretly occupied. Nothing had happened yet, and still something was happening. The future had reached backward and interfered with the present. I could be doing nothing particularly enjoyable and enjoy it slightly more because something enjoyable was coming. An absurd arrangement, when examined: receiving an advance payment in happiness for an event that had not occurred and might turn out to be disappointing. Yet it worked. The mind extended credit. I lived a little on the interest.

Now I know what is coming.

Knowing seems to be the entire transaction.

The calendar, meanwhile, is almost indecently confident. Here are the dates. Here are the occasions. Here is the annual authorization to feel something larger than the usual damp fistful of yourself. It has arranged everything into neat little squares, this smug accountant of human expectation, as though sorrow becomes manageable when supplied with borders.

I look at October and find myself waiting for the response I think I ought to have.

Then I notice that I am waiting.

Then I become irritated that I have noticed.

Within seconds, a perfectly innocent month has become an examination of my emotional competence, and I am once again the candidate who has brought an extensively annotated understanding of the questions and no functioning pen.

There is a particular humiliation in being unable to enjoy the prospect of enjoyment. Actual enjoyment, at least, requires something to happen. Anticipation is supposed to be the cheap part. No logistics. No successful outcome. Just the mind doing a little advance embroidery on time. Mine has apparently decided that even imaginary pleasure must submit supporting documents.

I would like to appeal.

To whom, however? The same mind handles complaints. A splendid constitutional arrangement. The accused wears a different hat and hears the case.

What makes this difficult to explain is the lack of a sufficiently theatrical cause. There is no single grief I can haul forward and place before the reader like an enormous dead fish. There. That explains the smell. You can understand a particular sorrow, even when you cannot repair it. It has a shape. It points somewhere.

This has the irritating vagueness of a defect in the atmosphere.

I am aware of celebration. I understand its ingredients. The return of familiar stories, the permission to interrupt ordinary time, the agreement that these days will be marked and remembered: none of this is incomprehensible to me. I can appreciate the ingenuity of it. Human beings take a stretch of time, which would otherwise pass without consulting anybody, and insist on giving it a character.

This day matters, we say.

Then we go to considerable trouble to make the assertion visible.

There is something touching about that, even through the greasy spectacles of my current disposition. Time offers no obvious handles. We make some. We attach ceremony to recurrence, memory to dates, expectation to the slow approach of a month. We arrange for the future to contain things we can recognize.

I recognize them.

That is the trouble. I recognize almost everything except my own participation.

I do not need an explanation of why a festival is enjoyable. I can supply one myself, fluently, with subsidiary observations and an unnecessary qualification that will make everyone regret asking. Understanding has never been particularly shy about turning up where it cannot help. Mine arrives early, claims the best seat, and proceeds to deliver a lecture while the patient remains unchanged.

Perhaps I should stop examining it.

An excellent suggestion. I have examined that suggestion extensively.

The difficulty is that the missing feeling was once so unstudied. I did not have to construct an argument for anticipation. Something was approaching, and I leaned toward it. That was all. The leaning happened before the explanation. Now I produce the explanation and wait for it to pull the rest of me into position, like a man attempting to inflate a collapsed lung by reading it an enthusiastic description of air.

Nothing.

A small, complete word. Remarkably roomy inside.

I could make my condition look more distinguished by calling it disillusionment. There is a market for that. Give a disappointed man enough adjectives and he can pass for a philosopher. I could announce that I have seen through the spectacle, penetrated the symbolism, escaped the herd, transcended the vulgar appetite for seasonal diversion.

A rectal coronation of the intellect.

The embarrassing truth is that I would quite like some vulgar seasonal diversion. I would like the prospect of it to interest me. I would willingly surrender a substantial portion of my supposed insight in exchange for that ordinary, unearned lift at the thought of something pleasant approaching.

Keep the penetrating analysis. Give me the little lift.

There is no superiority in being difficult to delight. I find it inconvenient, repetitive, and increasingly dull. Even my dissatisfaction has become dissatisfied with its material. It would like a new subject. Unfortunately, the editor is me.

I suspect memory makes matters worse, although I cannot persuade it to stop providing evidence.

I remember anticipation. That is an awkward thing to retain after the anticipation itself has thinned away. The memory becomes a demonstration of a function I can no longer reliably perform. Look, it says, you used to do this without assistance. You used to feel a coming day exert a pull. You used to carry a little unfinished happiness inside the present.

Thank you, memory. An exceptionally considerate presentation. Would you care to follow it with a ceremonial intestinal sonata?

And memory is hardly an impartial witness. I cannot be certain how faithfully I am recalling those earlier feelings. Perhaps I have polished them through repetition. Perhaps the old excitement was smaller, more intermittent, more vulnerable to ordinary disappointment than it now appears. I allow for this. I make the necessary corrections.

The corrected memory still contains something I miss.

That seems unfair.

Every new October consequently arrives burdened with comparison. I expect the month to be itself and to restore my former response to it, which is an unreasonable amount of work to demand from a division of the year. October cannot reach into me and locate the missing inclination. It cannot reproduce the person who once received it differently.

I know.

I keep behaving as though it has misplaced an essential item of my luggage.

Perhaps the ugliest part is the additional labor I manufacture out of the absence. A feeling fails to arrive, and I immediately set myself the task of producing it. I should make an effort. I should approach the season differently. I should be receptive, grateful, interested, available to wonder. Each word sounds harmless until I turn it into another implement with which to prod myself.

By the time I finish, celebration has become an assignment.

I have found a way to give pleasure homework.

This is a talent of sorts. A foul little talent, best displayed in a sealed container, but undeniably mine: taking something that might have offered relief and converting it into evidence that I am failing to experience life correctly.

The self-reproach remains energetic. Worth observing, that. Anticipation cannot lift its head, but the prosecuting counsel within me has slept beautifully and prepared several supplementary charges.

Why are you like this?

Why can you not simply enjoy things?

Why must every feeling become a discussion?

I particularly appreciate the third question, which arrives in the middle of an involuntary internal discussion and immediately extends it.

I am tired of explaining myself to myself.

Yet I keep trying, because there is still a difference between being empty and being content to be empty. I am aware of that difference through the irritation it causes. If I were comfortably indifferent, October could proceed without this ridiculous hearing. Its promises would pass beneath my notice. Instead, I inspect them. I return to them. I resent their failure to move me.

There is wanting in this, somewhere.

Wanting to want is a miserable little substitute. It has the shape of an appetite without the appetite’s useful direction. I cannot say what particular celebration would satisfy it. I seem to want the capacity by which a celebration could become something to look forward to in the first place.

Try putting that on a wish list.

“Please restore the ability to desire an item from this list.”

The mind has folded itself into another of its magnificent administrative knots. I can almost admire the craftsmanship.

Almost.

And beneath all this busy, bad-tempered language lies a stillness that the language does surprisingly little to disturb. I can be sharp about it. I can be grotesque. I can dress the disappointment in a bishop’s robes and send it sliding down the banister of an imaginary cathedral. For a moment, the sentence entertains me.

Then the sentence ends.

October is still there, and the feeling I was trying to describe is still absent.

That is the limitation of being articulate about misery. The articulation can become so animated that it gives a misleading impression of the life underneath. The prose gesticulates. It trips over its own vestments. It produces an ornamental bowel movement and insists that everyone inspect the workmanship. Meanwhile, the original condition sits through the performance without noticeably changing its expression.

I would like to reach the paragraph where something shifts.

It would be convenient. I could discover a modest truth, lower my expectations by an elegant amount, and become available to the small pleasures that writers traditionally distribute near the end of a piece like this. The reader would receive a little relief. I would receive the appearance of having progressed.

I can feel myself preparing the fraud.

Even now, part of me wants to convert this into an acceptable account of sadness: difficult, certainly, but reflective; subdued, but ultimately receptive; sufficiently wounded to be interesting, sufficiently repaired to avoid becoming a nuisance. I have no such development to report. The month remains a month. I remain conscious of what I am not looking forward to.

It is uncomfortable to leave the matter there.

So I do what I have been doing all along. I turn it over again.

What was that old movement toward the future? I remember it as something almost physical, a slight forward pressure in the mind, a willingness to let the present pass because another day had begun to acquire a particular value. I did not think of it as a possession. I certainly did not think to be grateful for it. Who pauses in the middle of looking forward to something to admire the mechanism by which looking forward has become possible?

I could be disappointed afterward. Frequently, the imagined thing must have exceeded the actual thing. Still, I had enjoyed its approach. Even a disappointing occasion could arrive having already given me something.

That is the part I keep returning to.

Before anything happened, something had happened.

I am trying to remember how that began. Whether there was a thought first, or a feeling, or whether the distinction would have seemed so stupid to the person experiencing it that he would have told me to take my questions and administer them as an intellectual enema.

He probably would have.

I would quite like to ask him anyway.