Sometimes, you don’t understand it because I don’t really want you to understand it.

Sometimes, I am trying to poke you toward reading it over and over, not like a blog post, but like a poem, and making your own understanding instead of accepting, indulging in, mine.

***

This is what I’m really good at even though I have no idea what it all really means
(and even though it is the farthest thing from what A Man is supposed to be good at)
(or what a Great Author is supposed to be either, by the lights of the civilized savants).

***

You know by now (I hope you do) that a belletrist is a sage practitioner of belles-lettres.

The French spell it: belletriste

But also, curiously

French belle “beautiful”
French triste “sad, sorrowful, gloomy, feeling emotional or mental distress”
and French tristesse “melancholy, sorrow, sadness”

So in some literal sense a belletriste …
is also and exactly an instance of “beautiful-sadness”.

***

I’ve tried six ways to say it already. Sure sure I’m happy, and whatever. But I have never been as filled as I am right now with the blues–with the painful sadness of human life

yours and mine and ours.

***

Jack Kerouac, who was French-Canadian, was aware of most of this and called one of his heroines Tristessa.

Jack Kerouac, in spite of early ambitions, was never a Great Author, and in fact his earliest work is unreadably bad (sorry, Ti Jean).

But he was a Writer (so fuck off, Truman Capote), and he was … a Belletriste.

***

I feel like that is a low bar that I can fully aspire-to

here in the Begin.