Skip to main content

The Hard and the Beautiful

The Hard and the Beautiful

When I lived in New York I would regularly pass through Times Square. 

It always had a few 'end is near' prophets begging the tourists and the strippers, the 3 card Monte dealers and kids that sold a pint of blood for 6 bucks on the 42 St clinic, to repent. When I was broke once I tried. They threw me out. I hadn't eaten in a few days and they said I would pass out down a pint. Too much trouble.

I recall passing by them hectoring the sinner...hungry me... with their certainty and their signs.

There was one guy that stood at the corner of 42nd and Broadway. But instead of bellowing about righteous punishment and how near judgement was he stood still repeating the same few sentences.

"Living is hard. Living is beautiful."

 The hard is trying to make you beautiful."

Whenever I passed by I would look for him. Once in a downpour I stood next to him waiting for the rain to ease. He repeated his gospel again and again and seeing me near seemed uncomfortable and worried.

I said hello. He stared at me in terror with wide unblinking eyes for a long moment. Then he whispered to me, as though he were telling me a secret.

"Living is hard."

I caught sight of us in a window's reflection. A lost soul driven mad by his truth and a pauper boy in search of his.

I nodded and whispered back at him

"But living is ...beautiful?"

He began to nod frantically. Then suddenly composed he stopped and looking into my eyes, repeated his creed.

"The hard is trying to make you beautiful."

I closed my eyes. It sounded true. That resonance ringing from somewhere at the back of me.

The rain let up and as I walked away he began again... his quiet chant to the unlistening rush hour crowd hurrying by.

Like anyone...like all of you...I have come up against the edge of the hard. We all do. It's the nature of the beast. 

But now when I think back on the hard things...the heartbreak and loss...my modest share of suffering, I can see, at last, what first seemed like damage, irreparable and terrible...changed me.

I feel like a stone beneath a sculptor's hammer, crying out at every blow about the pain and loss. 

But finally crucially changed too...the only way I could have been. Freed from the stone. As yet unfinished, but touched by a kind of hard beauty.

I'm writing this today because of the news, as yet unconfirmed, that we may face more isolation, more time and distance and disease. More sculptor's hammer blows.

More hard. 

I hope not. But a nation becomes great...in the same way any person does. Through struggle and through the beauty it leaves in its wake.

If this is coming, I hope you come to know what I do. What I have come to believe. What I hear calling to me from a street corner of my past and what I whisper to myself like a prayer each night...

Living is hard. Living is beautiful...

But the hard is trying to make you beautiful.


WLM

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

River Girls

He was a broker, a money guy, and like all money guys he never seemed to quite add up. He was getting in from an office Christmas party just as I was heading out. He had some secretary marching unsteadily on high heels in front of him as we passed on the stairs. There is an army of girls that come from Brooklyn and Bayonne to the city for their first real jobs. They become executive assistants, which means they answer phones, smile till their jaws hurt and grind their teeth at night with worry that they don't belong, and never will, on this side of the river. Inevitably they become entranced by some unhappily married guy. The “she doesn’t understand me” guys that fill every office in every high rise on the island. The girls tell themselves a man’s lingering presence means 'I need you' or 'only you can save me.' It doesn’t of course. It means I’m tired of the boss and the bills and the wife.Or I’m tired of the harangue of living. It means I’m tired of the way...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mother's Day

Mother's Day The last time my mother knew me was a few years ago on Mother's Day. She had started forgetting and remembering in the wrong order. Forgetting the things around her, remembering the distant past...like Time was suddenly dyslexic. They had her in this hospital ward for the elderly on some back street off the main drag called Memory Lane Memory Lane would be funny if it wasn’t so cruel. Sometimes living's the same way. She kept asking for a mirror but didn't recognize herself anymore. She was 17 again but trapped in an 80 year old body. A young girl staring in disbelief at the person she would become. She didn’t know her husband or daughters or sons anymore. Some days she thought I was her long dead uncle or her brother. And near the end she thought I was her father. She pleaded with me again and again to let her see that Irish boy that was just back from the war, the one that got shot in the head and survived and kept knocking on the door...
3 comments
Read more

Light and the City

Light and the City The beggar was unshaven and even at 100 degrees wore an overcoat. But the old man, always gauging hidden worth, felt something else. Something rare, something valuable. Dabo stood silent, eyes down, humbled and uncertain. Three months on the street had hardened his features but softened his eyes. Forfet felt something else in him. His business was listening to lies. “She don’t need this ring,” or “He’s finally got a job if we can just make it to the end of the month,” or “Just take it, I never loved her anyway.” His currency was the lies that people tell themselves just to get through one more week or month or year. And so he could not help but feel the truth whenever it stumbled into his shop. Some things, he knew, can’t help but tell the truth. Small children, old dogs and drunks. Truth, he knew, has a tone, undeniable as a church bell. And now looking at this beggar before him, Forfet could feel that low tolling resonance, incapable of misrepresenting...
Post a Comment
Read more