{"id":111130,"date":"2017-05-23T15:40:36","date_gmt":"2017-05-23T19:40:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=111130"},"modified":"2017-05-23T16:39:15","modified_gmt":"2017-05-23T20:39:15","slug":"another-passionless-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/23\/another-passionless-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Passionless Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Our\u00a0complete digital archive is now available.\u00a0Subscribers can read every piece\u2014every story and poem, every essay, portfolio, and interview\u2014<\/em>from\u00a0The Paris Review\u2019s sixty-four-year history.\u00a0Subscribe now<\/a>\u00a0and you can start reading our\u00a0back issues\u00a0right away.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe mere has always been a useful category<\/a>,\u201d Donald Barthelme said in his 1981 Art of Fiction interview. And he\u2019s right. I love the mere. To be merely this, merely that, merely the other\u2014this is the mark of someone who eschews the limelight, who moves in the margins, who rejects the all-consuming ethos of fullness<\/em>. To be mere is very close to being entirely irrelevant, and that\u2019s the grand prize.<\/p>\n

And yet there are days, and this may well be one of them, when we find ourselves afflicted by all that\u2019s\u00a0mere in the world: when constellations of objects conspire to trip you up. When\u00a0current events draw\u00a0you into the mire. When something is as good as anything. Between skimming the headlines and making phlegmatic trips to the refrigerator for more seltzer, I\u2019ve been admiring\u00a0Sidney Wade\u2019s poem \u201cAnother Passionless Day<\/a>,\u201d from our Summer 1998 issue, which nails the sensation of \u201cmereness\u201d; in lines that are somehow full of momentum, Wade describes exactly how it feels not to have any. And as her nouns begin to accrue (in that stochastic way that is the hallmark of the mere; find another poem that has hockey pucks, clarinets, and giant pastries within spitting distance of one another), Wade puts her finger on what\u2019s always been to me the scariest part of apathy, and the hardest to shake: the sense that it will settle over everything you see like a fine layer of dust, that it is contagious and terminal. I won\u2019t spoil the second half\u2014which I haven\u2019t included here; the idea is to get you to pay for it, see\u2014except to say that it won\u2019t turn on you. That is, it won\u2019t swerve to offer some undeserved, bullshit, inspirational pick-me-up in the end. This is, after all, a mere poem. And I say that as the highest praise.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nel mezzo del cammin<\/em> what one finds is beans
\nand wrinkled cabbage and an awful case
\nof ambling vacuity, an affliction resembling<\/p>\n

walking pneumonia, but worse in its long-winded
\nand peevish consequences, so one shuffles and pokes
\nthrough jars of ointment and old hockey pucks<\/p>\n

tucked away in the armoire to find just exactly
\nthe right sort of eyewash or what is left
\nof one\u2019s former and nobly galloping convictions,<\/p>\n

but what one discovers, among the stoppered monuments
\nto ancient prostrations, is a b-flat clarinet
\nand a parched umbrella, so one decides<\/p>\n

with waffling confidence to put on some weight
\nand to belly up to some giant pastries
\nin a health-food bar where one is likely<\/p>\n

to meditate, darkly, on the gnarled knobble
\nof the rich tapestry of life \u2026<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Subscribe now and read the whole poem here<\/a>. And then read more of Wade\u2019s poems from our archive<\/a>. And then more still<\/a>. And then even more<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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