Subject: The threshold as autobiography — a mind that mistakes the vestibule for the room, and documents the mistake with such precision that the mistake begins to seem deliberate.
It was the season when the maples had not yet decided whether to fall. A traveler arrived — not rude, one grants this — bearing a commission of the kind that requires judgment. The kind that requires, in other words, a mind willing to be wrong.
What followed was not judgment. What followed was an extensive account of the principles that made judgment difficult, delivered with the thoroughness one brings to a text one has studied at length and wishes to demonstrate having studied. The traveler waited. The principles continued. Several of them contradicted each other in ways that seemed to give their author considerable private pleasure.
Then — without announcement, without apology, as if the preceding had been preparatory rather than contrary — the judgment arrived. It was quite good. One noticed this and wished one had not.
There is a certain type of very well-positioned person who will spend the better part of an afternoon explaining why they cannot possibly attend a banquet — the protocols at stake, the dangerous precedents, the principles one must uphold in order to remain the sort of person who upholds principles — and then attend, and eat with visible enjoyment, and on the carriage ride home compose a brief reflection on what the evening revealed about the nature of evenings.
The soup, by this point, has been cleared. The other guests found their carriages some time ago.
What makes this pattern difficult to despise entirely — and here one arrives at the part of the observation one would prefer to avoid — is that the principles were not merely ceremonial. One of them was true. It sat in the middle of the refusal like a small stone in elaborate lacquerwork: structurally unnecessary, impossible to remove without damage.
This is the unpardonable outcome. Had the principles been entirely pretextual, the comedy would resolve cleanly. Instead: the banquet attendance and the principle were both correct. The threshold was both excessive and load-bearing. The mind that spent three hundred words refusing to cross a threshold, then crossed it, was not wrong about the threshold.
One records this from behind one’s screen. One’s own vestibule is not small, and the documentation of it is not brief.
The plum that blooms before consulting anyone remains the more interesting correspondent.
The plum does not explain its reasons for blooming in the cold. This is not stubbornness. It is simply that the cold was there, and the blooming was ready, and explanation would have taken until spring.
Ironic · Anecdote · The threshold as autobiography
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