The Invented Part Page 14

  III

  “In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.”

  Who said that? Who wrote that? The Young Man wonders. Was it The Writer? Or was it a writer who The Writer liked a lot, one of those sentences pinned to a wall in his study? It seems to The Young Man that the sentence in question is nothing special. To begin with there’s the fact that it contains the words “night” and “morning” in the same line. It doesn’t fit. But changing “morning” to something else doesn’t really improve anything. Dawn? No. Wee Hours? Too childish. Small hours? Better, but not really. And it’d completely break down the mechanics of the sentence: “In a real dark night of the soul it is always the small hours.” No. It doesn’t work. Broken beyond repair like one of those clocks that, once opened, becomes impossible to close. Like that clock that Jay Gatsby almost breaks. And he read somewhere that Fitzgerald always wrote surrounded by clocks, because he was obsessed with time’s passing, with the repeatable or unrepeatable past passing by and, ah, yes, it was Fitzgerald who wrote that thing about the dark night of the soul and three o’clock in the morning or whatever, whatever time it is, thinks The Young Man.

  The Young Man looks at the time on the screen of his mobile phone. It’s 3:05 a.m. The small hours, indeed. At 3:05 in the morning we’re all geniuses, he says to himself. Or we all think like writers who could be or who, unbeknownst to everybody, are geniuses. Or, at least, we all think like writers. The spasmodic mechanics of dreams—that free association of ideas, those sudden changes of direction or channel or genre, that succession of impossibilities suddenly plausible because they’re happening inside the desk of your head, mind the color of a blank page—is the way writers see the waking world. All the time, every hour and every second. Weighing possibilities, strengthening weak characteristics and altering uncertain realities, inserting trial endings, trying to find the right words, that kind of thing.