The difficulty of beautiful things is the founded suspicion someone had done a better job describing them. It is the classic "They should have sent a poet" conundrum. You sit in the brief humid patch of summer between thunderstorms bearing the promise of ten days without a solid dry hour, and it's all you can do to pick up a pen as you look toward the break in the clouds, where you can almost see beyond the atmosphere. This day, this hour, happened to the world for the first time and will never recur for the history of the universe, and someone has still beaten you to the punch. Send all available poets, and we'll forgive it if they don't make it back. Who needs the competition?
Maybe this ranks high on the list of reasons that artists so readily fall in love. It is not that art about love hasn't eroded the word to meaninglessness but that there is a fraction of a chance you might pen something about your lover in specific that isn't exhausted. An artist is so restricted that their only option is the microscopic directly before their eyes. An inch further and someone has already rendered it as an epic poem turned into a ukulele anthem used over the credits of an indie movie. You worry about artificial intelligence stealing hot, bright air from the room, but it, too, has been scooped. At least it doesn't know the import of its output. At least its ego isn't belittled by standing on the shoulders of giants. You can't say the same of the floppy-haired bastard tapping away on the MacBook in the coffeehouse you visit for caffeine to reinvigorate your thin confidence you have anything to add to the world. Even the cliche of him grates, a caricature from a lousy skit, but there he is, nursing a chai in two hands, the turbulent flow of the steam deliquescing. He leans back, watching a mote caught in a sunbeam, and lets out a cartoonish sigh of unforgivable contentment or smugness before clattering away on the keyboard, probably deciding the dust is a leitmotif in his rock opera about Kierkegaard.
You know that he captured the first light breaking through the storm clouds and used some impossibly perfect tern for it -- like apricity except, no, that's for cold sunlight; you don't know if there is one for hot sunlight and, if there is, if it isn't something banal because sunlight is by nature hot, and wouldn't that imply it wouldn't be owed an evocative term? -- while you checked the forecast and became so distracted by a video of a buffalo headbutting a tourist that you missed the butterfly landing on your notebook and extending its hair-fine proboscis into a drop of water refracting the trees beyond so it was almost as though it drank the woods.
You stare harder, trying for a moment to fall in love with Floppy-Haired MacBook Bastard to describe him better, but you only add "blond highlights, possibly fake?" When he gets up to sit elsewhere as though that seat made him uncomfortable, you can't even remember his eye color, though you are sure he had eyes -- you would have noticed if he didn't. He would do well in the vacuum of space and have much to say of the cosmos, but you would like best the words, "What do you mean 'one-way trip'?"
You pick up your pen and cross out the first eleven opening sentences, almost sure you know who you must be plagiarizing. What is new under the sun -- no, that's taken. True, but not yours.
Perhaps you would welcome the launch to space as long as it would have you, to peer the celestial firmament and gaze at the cosmic smallness of our bright apple skin atmosphere; to see the Earth not as your home (and that of inarticulable breaks between July lightning showers) but a planet like countless many whose continents are diamonds and oceans, mercury; to float amid the nothing containing everything; to place on the tip of your tongue just a crumb to taste what it must be like for God; to glance with not envy but awe the snowcapped peaks, vast ocean, and deserts at once; to stand above and beside all the people who have every died and lived; too know how little you matter; to know how much you matter; to find for once the sentence no one has conceived, even if you would not share it before you burn up on reentry -- it was not ever for the overstuffed world but only to know you could, that it was possible still no matter imprecise words trying to prove themselves cages and bowls for the beauty.
You cross out the twelfth opening line for having too many semicolons.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.
