A few years ago, a woman shared this photo of her grandparents with the vintagephoto pool on Live Journal. I was among the many who right-clicked to save it, drawn in by their eyes so in love, so lively, their postures so intimate and hopeful. They look like two lovers sitting side-by-side on a piano bench, serenading one another, coy, laughing, flirtatious. But who can say what this day held, or the weeks and months before and after. Their granddaughter puts them in their historical context in photo commentary:

“They were waiting for the end of World War II to get married and the life after it seemed them as true happiness.”

They looked to the war’s end as their beginning, but it seemed – in the camera’s eye – to be begun already: a merry mess of papers and possibilities, a watch well-worn with times already told, a smile over a shoulder that promised.

New York City 1913 by Lola Dupré

from “Fiction – Reality A and Reality B” by Haruki Murakami (via the New York Times)

“If I were to pin a label on the process through which the world has passed in recent years, it would be “realignment.” A major political and economic realignment started after the end of the Cold War. Little need be said about the realignment in the area of information technology, with its astounding, global-scale dismantling and establishment of systems. In the swirling midst of such processes, obviously, it would be impossible for literature alone to take a pass on such a realignment and avoid systemic change.

An acute difficulty brought about by such a comprehensive process of realignment is the loss — if only temporarily — of coordinate axes with which to form standards of evaluation. Such axes were there until now, functioning as reliable bases on which to measure the value of things. They sat at the head of the table as the paterfamilias of values, deciding what conformed and what did not. Now we wake up to find that not only the head of the household but the table itself has vanished. All around us, it appears, things have been — or are being — swallowed up by chaos.”

Ever envy people who lived in simpler times? Not romanticizing those times, not exactly, or even completely considering those times within their true, full historical context? But simply envying in the sense of feeling “somewhat admiring discontent” when you think about the cleaner lines and demarcations that must have  been visible between your various tasks and projects and choices back when living as a writer in, say, Eudora Welty’s time?

I so often feel saturated by stimulation and the endless array of choices before me – where to rest my eyes, what to scan next, what I’m missing. I look at Ms. Welty – her slight dowager hump, that determined and lifted chin, her arched brow over those great cow-eyes that saw so far across and deep into everything – and I wonder if she was able to rely on self-discipline to tether her to her desk and to the development of her ideas. Or was there a dearth of distractions back then, less to sift through and filter out that somehow gives the Weltys and Brontes an advantage? Or am I just terribly lazy? Others aren’t handicapped by the heaps of modern distractions.

Even if I were placed in a bare room with nothing but a typewriter and a cup of tea, I worry that I would still flitter for days, fluttering focus, and fritter away hours in half-thoughts about whether my Google Reader had filled up again or if there were photos of recent Arcade Fire shows I had missed or if my cousin had posted new photos of his baby daughter on Facebook…

My admiring discontent provides its own distraction, there, doesn’t it.

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