Free The World Is the Home of Love and Death by Harold Brodkey

money from the firm. The life I have left will be better if I accept the need to be sly steadily, with daily regularity:
Dearest, tell me, do I look blankly friendly? Can you tell me if I give off a hint of menacing slyness? Do I appear to be a good citizen?
My life would go better, but I would sicken and die even faster than I am sickening and dying now, and doesn’t dying free you from the need to accept the world any longer?
    I went to a country wedding once—a Methodist minister’s son married a pretty girl in an agonizingly pretentious stone chapel upstate. Built on the shore of a lake in a grove of birches, the chapel was pretty in a horrendously striving, American way—self-consciously Christian, trying for tradition. It had some architectural quality but not a quality of spiritual exercise and no aura from generations of belief. It was not pure with the hope of God, like the wooden churches visible across the lake from it. The morning had been rainy. The rain stopped just as we settled ourselves in church; the sun came out; the turn-of-the-century stained-glass windows began to glow effulgently in a kind of harsh American glory of light.
    The first bridesmaid down the aisle had a two-year-old child who would not leave her or let her march without him, and so the woman marched carrying a bouquet in one hand with a child balanced on her hip and held by her other hand—a different bouquet. She marched with a curiously mild, unassertive, consciously lovely, almost sated-but-frantic air down the aisle in the overwhelming light.
    Is it a fate to have been happy?
    Here is another definition of a life I have not lived. At a night club upstate that wedding weekend, an oldish and overweight, gray-haired woman with an obvious paunch and a white violin and a back-up band sang and fiddled a song that she had written. She sang and chanted that she could get everyone to dance: “I’ll make you wild.…” She sang and chanted it. She had set her amplifiers at some high register and everything she did was loudly amplified, a bit thunderous and a bit shrill with electronic treble, electronic tremble. She was loud, hypnotic, gifted, and her insistence was inspired in its way, that she could make us wild.… Dionysiac. And people did begin to dance. The woman became more and more suggestive, dirty, and commanding, in a somehow Scotch-Irish way that was
gypsylike
and irresistible. It was also part of the American backwoods, the camp meetings, the harvest festivals.
    Everyone in the audience, in the crowd, who was not crippled or arthritic—the drunken midlifers and the eighty-year-olds and the stoned younger ones, countryside working class—danced stiffly wildly. We were whitely and self-consciously orgiastic. In a somewhat consciously traditional way and as rebels as well. The sexual self-revelations, such as they were, suited the room and the lake. And explained the privacy of clubs and summer places. Explained my parents’ summertime snobbery, explained night clubs and lakeside resorts in a new and somewhat comic way, a touching way, with a sense of kinship. All the things I have not lived were present. I never was Dionysian.
    Bad news, broken heart, absurd tension. Still, the light among the trees and the fragments of sky, pale, glowing blue like the nylon over my head with the light in it, say it will be a pretty day.
Je m’en foutisme
—I-don’t-give-a-damn-ism: is that the note I whistle? From the time I was old enough and strong enough to have my own way at least partly, even as a boy, I have insisted on living part of each day, a moment or two, without suffering. And without cold willfulness. A civilized moment or two of freedom and of emotion.
    I bought this land last year, five acres; four are wooded and steep and set among gray, lichenous rocks and closed in by a forty-foot rock face and a lower, sloping meadow—small, less than an acre, and ringed with hemlocks—and in the woods between the meadow and these