Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy - Plot & Excerpts
Film for the New Reader Black screen. A flicker. The letter: In the heart of the night the new reader lies awake with the lights turned off listening to the rain tapping on the skylight. If she opened her eyes she would see the darkness of the ceiling and a differing quality of darkness above her, a rectangle gradually reorganizing itself into a gray filmy gleam, glassy surface blistered by streetlamps, and the little shudders of water whose shadows she can feel moving across the bedspread, her husband’s sleeping body, her own face. Like hieroglyphics or Hebrew letters they form and squiggle and dissolve almost legibly before her closed eyes. The letters are falling on her roof and the roofs of her neighbors: they fall invisibly into Lake Michigan, that vast unplacid text, and coat metal and glass and asphalt from Waukegan down to the Indiana border. Others too are awake reading the weather, establishing degrees of correspondence between internal and external states of being, between the past and the present, what they expect from the day and what they are incapable of anticipating.
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