This Is Running for Your Life Read Online Free Page B

illustrate his fear of a poorly inhabited present. “I don’t want to come on and be everybody’s Aunt Sophronia and complain about the good old days, which I never knew either,” Mailer said, by way of qualifying his feeling that flying a thousand miles in an hour means moving through “whole areas of existence which we have not necessarily gained . It may be confounding, it may finally be destructive of what is best in the human spirit.”
    McLuhan replied with one of his casually immortal predictions: “If you push that all the way, what it means is that we will increasingly tend to inhabit all of these areas in depth, simultaneously.” Mailer took this like a shiv to the spleen. “But we will not inhabit them well !” he cried. “We will inhabit them with a desperately bad fit !”
    I’m not sure I ever knew the good old days either. It’s too soon to tell. And believe me, young people, I know the case against me better than you ever could: I rarely go to shows anymore; I don’t troll the sites I can’t even name for hot new sounds; I never got into Mumblecore; too often I read new books because I’m being paid to; and it’s probably a matter of months before I look in the mirror and see Ethan Hawke staring back. I’m right there with you. But tell me, have you seen 1999? I was young then, but it didn’t mean that much to me. It seems like a while ago, I know, but it won’t be long before you’re standing where I am now, trying to sort your personal history from the stuff that stands alone. Time used to do that work for us, but time’s a little tired these days. Time needs a minute. For those of us born into pieces—you and me both, pal—the challenge is not salvaging a meaningful sense of time but determining how to build one within our current parameters, and then inhabit it well. I guess I can only say you’d be amazed how much the 1999s and the Ethan Hawkes of the world can help you with that, if you let them.
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    About two years after moving to New York and not long after the release of Before Sunset , I found myself sharing a room with Ethan Hawke. Should you move to New York and stick around long enough, eventually you will too. A group of us were huddled in a penthouse at the Tribeca Ritz for an informal brunch. Whether genuinely felt or a function of decorum, the hostess showed a helpless ambivalence about the space, which she informed me was bought for a song—and here we bow our heads to consider whatever her version of that tune might be—when the building went condo in late 2001. She and I had paused our tour of the apartment to consider the spare bedroom’s northern exposure when I felt Ethan Hawke draw up to my side.
    I could tell you about the way he ate chicken curry with his hands but parsed a cupcake with a knife and fork, or the loud, actorly register of his voice across the room, or the way, during our brief exchange—the hell-or-high-water piece of him every person in that room was going to claim before he got away—he’d only pause from his uncomfortable flitting to grant eye contact when I paid him a compliment. I remember those things, as well as the view—out of the living room’s panoramic, southwesterly window bay—of what seemed to be endless harbor beyond Miss Liberty’s straining arm, and the horror I felt when a puzzled author with a blond bowl-cut approached the glass to ask if the lone child on the premises belonged to me. But beyond them is a memory of accrued and connective meaning. Beyond them is simply the sense of being engaged in a new and yet distinctly familiar way with Ethan Hawke’s face, and the felicities of time.
    As a kid, probably around when I first saw that face, I nursed a secret conviction about how the perfect movie could be made. It would tell the story of a life, start to finish, only instead of