Back at the Morgan apartment Rennie would clam up completely unless Joe questioned her directly about our morning. This, of course, he did often, and when it became quite necessary Rennie would lie grimly to him about the nature of our conversation. Grimly and clumsily: it was not pretty to watch. Joe listened carefully, and, as a rule, noncommittally, and sometimes smiled. Probably he knew she was lying, although it is hard for one who is aware of the truth to judge effectively its disguise. But if he knew, it didn’t worry him. He was indeed very strong.

He and I got along better all the time. He argued exuberantly with me about politics, history, music, integrity, logic — everything; we played tennis and gin rummy together, and I proofread two or three improperly split infinitives out of the manuscript of his dissertation — an odd, brilliant study of the saving roles of innocence and energy in American political and economic history. My attitude toward Joe, Rennie, and all the rest of the universe changed as frequently as Laocoön’s smile: some days I was a stock left-wing Democrat, other days I professed horror at the very concept of reform in anything; some days I was ascetic, some days Rabelaisian; some days super-rational, some days anti-rational. Each time I defended myself vehemently (except on my uncommunicative days), and Joe laughed and took me to pieces. It was a pleasant enough way to kill the afternoons, I thought, but Rennie grew increasingly morose as August progressed. At the pine grove she shuddered, rationalized, talked, and wept. She was caught.

About the first of my qualifiers — the author’s self in his/her fiction — I make two simple observations. The first is that as a narrative convention it has a very long provenance. The contemporary appearance of the author, or of authorial surrogates, in the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, John Updike, and Bernard Malamud, for example — to mention only a few American novelists published last year — reminds us of our near contemporaries’ similar inclination to make cameo appearances, sometimes even to take major roles, in their own productions: Borges’s Borges, Nabokov’s Van Veen, and the rest. And they of course are echoing the great modernists’ preoccupation with author-heroes, authorial surrogates, and the Künstlerroman in general: Joyce’s Dedalus, Mann’s Kröger and Aschenbach, Proust’s Marcel, Kafka’s Samsa (at whose simple vowel-and-consonant correspondence to his own surname Kafka felt such an odd, sly uncharacteristic, undergraduate excitement). But the modernists were of course only escalating that foregrounding of authorial self-consciousness which runs from Flaubert through Henry James: that “fall from innocence” on the part of literature which Roland Barthes seems to date from about 3 P.M. on a Tuesday in 1853 or thereabouts and which he exaggerates as follows a hundred years later in Writing Degree Zero

Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the records of the day. If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is yours.

There is no going back. There is no drawing against the “tomorrow”. You must live in the present on today’s deposits. Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness and success! The clock is running. Make the most of today: “Seize the day!”

So, you see, time is important, make the most of it. After all, life is either a daring adventure or nothing!

Treasure every moment that you have! And treasure it more because you shared it with someone special, special enough to have your time. And remember time waits for none.

The “cool kids” rock moleskins. Real m’f’ers rock Rhodia all day – No.16 to be precise. Paul Smith knows this as well which is why they have teamed with Rhodia to celebrate the French brand’s 75th anniversary with a set of special?designer?edition notebooks. Founded in Lyon, France in 1934, Rhodia has become a standard notebook in European households and beyond for decades. the collaborative notebooks with Paul Smith feature the standard orange as as well a black edition with various?designs?on the covers.

The black Paul Smith covers for Rhodia have my name written all over them. I’m sold. Look for them at the end of May. 5×5 graph paper runs.

More views of the?Paul Smith for RHODIA 75th Anniversary Notebooks after the jump.

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