Beautiful Plan of Your Future
December 17, 2024 at 03:09AMIn 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, Ed Park discovered an unpublished manuscript at home—his memoir, Three Tenses. As he and his family isolated in a small 10th-floor apartment in Manhattan, Park sat in a closet-turned-office and transcribed it. In this essay for The Baffler, he revisits what he wrote and contemplates his creative process and growth as a writer.
Though I kept hard copies of both misbegotten books readily accessible over the years, my rare peeks saddened me, forcing me to recall the gap between ambition and execution, completion and reception. Conversely, I found I could enter Three Tenses on any page and get hooked. Written in a few months in 1998, this memoir—I’ll staple some asterisks to that word later—did not resemble those two monstrosities. The Tenses were built, mosaically, out of 1,478 discrete fragments, each just a few lines long, polished to what I deemed a brilliant gleam. In fact, let’s call them tiles.
My memoir was built of gaps, juxtaposition, weird little nothings. It had no chronology, which may have been the point. Maybe this was a way to live forever—an appealing idea, during the months when Covid seemed to tear through the city, the disquieting urban silence broken by sirens. At one point, the manuscript quoted Slaughterhouse-Five, about the unusual books enjoyed by the beings on the planet Tralfamadore: “There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.” In those days, perhaps, having found no earthly readers, I was writing mainly for the aliens.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/12/16/beautiful-plan-of-your-future/
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