I Walk the Line

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
I keep my eyes wide open all the time
I keep the ends out for the tie that binds
Because you're mine, I walk the line

I find it very, very easy to be true
I find myself alone when each day is through
Yes, I'll admit that I'm a fool for you
Because you're mine, I walk the line

As sure as night is dark and day is light
I keep you on my mind both day and night
And happiness I've known proves that it's right
Because you're mine, I walk the line

You've got a way to keep me on your side
You give me cause for love that I can't hide
For you I know I'd even try to turn the tide
Because you're mine, I walk the line

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
I keep my eyes wide open all the time
I keep the ends out for the tie that binds
Because you're mine, I walk the line
-Johnny Cash

The Long Way Around

Artist/Band: Dixie Chicks

My friends from high school
Married their high school boyfriends
Moved into houses in the same ZIP codes
Where their parents live

But I, I could never follow
No I, I could never follow

I hit the highway in a pink RV with stars on the ceiling
Lived like a gypsy
Six strong hands on the steering wheel

I've been a long time gone now
Maybe someday, someday I'm gonna settle down
But I've always found my way somehow

By taking the long way
Taking the long way around
Taking the long way
Taking the long way around

I met the queen of whatever
Drank with the Irish and smoked with the hippies
Moved with the shakers
Wouldn't kiss all the asses that they told me to

No I, I could never follow
No I, I could never follow

It's been two long years now
Since the top of the world came crashing down
And I'm getting' it back on the road now

But I'm taking the long way
Taking the long way around
I'm taking the long way
Taking the long way around
The long
The long way around

Well, I fought with a stranger and I met myself
I opened my mouth and I heard myself
It can get pretty lonely when you show yourself
Guess I could have made it easier on myself

But I, I could never follow
No I, I could never follow

Well, I never seem to do it like anybody else
Maybe someday, someday I'm gonna settle down
If you ever want to find me I can still be found

Taking the long way
Taking the long way around
Taking the long way
Taking the long way around

Mostly Imagination...

Some thoughts since my last post :D…….

I was speaking with a friend, she was telling me about her plans for her 30th birthday. she must be 21 years old ..I just realize I have some 4 and half more years to my 30th bday…anyway one idea she had was to go to Antarctica to celebrate… which I think is pretty cool , another idea was that if she wasn’t married/engaged by her 30th birthday…she would buy her self a right hand ring.. depending on who you are; you might have a different immediate reaction to this …though I rather like it…I don’t have to wait for someone to give me a nice ring!!! Like she said “ I know exactly what I don’t want…”

There was a good eight years 98-2004 a period in which I didn’t travel by air and kind of lost touch with air transport, I always liked traveling by airplane…seemed like a very once-in-a-while adventurous thing to do…at that point of time I would have thought that some one who said this was seriously over privileged and didn’t know what they are talking about.. but here goes and I’m saying it ..”I hate traveling by airplanes”…already closed window car journeys make me sick…. Add to that five hour journeys by plane or horror of horrors the 16 hr journey from the US to India….. maybe I’ve grown bigger since I was a kid, but the airlines are seriously more cramped…. American airline food totally sucks ( if you call a soft drink and pack of pretzels a meal)…give me back those one and a half hour plane journeys from Dubai to India…..


My mom read my blog for the first time this week (thank you broadband)cover to cover for a few hours , , she liked my “I miss my mom when I have to clean the bathroom”..so Hi Mom!!!.. to everyone else….. yeah…whatever…….

The past few years I’ve been jumping from one unexpected place to another…where next I wonder ……………….


One of my pet peeves are people who lack any imagination whatsoever( I on the other hand. .have a rather overactive imagination)…I feel bad for people who lack the imagination to see what possibilities lie ahead for them or what they are capable of.. and I totally despise people who lack the imagination to see what other people are capable of….

Of Irish Blessings, Goodbyes and then some...

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
the rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again,
may God hold you in the palm of His hand.
traditional gaelic blessing

“May those who love us, love us; and those who don't love us, may God turn their hearts; and if He doesn't turn their hearts, may he turn their ankles so we'll know them by their limping.”

Irish Blessings

“May God grant you always...A sunbeam to warm you, a moonbeam to charm you, a sheltering Angel so nothing can harm you. Laughter to cheer you. Faithful friends near you. And whenever you pray, Heaven to hear you.”

Irish Blessings

“May flowers always line your path and sunshine light your day. May songbirds serenade you every step along the way. May a rainbow run beside you in a sky that's always blue. And may happiness fill your heart each day your whole life through.”

Irish Blessings


“May God give you...For every storm a rainbow, for every tear a smile, for every care a promise and a blessing in each trial. For every problem life sends, a faithful friend to share, for every sigh a sweet song and an answer for each prayer.”

Irish Blessings


“May you have the hindsight to know where you've been, The foresight to know where you are going, And the insight to know when you have gone too far”

Irish Blessings

“Why can't we get all the people together in the world that we really like and then just stay together? I guess that wouldn't work. Someone would leave. Someone always leaves. Then we would have to say good-bye. I hate good-byes. I know what I need. I need more hellos.”

Snoopy quotes (Fictional character from the comic strip Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz)


“Don't be dismayed at goodbyes, a farewell is necessary before you can meet again and meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.”

Richard Bach quotes (American Writer, author of 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull', b.1936)

“You and I will meet again, When we're least expecting it, One day in some far off place, I will recognize your face, I won't say goodbye my friend, For you and I will meet again”

Tom Petty quotes (American Guitarist and Singer (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers) b.1950)

“You have four years to be irresponsible here. Relax. Work is for people with jobs. You'll never remember class time, but you'll remember time you wasted hanging out with your friends. So, stay out late. Go out on a Tuesday with your friends when you have a paper due Wednesday. Spend money you don't have. Drink 'til sunrise. The work never ends, but college does..."”

Tom Petty

“A sad thing in life is that sometimes you meet someone who means a lot to you only to find out in the end that it was never bound to be and you just have to let go.”

“Say goodbye to the oldies, but goodies, because the good old days weren't always good and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems”
Billy Joel quotes (American Pianist, Singer and Song Writer, b.1949)


“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.”

Henry David Thoreau quotes (American Essayist, Poet and Philosopher, 1817-1862)

“So many faces in and out of my life; some will last, some will be just now and then. Life is a series of hellos and good byes, I'm afraid it's time for goodbye again.”

“Are you upset little friend? Have you been lying awake worrying? Well, don't worry...I'm here. The flood waters will recede, the famine will end, the sun will shine tomorrow, and I will always be here to take care of you. -Charlie Brown to Snoopy”
Snoopy quotes (Fictional character from the comic strip Peanuts, by Charles M. Schulz)


“Maybe I could have loved you better. Maybe you should have loved me more. Maybe our hearts were just next in line. Maybe everything breaks sometime.”
Jewel quotes (American Singer, Songwriter and Guitarist, b.1974)

“Never let go of hope. One day you will see that it all has finally come together. What you have always wished for has finally come to be. You will look back and laugh at what has passed and you will ask yourself... 'How did I get through all of that?”


“Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again.”
William Shakespeare quotes (English Dramatist, Playwright and Poet, 1564-1616)

“I must learn to love the fool in me the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries”
Theodore Isaac Rubin quotes (American Writer and psychiatrist, He has been a columnist for the Ladies Home Journal, since 1968. Wrote Lisa and David (1961). b.1923)

That 70's Post...

I would have liked to have been present in the 1970’s.. that’s’ soooo my decade…. The bell bottoms, the message of peace and brotherly (or sisterly love) , the sepia photographs, the paisley prints, the age of the flower children , psychedelia, the big hair ( ok maybe that was the 80’s..),the music.. you get the general drift….


I LOVE 70’s music.. I would go back in time just to listen to those songs in the top 40 and continuous rotation .From the wiki

The 1970s saw various forms of pop music dominating the charts. Often characterized as being shallow, 70s pop took many forms and could be seen as a reaction against the high-energy and activist pop of the previous decade..

. I’m watching the infomercial for Time Music’s 70’s Music Compilation. Here’s a list of 70’s songs I got off the internet …

"Band Of Gold" - Freda Payne

"Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" - B.J. Thomas

"ABC" - The Jackson 5

"Let It Be" - The Beatles

"(They Long To Be) Close To You" - Carpenters

"It's Too Late" - Carole King

"Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)" - The Temptations

"Take Me Home, Country Roads" - John Denver

"Knock Three Times" - Dawn

"American Pie" - Don McLean

"Without You" - Nilsson

"Lean On Me" - Bill Withers

"Crocodile Rock" - Elton John

"My Love" - Paul McCartney & Wings

"Killing Me Softly With His Song" - Roberta Flack

"Seasons In The Sun" - Terry Jacks

"One Of These Nights" - Eagles

"Don't Go Breaking My Heart" - Elton John and Kiki Dee

"Play That Funky Music" - Wild Cherry

"Silly Love Songs" - Paul McCartney and Wings

"December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night)" - The Four Seasons

"Best Of My Love" - The Emotions

"Night Fever" - Bee Gees

"YMCA" - Village People

"Too Much Heaven" - Bee Gees

"Hot Stuff" - Donna Summer

All in all a good decade for music and culture ...

Hello Blog!

Ok , I’m going to my middle of semester frequency of posts….which is not a bad thing… I believe blogs shouldn’t be forgotten (no matter how busy you are)..like any other serious endeavour it needs constant attention .So don’t worry blog… I shall not neglect you..
I suffer from a serious lack of inspiration of late..and Sharath’s post got me thinking…. Personally I feel I’ve come down with a severe case of foot in the mouthitis.

Anne of Green Gables

Which L.M. Montgomery Heroine are You?

Anne of Green Gables is my favourite book ever( i stopped serious reading after the 10th grade :P)... i have all the books in the series..when we were growing up ..a friend described Anne as the person she most looked up to ( doesn't matter that she's fictional!!)

A matter of trust

Who would’ve thought that people write songs like these!!!!!
A Matter of Trust

Some love is just a lie of the heart
The cold remains of what began with a passionate start
And they may not want it to end
But it will, it's just a question of when
I've lived long enough to have learned
The closer you get to the fire the more you get burned
But that won't happen to us
Because it's always been a matter of trust

I know you're an emotional girl
It took a lot for you to not lose your faith in this world
I can't offer you proof
But you're gonna face a moment of truth
It's hard when you're always afraid
You just recover when another belief is betrayed
So break my heart if you must
It's a matter of trust

You can't go the distance
With too much resistance
I know you have doubts
But for God's sake don't shut me out

This time you've got nothing to lose
You can take it, you can leave it
Whatever you choose
I won't hold back anything
All I'll walk away a fool or a king
Some love is just a lie of the mind
It's make believe until it's only a matter of time
And some might learn to adjust
But then it never was a matter of trust

I'm sure you're aware love
We've both had our share of
Believing too long
When the whole situation was wrong

Some love is just a lie of the soul
A constant battle for the ultimate state of control
After you've heard lie upon lie
There can hardly be a question of why
Some love is just a lie of the heart
The cold remains of what began with a passionate start
But that can't happen to us
Because it's always been a matter of trust.

-Billy Joel

Mates: A literary history

Matching sock, erotic target or fellow damned soul chained to your wrist? From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Kundera, a guided tour of the Big Two.
By Gary Kamiya
October 14, 2003 |

Mate is a comfortable and companionable word. Its world exudes a kind of biological or metaphysical rightness: a place where human beings, like those smiling giraffes shown boarding the ark in tandem in children’s books, contentedly pair off forever. It is a cosmic laundry in which no sock ever goes missing.

But the aspirant to this mately heaven is haunted by fears of inadequacy. The founding myth of the mate, after all, derives from Plato’s Symposium. In that dialogue, one of the speakers, Aristophanes, asserts that the primordial race of men and women (and hermaphrodites, but to explore that would take us too far afield) was divided in half by Zeus. Ever since then, goes on Aristophanes—who, it should be noted, claims to be suffering from a severe hangover—we have been destined to search for our complementary halves, without which we will not be complete. In an age in which the soul-elevating yearnings and courtly ordeals of Provençal love have been replaced by sixty-second dating and sexual encounters negotiated on the Internet, this theory raises the bar of matedom dauntingly high. Hence, perhaps, the preference, in our modest age, for the neutral “husband” or “wife” or the still more poker-faced “partner,” which could refer as easily to the relationship between Ebenezer Scrooge and Jacob Marley as to that between Dante and Beatrice. Still the mate ideal beckons, like a horizon.

Of course, you cannot visit a horizon—which is one of the reasons why literature so rarely deals with long-term romantic relationships of the sort that could be characterized as mately. Byron anatomized this omission in Don Juan: “All tragedies are finished by a death, / All comedies are ended by a marriage; / The future states of both are left to faith, / For authors fear description might disparage / The worlds to come of both, or fall beneath, / And then both worlds would punish their miscarriage. . .” In Tristram Shandy, the first modern, smarty-pants novelist, Laurence Sterne, slyly alluded to the problem of depicting ideal happiness by inserting a blank page on which the reader could draw his beloved.

Throughout most of literary history, marriage—particularly happy marriage—might as well be one of those empty spots on old maps inscribed with the words “Here be monsters.” For every Kitty and Levin, the lovingly observed couple in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina who find grace as they work their way together through life, there are hundreds of Karenins, Madame Bovarys, and Casaubons—a vast, dreary entourage of miserable spouses, doomed adulterers, and hideously mismatched souls. There are plenty of lusty young stallions crashing through fences, but very few mates grazing contentedly together in the meadow. As an old man, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno said, “I do not feel anything when I brush against the legs of my wife, but mine ache if hers do.” Though existent, these kind of poignant observations are hard to find in fiction.

Some of this void can be attributed to the uninspiring historic reality of marriage, which until fairly recently could be summed up as a business deal with bad sex. But the reasons are deeper. Stories are driven by change, not permanence: once the hero and heroine make their safe harbor, the wind goes out of the story’s sails. From a narrative standpoint, happiness is boring—a truth summed up by Tolstoy’s famous dictum that “Happy families are all alike.”

There is also the uncomfortable possibility that mately happiness may be boring even to those allegedly enjoying it. We return to perhaps the world’s most depressing marriage counselor, Lord Byron, who wrote, “Tis melancholy, and a fearful sign / Of human frailty, folly, also crime, / That love and marriage rarely can combine, / Although they both are born in the same clime; / Marriage from love, / like vinegar from wine— / A sad, sour, sober beverage—by time / Is sharpen’d from its high celestial flavour / Down to a very homely household savour.”

Who would sing the joys of even the finest aged Modena balsamic when there are so many sweet young bottles of Taittinger yet to be popped? (Although it is worth noting that Georges Simenon, the great Belgian writer who claimed to have made love to ten thousand women, created one of the most memorably contented couples in literature in Inspector and Madame Maigret, who walk together in happy silence. Could it be that exhausting, Wilt Chamberlain-level promiscuity is required to direct a writer’s precious mental fluids toward consideration of mately bliss?)

But even if we reject Byron’s discouraging words and insist that mately love is more like aged Bordeaux than oxidized rotgut, there is a deeper reason that writers rarely explore it. Fiction’s “happily ever after” syndrome betrays its deep roots in fairy tales and fables—simple, archetypal forms that reveal both the eternal human drive to affirm a state of permanent happiness and the difficulty of doing so. Even the most sophisticated modern writers, who do not believe in fairy-tale endings, are still drawn to convey an irreducible and transcendent union between two people. But just as in fairy tales, they cut away at precisely the moment when it is to be revealed. It is as if only by looking away can one convey the unknown land denoted by the word “happiness.” Like Orpheus bringing Eurydice out of the underworld, it seems the novelist cannot look directly at love without losing it. The light flashes only out of fragments.

Sometimes writers act like officers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Language, attempting to increase the value of the l-word by restricting its circulation. In Czeslaw Milosz’s memoir Native Realm, for example, the word “love” appears, I believe, only once—as literally the last word in the book. It’s an extraordinary and unexpected move that falls like a thunderbolt. Or take the famous last sentence of The House of Mirth, when Lawrence Selden says goodbye to the dead Lily Bart: “He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.” The word, presumably, is “love.” But the fact that Wharton refuses to name it gives it far greater power. Silence breathes the ineffable.

The ending of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being reveals another strategy of indirection. It attempts to resolve the question posed at the outset of the book: How can you know if your decision to settle down with one person is driven by love or sentimental exhaustion—what Kundera calls “hysteria”? The problem with questions like this is that once they are asked, there is almost never going to be a satisfactory answer. And the book’s protagonist, Tomas, is nothing if not a bed-hopper and question-asker. Kundera needs to assert that Tomas has experienced some kind of romantic epiphany that has made him choose Tereza once and for all, but he is also too sophisticated to be satisfied with that answer.

He falls back first on a venerable narrative device: prolepsis or foreshadowing. The reader is told that Tomas and Tereza are both going to die in a truck crash. This omniscient knowledge bathes their last scene in a golden glow; it becomes doubled, like a vista observed by a man with cancer uncertain he will ever see it again. Yet even with this doubling, which would perhaps have allowed Kundera to get away with a sentimental portrayal of marital happiness, he distances himself. “Tereza leaned her head on Tomas’s shoulder. Just as she had when they flew together in the airplane through the storm clouds. She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together. The sadness was form, the happiness was content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.”

Which comes first, happiness or sadness? In this dialectical game of tag, in order for us to believe in the happiness that the author is asserting, it is also necessary for us not to believe in it. Without shadow, no light.

And then, having adjusted his chiaroscuro perfectly, the author in the book’s last lines retreats altogether and turns things over to the God of narrative. Tomas and Tereza retire to bed. A butterfly flies up. “The strains of the piano and violin came up weakly from below.” The greatest intimacy can only be communicated by the neutral turning of the world.

There is, of course, far more to the mately story than these kind of deconstructive and reconstructive finesses. Byron is wrong: not all comedies are ended with a marriage—many, in fact, begin with one. Marriage may be rarely chosen as a romantic subject, its intimacies and their meanings may be terra incognita, but it frequently serves as a kind of rumpus room, an arena where all the furniture can be wiped off, the laugh track is always going, and the wet bar is well stocked. Literature is filled with companionable, often jesting and jawboning mates, an endless procession of Nicks and Noras and Mr. and Mrs. Bennetts. Statistically, matedom is comic. But comic matedom is simply taken for granted, as background; it no longer has any meaning, any fizz. Love’s daemon is dead—and you can often discern a distinct element of thank god—and pure vinegar reigns.

Far from indicating an era’s creeping spiritual death, vinegar literature can be a sign of its maturity. It would be foolish to generalize, but ages that are only obsessed with the ecstasies and agonies of the carnal may well turn out to be intense but callow. Whatever the case, the greatest psychological novelists, like Stendhal or Flaubert, combine vinegar and wine—the disillusioned but smiling perspective of the mate with the erotic obsession of the lover.

Standing off to the side of these romantic partners is a closely related type of mate, perhaps indeed the beau ideal of erotic mateship in its approaching-vinegar phase: the mate as friend. This mate appears at the very beginning of written literature: The Epic of Gilgamesh, written as early as 3,000 b.c., recounts the love of the half-divine King Gilgamesh for his human friend Enkidu, a love that leads the heartbroken king to travel to the underworld to try to bring his dead friend back. “I thought my friend would come back because of my weeping,” Gilgamesh laments, in words that echo down the millennia. A mate in this sense is traditionally male, though there is no reason the word can’t stretch beyond its British nautical roots to include women. (As Octavio Paz argues in his erudite, heartfelt exploration of love and literature, The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, the comparative absence of great female friendships in the canon is due to social constraints on women, not to the feminine shortcomings alleged even by so great a thinker as Montaigne.)

A mate is no ordinary friend: he or she is a bro, a dude, a homeboy, a pard, a pally—someone who’s got your back, who’s connected to you by a kind of tribal bond, like those found in Clifford Geertz or the Crips and the Bloods. Since American men notoriously pursue loneliness and bowl alone, the Ur-mate is British or Australian: American male friendship tends to be too jumpy and self-centered. The most powerful contemporary portrait of mates I know is in Graham Swift’s exquisite Last Orders, the tale of a gang of aging, working-class East Londoners who carry out their promise to dump a pal’s ashes off Margate Pier. These men are of the generation that fought in World War II, which is telling: one of the two quintessential mate types is the soldier. The friendships in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and his powerful, little-known sequel, The Road Back, are not deeply developed, but they are unforgettable.

The other quintessential mate locale is, of course, the Old West. The friendship of Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, that rare book that is at once a potboiler and a literary masterpiece, is truly epic: it reaches sublime heights in the book’s long, heartbreaking denouement when Call honors his promise and travels alone, carrying the coffin of his friend from Missouri to Texas to bury him.

The mate need not even be human. In Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling, the love of young Jody Baxter for his fawn Flag culminates in Jody’s initiation into the heartbreak of adulthood—a passage captured in the book’s beautiful closing:

Flag—He did not believe he should ever again love anything, man or woman or his own child, as he had loved the yearling. He would be lonely all his life. But a man took it for his share and went on.
In the beginning of his sleep, he cried out, “Flag!”
It was not his own voice that called. It was a boy’s voice. Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.

In the greatest novels, friendship becomes as rich, strange, and spiritually complex as a great love affair. This is emphatically true in the greatest Western novel of all, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The relationship of Jim and Huck, with its racial audacity and the haunting ambiguity in which the slave is father to the fatherless boy and the fatherless boy is father to the slave, stands as one of the supreme examples in world literature of friendship, a friendship that breaks the bounds of our understanding of that category as decisively as King Lear and Cordelia break through our received understanding of fathers and daughters.

The turning point in Huck’s understanding of Jim, and of himself, comes when he decides to turn Jim in. At first Huck is overjoyed, knowing he is finally doing a good deed that will send him to heaven; but then he gets to thinking. “And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.”

The climax of this passage, when Huck decides not to turn Jim in and says, “All right, then I’ll go to hell,” is justly famous. But it is the sentence “But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind” that has always moved me, with its humility, the pathos of its involuntary love.

And unlike Kundera’s couple, whose final closeness is sublime yet haunted by a hint of artificiality, Huck and Jim are together effortlessly. “It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn’t ever feel like talking loud, and it warn’t often that we laughed—only a little kind of a low chuckle.” Nothing really happens in this scene, but it is as close to idyllic as anything in modern literature.

We have only touched on the first, second, and third mates—the Starbucks, Stubbs, and Flasks of the literary world. But the gallery is endlessly, gloriously varied: Bertie and Jeeves, Elizabeth and Darcy, Prince Hal and Falstaff, Helena and Hermia, Dean and Sal, Lear and Kent, Tristan and Isolde, Hamm and Clov, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Poldi Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. (The entire plot of the most important novel of the twentieth century culminates in the moment when Young Joyce and Old Joyce, having finally met, piss together—an action that could be considered the apotheosis of male matedom.)

These pairs have nothing in common except the fact that they are together. They may be blood brothers, or conspiring fools; master and servant, or husband and wife; father and son, or the most complicated of friends. It doesn’t matter: what matters is that for some reason, as they made their way through the world, they found each other, found solace, or an answer, or a wilder music, and for a moment, or a lifetime, two turned into one. Falstaff’s plea to Prince Hal, who he knows is about to drop him, could speak for them all, that great pageant of lovers and friends: “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.”




This essay originally appeared in the "Mates" issue of Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story magazine, featuring stories by Louis Begley, Mary Gaitskill and Robert Olen Butler and artwork by the Clayton brothers. For more information about Zoetrope and the Mates issue, go to www.all-story.com.

From salon.com