As you can probably
imagine, I began to get a little worried when Angie was an hour
late. It was not totally unthinkable that I was being stood
up, but my fear of such a misfortune was a pittance compared
to my fear that she had met with some accident or violence.
I
can assure you that if any ruffians were laying hands on her,
they would quickly taste the fruits of their rudeness if I had
anything to say about it. I guess that’s an outdated worldview
nowadays, but I don’t care.
So,
while I’m sitting there at my usual table at the Old Tip, a
word about tragedy:
It
seems to me that the biggest events, the biggest heroes, and
the biggest injustices make a story less rather than more tragic.
Insofar as a legend gets romantic, it loses its ability to elicit
pity. A Great Sufferer is, of course, great in some sense. Against
this suggestion the Muse argues that small people can only undergo
small tribulations, which has always struck me as elitist and/or
utilitarian in premise.
I begged and begged Jaremy to work
with this section a little more, to amp it up for the sake of
his reader, who I’m sure is bored to the point of irateness
by now. Whatever is going on here, it’s being lost in the intellectual
muddle; furthermore, he draws attention to it like a child trying
to re-produce a tremendous fart.
