putterings 271 < 272 > 273 index
one object beside another, and then another
For several weeks, I homebodied, reading Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller, writers whose lives bore zero comparison with my own. After each day of work, I puttered around. To putter is to potter is to poke around. The words express a mumbling, stumbling failure to get it said or done, “it” being a decisive act, a commitment of desire. My “it” was love in all its facets, and my puttering fell far short of that goal. I seemed unable even to know someone else. And yet. And yet, as an instinctual collector, I knew that putting one object beside another, and then another, would make me feel I was getting closer to the cup. A putter moves the ball just a few inches or feet, but each stroke of the blade is as dear as a tremendous drive. Miller and Kerouac would whack the ball. Collectors putter.
ex William Davies King, Collections of Nothing (2008) : 49-50 : link
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aside —
read this when book appeared (by what trajectory?). see now (2023) that I’d marked this passage (not in margin, but among endpaper notes).