Keats At Twenty-Four by Caleb Crain, 2023
The magic trick:
Approaching his main ideas directly at the outset
The narrator in this story is stuck in a loop. He’s aging so the pressure to get things accomplished is increasing as he realizes his time on this planet is short. But at the same time, he’s finding himself avoiding finishing anything – from his writing projects to the books he’s reading – because it reminds him of the impending end of his life.
Not good.
As you might expect from such a situation, the narrator’s story here is a bit of a ramble. He’s all over the place, pondering one idea for a moment before interrupting himself by learning about something totally unrelated. The result is that almost nothing gets done.
The result, of course, is that the story the narrator tells becomes a great living example of the exact problem he is trying to describe.
And that’s quite a trick on Crain’s part.
The selection:
“Every writer, every journeyman, / past the halfway, is Keats at twenty-four,” Robert Lowell wrote, during the throttled-down mania of his last few years. He deleted the lines during a revision.
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