Moleskine #003 -- Writing Exercises and Developing Discipline

 These are the type of experiences that tell you you could do this professionally.  All that material stored in your mind can indeed come in handy at times like these.  This is one exercise you should really concentrate on for J.—show the emotion through events rather than simply make him say explicitly what his emotion is.  Arch those emotions.  For example, that sense of him resigning to his lover’s decision creates later a gamut of emotions with both sadness and desperation at the center of it, but never really anger.  He is sad and by thinking too much about it, it progresses into desperation; that inherent inability to control himself or his thoughts that ultimately culminates with him turning into a stalker of sorts.  Then, of course, is humiliation, complete, collective, irrevocable.  Now all of the emotions continue to boil.  He’s caught in the threshold of insanity and all that is required now is for one more single push that will “nail the coffin” for him.  That nail comes next day when, in the morning, during what he considered a valiant effort to regain normalcy, he shows up at work to find D. waiting for him in the lobby.  They go to the boardroom where the other partners are gathered.

You may or may not have the time to go into detail now about how the meeting develops.  That’s not the point right now.  At the end of the meeting, J. is completely out of control.  He leaves the building in a daze of confusion.  The only difference is that the proverbial tunnel, slow-motion that populates the senses similar to this one do not appear in front of J.  Of course he knows this is not a movie, but he felt disappointment nevertheless.  In a sudden burst of sacrilege and existential angst, he wonders whether God is, to use his words, “fucking with him.”  J. was sure this was not the case, but wondered nevertheless what sort of explanation he could put together right now. 

This of course was not for S.’s benefit but rather for himself.  How could a chain of events sparked by something so simple as an affair lead to such an apocalyptic result.  Is this what happens to all people who have affairs?  Is this what eventually will happen to S. and I.?  No, he seriously doubted that.  There seems to be two outcomes for cases of infidelity.  In his case, lack of careful management of the affair (that is to say, his own inability to keep his emotions in check) had brought all of this about.  No, of course it could not be.  People have affairs all of the time and not all of them came to the catastrophic conclusions his did.  Imagine, with so many affairs taking place in the confines of the business world, if even 50% of affairs ended the way this one did, we would be living in an economic collapse of Biblical proportions.  Lives ruined by illicit love affairs would eventually impact American business leadership to such a degree that the trickle-down effect would leave millions unemployed, houses will foreclose, banks would be forced to close down for lack of liquidity, the streets would be filled with the discontented, riots and civil war will envelop the country, the government will be overthrown and anarchy will be the way of the world.  J. knows that all of this is a terrible slippery slope, and that it will never happen; or rather, he knew that the source of all the things leading to that will not be marital infidelity.  And now he hated the fact that the entire idea of the affair wasn’t entirely his own.  Didn’t S. advocate this?  (This is the scene where everything is passing by him in NYC).  He walks half of the edge of Central Park, but doesn’t know where to go from here… the pause makes him think of something and he goes into a long memory scene that takes him back to (       ).