revolutionary road

Blue Valentine Closing Credits from Josh Noble on Vimeo.

The intensity of the shallowness was all he had to go by; the false smiles, the blinking out into the light at this late stage of the day a kind of familiar bewilderment. The intangible sense that something irrevocable had occurred, that some great ship had passed him by in the distance and he had made no note of it, been unable to recognize it. 

He looked down at his fingertips, unstained by a decent day's work, his  father would have said. His hands were blotched, without form, the one great constant in all the flux, in a strange way bearing witness to the lack of brilliance, the ordinary, unremarkable striving that didn't mark anyone out; if there was any precision or rigour then it was the kind of abstract type that would always keep him one step removed from reality. 

The flood of memories held back, just one allowed to surface...the deeply satisfying smell of smoke that clung to his father's coat, from another, older and more reassured world. "Our personal lives will always seem small in the vastness of time" and now that he recalled these words they seemed true and his life remarkably even smaller than he'd imagined it would be.

At parties there was nothing to say any more, just this profound desire to get through-somehow-and make for the darkness and the quiet. Everything that could be said had been; and what had not, had not.

The world without foundations, the turtle's feet sliding. That's the way it goes, he thought to himself..you see all those lives slipping by, like so many multi-coloured headlights over the bridge, without any sense of a destiny. Keep on moving unless you stop and wonder why you were moving in the first place.

How does it unravel, this silver thread? What images are inherited by your face? He had no answers and wasn't even sure if these were the questions.  

In another world, another time, who would we be? He couldn't even imagine pulling himself together in this place. Eyeing the fatal flaw in his own character, he thought he could name it. He wondered how it would pan out, enfold him in its final mystery; he secretly longed-if he was honest with himself he would tell himself this-for its dark compulsions to break him open and reveal that final image, anything but endure more of the average greyness with which he surrounded himself, and in which he had lost so many years of his life.