Page 67 - A Little Life: A Novel

And now? Now Jason and Sonal had had two projects appear in New
York and one in The New York Times, while he was still doing the sort of
work he had done in his first year of architecture school, working for two

pretentious men at a firm they had pretentiously named after a pretentious
Anne Sexton poem, and getting paid almost nothing to do it.
He had gone to architecture school for the worst reason of all, it seemed:
because he loved buildings. It had been a respectable passion, and when he
was a child, his parents had indulged him with tours of houses, of
monuments wherever they had traveled. Even as a very young boy, he had
always drawn imaginary buildings, built imaginary structures: they were a

comfort and they were a repository—everything he was unable to articulate,
everything he was unable to decide, he could, it seemed, resolve in a
building.
And in an essential way, this was what he was most ashamed of: not his
poor understanding of sex, not his traitorous racial tendencies, not his
inability to separate himself from his parents or make his own money or

behave like an autonomous creature. It was that, when he and his colleagues
sat there at night, the group of them burrowed deep into their own
ambitious dream-structures, all of them drawing and planning their
improbable buildings, he was doing nothing. He had lost the ability to
imagine anything. And so every evening, while the others created, he
copied: he drew buildings he had seen on his travels, buildings other people
had dreamed and constructed, buildings he had lived in or passed through.

Again and again, he made what had already been made, not even bothering
to improve them, just mimicking them. He was twenty-eight; his
imagination had deserted him; he was a copyist.
It frightened him. JB had his series. Jude had his work, Willem had his.
But what if Malcolm never again created anything? He longed for the years
when it was enough to simply be in his room with his hand moving over a

piece of graph paper, before the years of decisions and identities, when his
parents made his choices for him, and the only thing he had to concentrate
on was the clean blade stroke of a line, the ruler’s perfect knife edge.