Life's Top Decile

Building from last night’s post, what is the best 10% of life? This is a difficult question that I don’t think I can answer in the hour I a lot myself for lunch and blogging. But that is sufficient time to steal from other people. I’ll use Stephen Dunn, my favorite poet, as my guide. In his poem “Loves,” he rattles off about 6 pages of things that he loves. Here are 10 that I think belong in life’s top 10% (or at least the top 20%).

“I love abstractions, I love to give them a nouny place to live, a firm seat in the balcony of ideas, while music plays.”

“I love love, for example, its diminishments and renewals”

“I love being the stupidest happy kid on the block.”

“I love the game winning shot that isn’t an accident, the shot prepared for all one’s life, practice and talent metamorphosed into a kind of ease.”

“Something else in me loved the blue jay who all summer dive bombed my cat, the only justice it could deliver for many blue deaths.”

“I love the good home clichés can find in an authentic voice.”

“After I asked my wife to marry me, I hid behind a bush the next day, and was thankful to Poe and his Imp of the Perverse. Thankful as it were for a colleague. Later I loved telling her this, laughter the sweetest agreement, more conclusive than any yes.”

“I love the thing chosen and I love the illusion of choice.”

“Once in Chicago at the Hilton I slipped an “I quit” note under my boss’ door, took a night flight home. Whatever I love about my life started there.”

“I love how familiar bodies drift back to each other wordlessly, when the lights go out. Oh we will die soon enough. Not enough can be said for a redemptive caress.

Good stuff, but probably outside the top 10%:

“I love the ferocity of certain dreams, boulevards I’ve walked at midnight, vulgarities made holy in the mutual church of our bed”

“I love what we must forgive”

“I love that the normal condition of the soul is to be starved.”

“I love that the shy ones sometimes grow wings and that the peacocks disappoint when they begin to speak.”