Some passages from Afternoon Hours of a Hermit by Patrick Cottrell

Some passages from Afternoon Hours of a Hermit by Patrick Cottrell:


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“Friendship has been a form of poison to me, I thought as I tried to picture my friends, especially my writer friends. I kept trying to picture them, my writer friends from the contemporary literature and adjunct scene in Brooklyn. No, the writer friends I pictured only reminded me of the palpable anxiety and awkwardness I felt whenever I interacted with them.”


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“Perhaps part of the problem was I had surrounded myself with the fiction writers instead of the poets. I had chosen the wrong world to immerse myself in; the poets were nightclub docents of mourning and melancholia and the fiction writers were real estate agents.”


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“I was ecstatic with joy whenever I had the opportunity to overhear what people said about me as if I weren’t there. Whenever I ran out of things to talk about during my creative writing workshop with the troubled youth, I would, without warning, get up from the conference table and wander out into the hallway, where, if I wasn’t careful, I could spend the rest of the class eavesdropping on my troubled youth, although they hardly ever said my name. I was nothing to them; they preferred to talk about debt, activism, gender, trauma, etc. I was disappointed when I didn’t hear my name come up.”


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“A few years and nothing to show for all my troubles but the beginning of my psychological thriller, perhaps ten or twelve pages at most, the first ten or twelve pages are the easiest to write, I once said to Thomas Bernhard during office hours, the first ten or twelve pages are effortless, seamless, boundless, effortlessness; it’s the rest of it that’s completely insufferable. It never opens up the way I want it to, I explained to my mother and Aunt Sue. I only wanted to conjure a latticework of light and tranquility, but because of my limitations, I always end up suffocated in a broom closet of despair.”


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“And some people might find it hard to believe I managed to write a book, a published one, knowing what they know about me, but during my time in graduate school, I learned it’s the most demented and mentally unwell writers who have the easiest time getting their books published, even the most awful, unhinged, stupid, and neurotic person can write and publish a book, then step into a roomful of strangers and talk about it and persuade them to buy it. Almost all my writer friends are suicidal in some way, I reflected, mostly in a soft, ambient way, their suicidal thoughts humming in the background like a refrigerator or a noise-machine, while others are openly suicidal, more suicidal forward.”


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