a pocket of broken glass
In the book I am currently reading, The Bitch in the House (NO comments, please!), Natalie Angier uses an expression I’ve never heard of: “I knew I was a pocket of broken glass.” What’s the origin of that!? It sent me on a Google search … goin’ on a bear hunt … for the text to F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s 1936 Esquire essay, “The Crack-up” where he descibes himself as a cracked plate, “the kind that one wonders whether or not it is worth preserving.” I found most of the text here, but let me give you the opening lines and a few choice nuggets in case you don’t want to click through:
“Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work - the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside - the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within - that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man agian. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick - the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.”
“… I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself spiritually and physically up to the hilt. I had realized that in those two years, in order to preserve something - an inner hush maybe, maybe not - I had weaned myself from all the things I used to love - that every effort from the morning tooth brush to the friend at dinner had become an effort.”
“… and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”
It’s as if Natalie Angier picked up the broken pieces of the cracked plate (that is herself) and carried them/it around in her pocket; was she preserving the anger? Is a pocket of broken glass a grudge you hold onto? Is it a way to keep a shattered self secret?
Very curious, indeed.
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I think you may be taking the term “pocket” a bit too literally. In your running, you probably occasionally came upon a spot, either an intersection where an accident had occurred or a parking space with those green cubes of glass, and you knew that there had been an incident and there was a degree of danger lurking. Those were pockets of broken glass. A powder keg might explode, but a pocket of broken glass, if ignored, would do little, but if handled incautiously, it could cut you badly enough that you’d need a hospital or die. The phrase is intriguing - do you want to share the context?
BTW - back in the ’70’s, I read somebooks on the outdoors by a Brad Angier, some of which we co-authored by his wife, whom I think this might be. Does the book have a bio? Did she spend time in Alaska? Do they list previous works? My recollection is of one titled At Home In The Woods.
Comment by Scooter — 3/16/2006 @ 12:55 pm
Thanks for the link! First time I’m reading excerpts from “The Crack-Up”. Fitzgerald reminded me of Herzog by Saul Bellow: the list-making, the apathy, the falling apart.
As to the phrase “a pocket of broken glass”.. It is a strange expression. Haven’t heard it before. What was the context?
Comment by mis_nomer — 3/17/2006 @ 2:51 am