And George Farr had the town, the earth, the world to himself and his sorrow. Music came faint as a troubling rumor beneath the spring night, sweetened by distance: a longing knowing no ease. (Oh God, oh God!)
At last George Farr gave up trying to see her. He had ‘phoned vainly and time after time, at last the telephone became the end in place of the means: he had forgotten why he wanted to reach her. Finally he told himself that he hated her, that he would go away; finally he was going to as much pains to avoid her as he had been to see her. So he slunk about the streets like a criminal, avoiding her, feeling his his very heart stop when he did occasionally see her unmistakable body from a distance. And at night he lay sleepless and writhing to think of her, then to rise and don a few garments and walk past her darkened house, gazing in slow misery at the room in which he knew she lay, soft and warm, in intimate slumber, then to return to home and bed to dream of her brokenly.
William Faulkner, Soldiers’ Pay
A photograph of a CVS storefront, that soul-crushing pharmacy chain where America goes to fill prescriptions for the emptiness it can’t quite name. And with it, this Faulkner passage about poor George Farr, skulking around town like a ghost, calling and calling until the phone itself becomes the thing he wants, not the girl at all. The means becoming the end. Isn’t that the story of everything?
If you scrutinize reality long enough, if in some way you really get close to it, it becomes fantastic. The CVS parking lot at 2 AM is as mythic as anything Faulkner wrote about. The fluorescent hum of commerce, the 24-hour promise of relief, acetaminophen, prophylactics, greeting cards for the dead, it’s all the same desperate phone call into the American void.
Robert Frank would’ve gotten it this, I hope. He understood something about the American void. And here I am aping Frank, pointing at the banal American landscape and saying “look harder, you fuckers.” That CVS isn’t just a pharmacy. It’s where George Farr would stand today, not under her window but in the shampoo aisle at midnight, pretending he came for toothpaste, hoping for an accidental encounter that never comes.
The telephone becomes the end. The store becomes the shrine. You keep circling the same block, different decade, same broken heart. Reality, scrutinized, doesn’t just become fantastic, it becomes unbearable and beautiful simultaneously.