Old Songs in a New Cafe by Robert James Waller Read Free Book Online Page A

she flees
     from the cold light of logic and data collection when it is turned toward her. If you persist in trying to study her, however,
     she first disintegrates, then dissolves into nothing at all.
    E. B. White once said a similar thing about humor, which “can be dissected, as a frog, but the thing dies in the process and
     the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.” You can’t get at romance, then, by good old Western reductionism.
    Understand, I am not just talking about romance in the sense of love between two people. You can’t really have a romance with
     someone else unless you are, first of all, a romantic yourself. Most people I know are not very romantic. They were once,
     or had the chance to be, but romance got lost along the way, drowned in the roar of our times, beat out by overly analytic
     teachers, drummed out by those who scoff at romantics as foolish and weak. In those people, romance looked around and said,
     “Pm not living here; too cold.”
    What do romantics look like? You can’t really generalize. Besides, to make a list of characteristics would be to commit the
     sin of breaking romance down into small pieces, which I cautioned about before. The best way to tell a romantic is to just
     be around one. You’ll know. There is a sense of passion about them, a sense of living just a bit too far out at the edge emotionally,
     sometimes; a caring for what seem to be dumb things—an old chair you sat in during your graduate student days and in the early
     times of your career, a knife that lies on the desk year after year, a simple wooden box. You can tell a romantic by the voice—it
     dances because the mind is dancing.
    And I can tell you this for sure: All romantics like dogs and cats, and maybe some other creatures, preferably animals that
     come in off the road for a little sustenance and decide to stay around and participate in the craziness they sense in this
     place of food and laughter. Animals like romantics, for they know’ they will never be let down by them.
    It’s important to note here that you do not have to be a poet or a painter or a musician to be a romantic. In fact, I know
     quite a few folks in these areas of endeavor who are downright unromantic. On the other hand, Andrew Carnegie was a romantic.
     So was Joseph Smith when he led the Mormons westward. And I have seen more than one insurance salesman, in the bars where
     I have played, grin outwardly and inwardly when I launched into a song about the wind and the flowers and the highways that
     run forever.
    Robert Pirsig puts it well, in his book
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
when he says, “The Buddha… resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission
     as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean
     oneself.”
    In a sense, romance is practical. It fuels your life and propels your work with a sense of vision, hope, and caring. Because
     you are working for others, not just for yourself, your work takes on a certain quality that it will not otherwise have. I
     suppose you can say romance puts meat on the table, though, as I say that, I feel more than just a slight drain on my system
     as romance prepares to leave.
    Let me turn now to the matter of getting and keeping romance. Romance is hard to get, hard to keep, and fairly easy to drive
     away. If you are really intent on getting rid of romance, though, here are a few brief suggestions:
    Become obsessive about neatness, particularly in the way your desk looks.
    Install expensive shag carpet in your house, so that when the dog throws up or one of your friends spills a beer, all hell
     breaks loose.
    Don’t listen to any good music. Ignore Bach, Mozart, Pete Seeger, and the Paul Winter Consort. Instead, listen only to top-40
     radio. This is a first-rate approach to giving romance a shove out of