Saturday, November 29, 2008

bucks and bucks and diamonds and diamonds

From The New Yorker archives via Maud Newton: John Cheever's 1949 short story "Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor"

Christmas is a sad season. The phrase came to Charlie an instant after the alarm clock had waked him, and named for him an amorphous depression that had troubled him all the previous evening. The sky outside his window was black. He sat up in bed and pulled the light chain that hung in front of his nose. Christmas is a very sad day of the year, he thought. Of all the millions of people in New York, I am practically the only one who has to get up in the cold black of 6 a.m. on Christmas Day in the morning; I am practically the only one...