By week’s end, when we’d had all manner of weather, I finally saw what it was about heavy seas and marvelous rest: in heavy seas you feel rocked to sleep, with the windows’ spume a gentle shushing, the engines’ throb a mother’s pulse.
It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.
For me, art that’s alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.
And it never even occurs to them their certainty that they are different is what makes them the same.
It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get-the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.
I will be conveyed to an Emergency Room of some kind, where I will be detained as long as I do not respond to questions, and then, when I do respond to questions, I will be sedated; so it will be an inversion of standard travel, the ambulance and ER: I’ll make the journey first, then depart.
We’re going to reinvent not just government but history. Torch the past.
I fear this feeling more than I fear anything, man. More than pain, or my mom dying, or environmental toxicity. Anything.
The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.
Your personal will is the web your disease sits and spins in. The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who knows how many Substance-drenched years ago.
Time wasn’t passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn tee-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once-comely bod.
Now a second-order vain person is a vain person who’s also vain about appearing to have an utter lack of vanity. Who’s enormously afraid that other people will perceive him as vain. A second-order vain person will sit up late learning jokes in order to appear funny and charming, but will deny that he sits up late learning jokes. Or he’ll perhaps even try to give the impression that he doesn’t regard himself as funny at all.
What if in fact there were ever only two really distinct individual people walking around back there in history’s mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens.
The great myth is that the bad ones don’t last long.
I acknowledge that I could never convey just what was so dreadful about this tableau of a bright, utterly silent room full of men immersed in work. It was the type of nightmare whose terror is less about what you see than about the feeling you have in your chest and stomach about what you’re seeing.
Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED.
It’s no coincidence it’s the gurus on mountains who’re wise. You get to the top: you’re already theirs.
Life is like tennis. Those who serve best usually win.
The only way you can communicate at a high level is to be conscious of everything you write – every comma, every pronoun, every word, and all their implications.