Television. Maybe it was all a study in the art of mummification. The effect of the medium is so evanescent that those who work in its time apparatus feel the need to preserve themselves, delivering their bodies to be lacquered and trussed, sprayed with the rarest of pressurized jellies, all to one end, a release from the perilous context of time. This is their only vanity, to expect to dwell forever in hermetic sub-corridors, free of every ravage, secure as old kings asleep in sodium.
Grass: I live in a great steel tower that reflects the blazing sun. People catch fire just walking by. The more bodies that pile up around you, the greater your equity, the stronger your power, the longer you live. This is the point of living in a high rise. To see the bodies pile up at sunset, the nostalgic hour, the hour of summing up, stirring the cocktails, feeling the great tower sway in the hot winds.
Choice is a subtle form of disease.
I move past the scaffolding and walk down the steps, hearing one language after another, rich, harsh, mysterious, strong. This is what we bring to the temple, not prayer or chant or slaughtered rams. Our offering is language.
I had not yet learned to appreciate the slowly gliding drift of identical things; chunks of time spun past me like meteorites in a universe predicated on repetition.
How do we stand with others when the things that separate us are imposed at birth, when the separation haunts us and follows us day and night?
What are the people like? Do the women wear plaid skirts, cable-knit sweaters? Are the men in hacking jackets? What’s a hacking jacket?” “They’ve grown comfortable with their money,” I said. “They genuinely believe they’re entitled to it. This conviction gives them a kind of rude health. They glow a little.” “I have trouble imagining death at that income level,” she said. “Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.
Some good-bad nights I spent, loving my self-hatred.
I’d never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be “only human,” subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief.
There’s a dolphin’s brain in my in-box but come see me in forty-eight hours.
She wasn’t a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself.
Is it better to commit evil and attempt to balance it with an exalted act than to live a resolutely neutral life?
This was New York. Every living breathing genotype entered his cab at some point, day or night. And if this was an inflated notion, that was New York as well. Two.
It takes centuries to invent the primitive.
He liked to mingle with shopping mall crowds. “I’m counting on you to tell me, Jack.” “Tell you what?” “You’re the only person I know that’s educated enough to give me the answer.” “The answer to what?” “Were people this dumb before television?” One.
When times are bad, people feel compelled to overeat.
When you see a thing like that, a thing that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history.
I thought of women in other places, streets and boulevards in major cities, wind blowing, a woman’s skirt lifting in the breeze, the way the wind tenses the skirt, giving shape to the legs, making the skirt dip between the legs, revealing knees and thighs. Were these my father’s thoughts or mine?
Pleasure is not diversion but urgent life, a social order perceived as temporary.
Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.