Everyone was a spook or dupe or asset, a double, courier, cutout or defector, or was related to one. We were all linked in a vast and rhythmic coincidence, a daisy chain of rumor, suspicion and secret wish.
What about the Americans?” “Eerie people. Genetically engineered to play squash and work weekends.
If your child thinks you’re guilty of something, right or wrong, then you’re guilty.
We create beautiful and lasting things, build vast civilizations.” “Gorgeous evasions,” he said. “Great escapes.
To have true socialism, he said, we first establish capitalism, totally and heartlessly, and then destroy it by degrees, bury it in the sea.
Marriage is something we make from available materials. In this sense, it’s improvised, it’s almost offhand. Maybe this is why we know so little about it. It’s too inspired and quicksilver a thing to be clearly understood. Two people make a blur.
By the time you listen to this, I’ll no longer remember what I said. I’ll be an old message by then, buried under many new messages. The machine makes everything a message, which narrows the range of discourse and destroys the poetry of nobody home. Home is a failed idea. People are no longer home or not home. They’re either picking up or not picking up.
Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war.
Solitude asks no pledges of anyone.
He was a foreigner here. There was no profit in discontent. He could not apply his bitterness. It was American-made and had no local standing. For the first time he realized what a dangerous thing he’d done, leaving his country. He struggled against this awareness. He hated knowing something he didn’t want to know.
The skies she retained in memory were dramas of cloud and sea storm, or the electric sheen before summer thunder in the city, always belonging to the energies of sheer weather, of what was out there, air masses, water vapor, westerlies.
A police car went by with its siren going, a rotary slurping noise, it sounded like the blender in their kitchen – she made fruit shakes compulsively that they felt morally bound to drink.
I’m at that certain stage in a night of drinking and talking when I see things clearly through a small opening, a window in space.
The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now.
There is a thing about the trust of a dog that makes up for a lot of heartache we take in this life.
The women kept washing floors. It seemed to be what they did in difficult times. Unvarying things, she saw, must have a deeper value than we know.
The ceiling angled down right over me and I raised my arm and touched it with my fingertips. All children, I thought, should be permitted to sleep in such a room; the child loves nooks and odd angles and is frightened into nightmare by equidistance, by parallel planes which conceal nothing.
People getting older become more fond of objects. I think this is true. Particular things. A leather-bound book, a piece of furniture, a photograph, a painting, the frame that holds the painting. These things make the past seem permanent. A baseball signed by a famous player, long dead. A simple coffee mug. Things we trust. They tell an important story. A person’s life, all those who entered and left, there’s a depth, a richness.
News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before – what? I don’t know. But you’re smart to trap us in your camera before we disappear.
There’s a neat correlation between the complexity of the hardware and the lack of genuine attachments. Devices make everyone pliant. There’s a general sponginess, a lack of conviction.