She thought she understood the tourists. You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of war and torture.
In the dark the mind runs on like a devouring machine, the only thing awake in the universe.
Miracles share the landscape with death.
Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits. I don’t understand money anymore. Money is undone. Violence is undone, violence is easier now, it’s uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values.
We yell and scold as a way of paying homage to each other’s views. This is the burden of friendship between extremely high-strung individuals.
Everything is supposed to be something. But it never is. That’s the nature of existence.
It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that.
At first it was only a nuisance. Now it’s a nuisance that threatens to become a way of life.
It is the neon epic of Saturday night.
Once you start a file, Delphine, it’s just a matter of time before the material comes pouring in. Notes, lists, photos, rumors. Every bit and piece and whisper in the world that doesn’t have a life until someone comes along to collect it. It’s all been waiting just for you.
A band played live Muzak.
If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.
Is he one of them now? Frustrated, stuck, self-watching, looking for a means of connection, a way to break out. After Oswald, men in America are no longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls, anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads the papers.
Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.
In the Times every morning, wasn’t it a fact that the obits and the ad column tended to appear on facing pages?
Her sweat is a rank reminder, the only one, that she exists, that she is separate from the things that surround her.
Only absences were fully shared.
Talent is everything; sanity is nothing.
Catastrophe is our bedtime story.
Memory is the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they did as men. The deep past is the only innocence and therefore necessary to retain.