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.
She is the kind of of child who feels a protective tenderness towards her own beginnings. It is part of her strategy in a world of displacements to make every effort to restore and preserve, keep things together for their value as remembering objects, a way of fastening herself to a life.
Isolation is not a drawback to those who understand that isolation is the point.” I.
In the afternoon I drank Coke and wrote poetry.
The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light – the whole thing oddly personal, a sense of one painter’s hand moved by impulse and afterthought as much as by epic design. I hadn’t expected to register such pleasure and sensation. The air was color-scrubbed, coppers and ochers burning off the metal skin of the aircraft to exchange with the framing desert.
When I get real high I can feel the space between sounds.
There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn’t exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here. They were an assault on the environment, which was defined by length, width, and depth, with time drawn out, computed in heartbeats.
I am the false character that follows the name around.
Self-pity oozed through my soul. I tried to relax and enjoy it.
The only problem I had was that my whole life was a lesson in the effect of echoes, that I was living in the third person.
What do children know? They know who they are, she said, in ways we can’t know and they can’t tell us.
He found his cigar smoldering in an ashtray on the liquor cabinet and he fired it up again. The aroma gave him a sense of robust health. He smelled well-being, long life, even placid fatherhood, somewhere, in the burning leaf.
He tried to read his way into sleep but only grew more wakeful. He read science and poetry. He liked spare poems sited minutely in white space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into paper. Poems made him conscious of his breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice.
But idealists of course are unpredictable. They tend to be the ones who turn bitter overnight, deceived by lies they’ve told themselves.
It seems that danger assigns to public voices the responsibility of a rhythm, as if in metrical units there is a coherence we can use to balance whatever senseless and furious event is about to come rushing around our heads.
I’m not looking to wear the white man out with my ability to suffer.