What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?
But then, six months ago, my dad hauled me with him to this shaddy town in Alaska. Seward Peninsula, just below Arctic Circle? And then, middle of May – we flew to Fairbanks on a prop plane, and then we came here.
No. Americans just persecute smaller countries that believe different from them.
Are you tired?” he said, looking at me closely. Was I? I was wide awake, and yet part of me was so glassed-off and numb I was practically in a coma. “If you’d rather have company? Perhaps if I build a fire in the other room? Tell me what you want.” At this question, I felt a sharp rush of despair – for as bad as I felt there was nothing he could do for me, and from his face, I realized he knew that, too.
Then why aren’t you happy?” “I don’t want to talk about it.” “And.
It was sometimes difficult to believe that Dr. Roland was a tenured professor in the Social Science Department of this, a distinguished college. He was more like some gabby old codger who would sit next to you on a bus and try to show you bits of paper he kept folded in his wallet.
Running along the back wall was a long glass trophy case filled with loving cups, ribbons, school and sports memorabilia; in ominous proximity were several large funeral wreaths which, in conjunction with the trophies, gave that corner of the room a Kentucky Derby sort of look.
Bethlehem star. But we were not.
Give my life, gladly! I will never love any person on the earth like Katya again – not even close. She was the one. I would die and be happy for only one day with her. But – ” pushing his sleeve back down – “you should never get a person’s name tattooed on you, because then you lose the person. I was too young to know that when I got the tattoo.
The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil.
Silver – well, Bobo was actually not so bad guy. ‘The Mensch’?
It’s a long story. I’ll make it short as I can.
I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.
She was beautiful, too. That’s almost secondary; but still, she was.
And the heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours.
I am not unused to being confronted with my ow lies, but those of others never fail to throw me for a loop.
The silence between us was happy and strange, connected by the cord and the icy voices thinly echoing. “You don’t have to talk,” she said. “If you don’t feel like it.” Her eyelids were heavy and her voice was drowsy and like a secret. “People always want to talk but I like being quiet.
Starched shirts and suits fresh from the cleaners’ went a long, long way toward hiding a multitude of sins.
I had nothing to offer her. I was illness, instability, everything she wanted to get away from.
And how can we lose this maddening self, lose it entirely? Love? Yes, but as old Cephalus once heard Sophocles say, the least of us know that love is a cruel and terrible master. One loses oneself for the sake of the other, but in doing so becomes enslaved and miserable to the most capricious of all the gods.