Understand, by saying ‘God,’ I am merely using ‘God’ as reference to long-term pattern we can’t decipher.
His warmth, which seemed to presume upon some happy old intimacy we did not share, had thrown me into awkwardness.
And I’m hoping there’s some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it – although I’ve come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don’t, and can’t, understand.
Beauty – unless she is wed to something more meaningful – is always superficial.
She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I’d lost with my mother.
While to a certain extent Milton is right-the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hall and so forth-it is nonetheless clear that Plano was modeled less on Paradise than that other, more dolorous city.
What is unthinkable is undoable.
I – ” At her tone, at once intimate and formal, a terrible sadness came over me, and when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment, clear as glass, a complexity of stillness that was rainy afternoons in spring, a dark chair in the hallway, the light-as-air touch of her hand on the back of my head.
At home, my mother had known how to suffocate my dad’s anger by growing silent, a low, unwavering flame of contempt that sucked all the oxygen out of the room and made everything he said and did seem ridiculous.
Adrift in an air of charged significance, doubt struck me: was it a real memory, had he really spoken those words to me, or was I dreaming?
I don’t know where to begin.” He paused, and took a drink. “Do you remember last fall, in Julian’s class, when we studied what Plato calls telestic madness? Bakcheia? Dionysiac frenzy?” “Yes,“I said rather impatiently. It was just like Henry to bring up something like this right now. “Well, we decided to try to have one.” For a moment I thought I hadn’t understood him. “What?” I said? “I said we decided to try to have a bacchanal.
Bad artists copy, good artists steal.
And someplace, if there is a place where lists are kept, and credit given, I am sure there is a gold star by his name.
Isn’t everything worthwhile a gamble? Can’t good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?
And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.
There wasn’t a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out.
We drank our tea. The lamplight was warm and the apartment still and snug. At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes i dreamed of always began like this: drowsy drunken hour, the two of us alone, scenarios in which invariably she would brush against me as if by chance, or lean coveniently close, cheek touching mine, to point out a passage in a book, opportunities that i would seize, gently but manfully, as exordium to more violent pleasures.
But somehow, despite my efforts, I am never able to blend myself in entirely and remain in some respects quite distinct from my surroundings, in the same way that a green chameleon remains a distinct entity from the green leaf upon which it sits, no matter how perfectly it has approximated the subtleties of the particular shade.
Though he didn’t treat them as equals – he didn’t treat anyone as an equal, actually – neither did he resort to the condescending friendliness of the wealthy.
Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia.