I have music. Music is the world inside me. I am a performer, but whether or not I perform, the music is there.
The third is to refuse the passion as one might sensibly refuse a leopard in the house, however tame it might seem at first. You might reason that you can easily feed a leopard and that your garden is big enough, but you will know in your dreams at least that no leopard is ever satisfied with what it is given. After nine nights must come ten and every desperate meeting only leaves you desperate for another. There is never enough to eat, never enough garden for your love.
Nothing is solid. Nothing is fixed. These are images that time changes and that change time, just as the sun and the rain play on the surface of things.
I’ve flown about a bit and picked up a few things and I’ll give one of them to you for nothing. You don’t run out on the woman you love.
My mother is very like William Blake, she has visions and dreams and she cannot always distinguish a flea’s head from a king. Luckily she can’t paint.
A meaningless life for a human being has none of the dignity of animal unselfconsciousness; we cannot simply eat, sleep, hunt and reproduce – we are meaning-seeking creatures. The Western world has done away with religion but not with religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives – money and leisure, social progress, are just not enough.
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights; the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes. Never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn’t know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.
THERE’S NO SUCH thing as a limited victory. Every victory leaves another resentment, another defeated and humiliated people. Another place to guard and defend and fear. What I learned about war in the years before I came to this lonely place were things any child could have told me. ‘Will you kill people, Henri?’ ‘Not people, Louise, just the enemy.’ ‘What is enemy?’ ‘Someone who’s not on your side.
The curious are always in some danger.
We had killed them all without firing a shot. I prayed for the snow to fall and bury them for ever. When the snow falls you can almost believe the world is clean again. Is every snowflake different? No one knows.
Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation.
I can’t stay here. These wars will never end. Even if we get home, there’ll be another war. I thought he’d end wars for ever, that’s what he said. One more, he said, one more and then there’ll be peace and it’s always been one more. I want to stop now.
I have learned, painfully, over the years that the things I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.
Would there were a festival for my fears, a ritual burning of what is coward in me, what is lost in me. Let the light in before it is too late.
And God? Truly? In his own right, without our voices speaking for him? Obsessed I think, but not passionate.
I reflected that without language, or before language, the mind cannot comfort itself.
It is snowing. In the English language we do not know anything about the ‘it’ that is snowing. It might be God. Maybe not. Anyway. It. Is. Snowing.
I began to feel like Sarpi, that Venetian priest and diplomat, who said he never told a lie but didn’t tell the truth to everyone.
The cities of the interior are vast and do not lie on any map.
The earth is round and flat at the same time. This is obvious. That it is round appears indisputable; that it is flat is our common experience, also indisputable. The globe does not supersede the map; the map does not distort the globe.