One’s country is like oneself. The more you learned about it, the more there was to be ashamed of.
It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water.
Whatever happened now would become the truth, that whatever he seemed to be would become what he was – already an American, in other words.
The magisterial presence of all those potentially readable words stopped her in her tracks.
I was young, and, despite dread, full of animal spirits; it was impossible for me to take a dark view too long.
If you used your head, if you became aware of how love was culturally constructed and began to see your symptoms as purely mental, if you recognized that being “in love” was only an idea, then you could liberate yourself from its tyranny.
Within the substandard construction of the Charlevoix church, literally upon a shaky foundation, I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that had existed long before Protestantism had anything to protest and before Catholicism called itself catholic; a faith that stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which, without an Aquinas to reify it, had remained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery whence it began.
From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn’t waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar. The only trust fund I have is this story, and unlike a prudent Wasp, I’m dipping into principal, spending it all.
It is said: San Francisco is where young people go to retire.
When she smiled, her mouth showed too many teeth, but at night Trip Fontaine dreamed of being bitten by each one.
From my birth when they went undetected, to my baptism where they upstaged the priest, to my troubled adolescence when they didn’t do much of anything and then did everything at once, my genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me.
Next to it were five potted photographs of the Lisbon girls, pinned with rusty tacks. We didn’t remember putting them up, but there they were, dim from time and weather so that all we could make out were phosphorescent outlines of the girls’ bodies, each a different glowing letter of an unknown alphabet.
Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup?
Corpul ii era ca o tulpina, sustinand laleaua creierului sau.
What was it about crazy people that made you want to shun them? The futility of reasoning with them, certainly, but also something else, something like a fear of contagion.
Though she carried on few extended conversations, we got an idea of her state of mind from the little that got back to us of the little she said.
My mother pictured a daughter as a counterinsurgent: a fellow lover of lapdogs, a seconder of proposals to attend the Ice Capades. In.
It occurred to us that she and the girls read secret signs of misery in cloud formations, that despite the discrepancies in their ages something timeless communicated itself between them, as though she were advising the girls in her mumbling Greek, “Don’t waste your time on life.
Continuu sa cred ca aceste semne negre facute pe hartia alba poarta cea mai adanca semnificatie, ca daca o tin tot asa cu scrisul, as putea reusi sa prind curcubeul constiintei intr-un borcan.
The heat precedes the fire.