I’ve never been any place I wanted to go.
It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.
I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself is increasingly obscure.
At a point during the summer it occurred to me that I had no letters from John, not one. We had only rarely been far or long apart.
January 11, 1965, was a bright warm day in Southern California, the kind of day when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of orange blossoms and it is a long way from the bleak and difficult East, a long way from the cold, a long way from the past.
If the dead were truly to come back, what would they come back knowing? Could we face them? We who allowed them to die?
Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.
As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame. Only.
I was not then guilt-ridden about spending afternoons that way, because I still had all the afternoons in the world.
Just an ordinary day. “And then – gone.
It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it.
You see the point. I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.
The bereaved must be urged to “sit in a sunny room,” preferably one with an open fire.
But perhaps it is presumptuous of me to assume that they will be missing something. Perhaps in retrospect this has been a story not about Sacramento at all, but about the things we lose and the promises we break as we grow older;.
Sometime in the night she had moved into a realm of miseries peculiar to women, and she had nothing to say to Carter.
Maria did not particularly believe in rewards, only in punishments, swift and personal.
Later those few minutes in the plaza in Oxnard would come back to Maria and she would replay them, change the scenario. It ended that way badly, or well, depending on what you wanted.
Make a place available to the eyes, and in certain ways it is no longer available to the imagination.
I remember thinking that I needed to discuss this with John.
Through most of my life I would have interpreted the growth of the prison system and the diminution of the commitment to public education as evidence of how California had “changed.” Only recently have I come to see them as quite the opposite, evidence of how California had “not changed,” and to understand “change” itself as one of the culture’s most enduring misunderstandings about itself.