And did the distress I was feeling derive from some internal sickness of the soul, or was it imposed on me by the sickness of society? That someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side... that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf – felt akin to an instance of religious grace.
Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper... The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies.
She’d listened to a lot of these utopian discussions, and it was somehow comforting that Stephen and his friends could never quite work all the kinks out of their plan; that the world was as obstinately unfixable as her life was.
The mark of a legitimate revolution – the scientific, for example – was that it didn’t brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred.
The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.
He was a sleaze, a nobody, a former graduate student of English studies.
You can think of me thinking of you, because that’s what I’ll be doing whenever you think of me.
To paraphrase Frank Zappa, she’d thought it was a man she wanted, but instead it was a muffin.
I’m telling you that I will be all right without you. Everything we have is temporary, the joy, the suffering, everything. I had the joy of experiencing your goodness for a very long time. It was enough. I have no right to ask for more.
How well aware the body was of what it wanted. How quickly it gleaned the news it could use.
Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal.
Yeah, well, we’re all grieving in our own way, obviously. It’s just I heard this crazy rumor about your having inherited twenty-two million dollars.” He tried to meet her eyes, but she’d turned away, squeezing her thumbs, fists balled. “Crazy, huh? But getting back to this lunch, let’s see, Mr. Aldren and whatever his name is, Tweedledum, they had steak, right? And Mr. Stoorhuys – ” He snapped his fingers. “Rabbit. Half a rabbit, grilled. Or what do you call it? Braised.
Can you imagine going to bed with Kierkegaard? He’d never stop asking, ‘Can I do this to you? Is this okay?
The interesting people are always immoderate.
Simply being a “social isolate” as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It’s just that at some point you’ll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading – to reconnect to that community.
The man who ‘forgets’ his toothbrush in a woman’s house is a man who wants to come back.
Outside, the middle class was disappearing faster than the icecaps, xenophobes were winning elections or stocking up on assault rifles, warring tribes were butchering each other religiously, but inside, disruptive new technologies were rendering traditional politics obsolete.
The New Regime even recycled the old Republic’s buzzwords, collective, collaborative. Axiomatic to both was that a new species of humanity was emerging.
Attempting to write an honest essay doesn’t alter the multiplicity of my selves. What changes, if I take the time to stop and measure, is that my multi-selved identity acquires substance.
It seems not to occur to you that I might have had other very smart patients. The difference between them and me is that I’m a psychologist and they are not. I don’t have to be as smart as you to help you. I only have to be smart about one thing.