The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. They haven’t yet learned about existence through time.
If you have a need and they find it out, they will use it against you. The best way is to stop from wanting anything.
But why bother about the end of the world? It’s the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.
Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship.
You should not be sad,” he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. “It must be the love. But you are young and pretty, you will have time to be sad later.” The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets. “It is criminal, the love, ” he said, patting my shoulder. “But none is worse.“ –.
A thing is valued, only if it is rare and hard to get.
Already my childhood seemed far away – a remote age, faded and bittersweet, like dried flowers. Did I regret its loss, did I want it back? I didn’t think so.
He loved her; in some ways he was devoted to her. But he couldn’t reach her, and it was the same on her side. It was as if they’d drunk some fatal potion that would keep them forever apart, even though they lived in the same house, ate at the same table, slept in the same bed.
That was the original idea, but once you’ve got a controlled population with a wall around it and no oversight, you can do anything you want.
In reduced circumstances you have to believe all kinds of things. I believe in thought transference now, vibrations in the ether, that sort of junk. I never used to.
I can’t think of myself, my body, sometimes, without seeing the skeleton: how I must appear to an electron. A cradle of life, made of bones; and within, hazards, warped proteins, bad crystals jagged as glass.
What mysteries remain to be revealed in the nervous system, that web of structures both material and ethereal, that network of threads that runs throughout the body, composed of a thousand Ariadne’s clues, all leading to the brain, that shadowy central den where the human bones lie scattered and the monsters lurk.
The trouble some people have being German, I thought, I have being human. In a way it was stupid to be more disturbed by a dead bird than by those other things, the wars and riots and the massacres in the newspapers. But for the wars and riots there was always an explanation, people wrote books about them saying why they happened: the death of the heron was causeless, undiluted.
When a shameful thing is done to you, the shamefulness rubs off on you. You feel dirtied.
Forbidden things are open to the imagination.
I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolor picture of blue irises, and why the window opens only partly and why the glass in it is shatter-proof. It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.
I could do a good imitation of a competent young woman.
There were places you didn’t want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtains, leaving on lights. These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.
It’s somewhat daunting to reflect that Hell is – possibly – the place where you are stuck in your own personal narrative for ever, and Heaven is – possibly – the place where you can ditch it, and take up wisdom instead.
Prayer is wanting. Jesus, Jesus he says, but he’s not praying to Jesus, he’s praying to you, not to your body or your face but to the space you hold at the centre, which is the shape of the universe. Empty.