And yet for all that I still had never gotten used to the breathtaking impermanence of things.
Sammy dreamed the usual Brooklyn dreams of flight and transformation and escape. He dreamed with fierce contrivance, transmuting himself into a major American novelist, or a famous smart person, like Clifton Fadiman, or perhaps into a heroic doctor; or developing, through practice and sheer force of will, the mental powers that would give him a preternatural control over the hearts and minds of men.
Sometimes even lovers of fiction can be satisfied only by the truth. I.
He was tired of shouldering the weight of other people’s bad decisions along with his own.
The short story narrates the moment when a dark door, long closed, is opened, when a forgotten error is unwittingly repeated, when the fabric of a life is revealed to have been woven from frail and dubious fiber over top of something unknowable and possibly very bad.
That’s why baseball is more like life than other games. Sometimes I feel like that’s all I do in life, keep track of my errors.
His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time.
Zugzwang. It’s when you have no good moves. But you still have to move.
The city was new again, and newly dangerous, and I would walk the streets quickly, eyes averted from those of passersby, like a spy in the employ of lust and happiness, carrying the secret deep within me but always on the tip of my tongue.
I don’t look stoned?” My heart began to pound. The classic aim of a pothead is always to look perfectly straight – and if possible operate complicated machinery – while immense shrieking nebulae are coming asunder in his brain. To fail at this – to be found out – carries a mysterious burden of anxiety and shame. “How are my eyes?
Thus while claiming, on the one hand, a dubiously ahistorical, archetypical source for the superhero idea in the Jungian vastness of legend, we dissolve its true universality in a foaming bath of periodized explanations, and render the superhero and his costume a time-fixed idea that is always already going out of fashion.
Then he saw that in gun-colored ink on the inside of her left arm, she bore the recent history, in five digits, of her life, her family, and the world. He.
The other fellow was more of a fireplug, broad in the chest and shoulders, with a wide pugnacious face and the hint of a shadow even on his freshly shaved jaw. He always looked as if he had not dressed for work that morning so much as gotten into some kind of altercation with his suit, shirt, and tie.
I was afraid that I had made a profound, irrevocable mistake, and that, as in a fantastic tale, if I did not find something firm and magical to grab a hold of right that moment we would both be swallowed up by a noisome gang of black shapes and evil black birds.
A laboring woman, though, while she endured her labor, lay at the center of something truly radiant in four dimensions; every birth everywhere, all the vectors of human evolution and migration originating and terminating at the parting of her legs.
Anyone who has spent time in the company of small children knows that a crushing boredom can unlock great powers of invention.
In my innocent cynicism I didn’t see that Cleveland was not trying to look tough; he just didn’t care. Which is to say, he knew what he was, and was, if not content with, at least resigned to knowing that he was an alcoholic. And an alcoholic is nothing if not sensitive to the proper time and place for his next drink; his death is one of the most carefully planned and prepared for events in the world.
She believed that it was important to put trust in children, to hand over the reins to them from time to time, to let them decide things for themselves.
Alcohol as helpful to the making of scapegoats as mud to the shaping of golems.
Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank – but that’s not the same thing. – Joseph Conrad.