Your own story is just one, and perhaps not the important one. The self is not the principal thing.
I love the performance of a craft, whether it is modest or mean-spirited, yet I walk away when discussions of it begin – as if one should ask a gravedigger what brand of shovel he uses or whether he prefers to work at noon or in moonlight. I am interested only in the care taken, and those secret rehearsals behind it. Even if I do not understand fully what is taking place.
Do we eventually become what we are originally meant to be?
I was about to enter a borderless terrain between adolescence and adulthood.
If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane. But between them lay a treacherous and complex journey. It was a very wide world.
Because what she wanted, I suspect, was a world she could fully participate in, even if it meant not being fully and safely loved.
A memoir is the lost inheritance.
Our heroes do not usually, after a certain age, teach or guide us anymore. They choose instead to protect the last territory where they find themselves. Adventurous thought is replaced with almost invisible needs. Those who once mocked the traditions they fought against with laughter now provide only the laughter, not the mockery.
In 1942 the Germans sent a spy called Eppler into Cairo before the battle of El Alamein. He used a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca as a code book to send messages back to Rommel on troop movements. Listen, the book became bedside reading with British Intelligence. Even I read it.
We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken – Rachel, the Wren, and I, a Stitch – sewing it all together in order to survive, incomplete, ignored like the sea pea on those mined beaches during the war. The greyhound is.
As he steps back, away from her into the darkness, she cries out, “How do you live?” And our hero, played by Paul Muni, says, “I steal.
I know the devices of a demon. I was taught as a child about the demon lover. I was told about a beautiful temptress who came to a young man’s room. And he, if he were wise, would demand that she turn around, because demons and witches have no back, only what they wish to present to you.
I am a man who fasts until I see what I want.
People are not who or where we think they are. And there is someone who watches from an unknown location.
I found her message heart-breaking in its cautiousness.
Nothing lasts. Not even literary or artistic fame protects worldly things around us.
I can never understand someone by his strengths. Nothing is revealed there. I can only understand people by their weaknesses.
She must have perceived how one could darken and make invisible or at least distant what is unhappy or dangerous in a life; I think her eventual skill with limelight and fictional thunder allowed her to clarify for herself what was true and what was false, safe and unsafe.
I shall have to learn how to miss you.
There is so much to know and we can only guess. Guess around him. To know him from these stray actions I am told about by those who loved him. And yet, he is still one of those books we long to read whose pages remain uncut. We are still unwise. It is not that he became too complicated but that he had reduced himself to a few things around him and he gave them immense meaning and significance.