I always sense the future, the antithesis of everything is always before my eyes. I have never seen a child without thinking that it would grow old, nor a cradle without thinking of a grave. The sight of a naked woman makes me imagine her skeleton.
For it is only in the darkness of solitude that the work of memory begins.
The past, to repeat the words of Proust, is hidden in some material object. To wander about in the world, then, is also to wander about in ourselves.
He learned how to look at himself from a distance, to see himself first of all as a man among other men, then as a collection of random particles of matter, and finally as a single speck of dust – and the farther he traveled from his point of origin, she said, the closer he came to achieving greatness.
Yes, it is possible that we do not grow up, that even as we grow old, we remain the children we always were. We remember ourselves as we were then, and we feel ourselves to be the same. We made ourselves into what we are now then, and we remain what we were, in spite of the years. We do not change for ourselves. Time makes us grow old, but we do not change.
And I am nothing if not a stupid, stupid man.
That is the idea he is toying with, Renzo says, to write an essay about the things that don’t happen, the lives not lived, the wars not fought, the shadow worlds that run parallel to the world we take to be the real world, the not-said and the not-done, the not-remembered.
I have come to New York because it is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You have only to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap.
What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?
A book is a mysterious object, I said, and once it floats out into the world, anything can happen.
The Adlers were diminishing. They had begun to look like one of those families in which no one got to be very old.
Something was wrong, and while Mr. Bones could scarcely imagine what that thing was, Henry’s sadness was beginning to have an effect on him, and within a matter of minutes he had taken on the boy’s sadness as his own. Such is the was with dogs.
In the deepest, most unalterable sense, he was an invisible man. Invisible to others, and most likely invisible to himself as well. If, while he was alive, I kept looking for him, kept trying to find the father who was not there, now that he is dead I still feel as though I must go on looking for him. Death has not changed anything. The only difference is that I have run out of time.
But laugh laugh at me Men from around the world especially people from here For there are so many things I don’t dare tell you So many things you wouldn’t let me say Have pity on me.
As the book progresses, it takes on a more and more unstable character – filled with unpredictable associations and departures, marked by increasingly rapid shifts in tone – until you reach a point where you feel the whole thing being to levitate, to rise ponderously off the ground like some gigantic weather balloon. By the last chapter, you’ve traveled so high up into the air, you realize that you can’t come down again without falling, without being crushed.
He was not trying to buy happiness, but simply an absence of unhappiness.
This is what is called speaking. I believe that is the term. When words come out, fly into the air, live for a moment, and die. Strange, is it not? I myself have no opinion. No and no again. But still, there are words you will need to have. There are many of them. Many millions, I think. Perhaps only three or four. Excuse me. But I am doing well today. So much better than usual. If I can give you the words you need to have, it will be a great victory. Thank you. Thank you a million times over.
Rather than fill me with ecstasy or gladness, this breakthrough overpowered me with dread. I didn’t know myself anymore. I was inhabited by something that wasn’t me, and that thing was so terrible, so alien in its newness, I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it. I let the tears come pouring out of me, and once I started, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to stop.
And even if there was an end, it seemed doubtful that I would ever know about it – which meant that the story would go on and on, secreting its poison inside me forever.
These are the last things, she wrote. One by one they disappear and never come back. I can tell you of the ones I have seen, of the ones that are no more, but I doubt there will be time. It is all happening too fast now, and I cannot keep up.