The sight of all the food stacked in those kitchens made me dizzy. It’s not that we hadn’t enough to eat at home, it’s just that my grandmother always cooked economy joints and economy meat loafs and had the habit of saying, the minute you lifted the first forkful to your mouth, “I hope you enjoy that, it cost forty-one cents a pound,” which always made me feel I was somehow eating pennies instead of Sunday roast.
This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.
You felt no reality. Only a weariness, a longing for a shoulder to sleep on, a pair of arms to curl up in – and a lack of that now.
I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string. I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, create corpses.
You are twenty. You are not dead, although you were dead. The girl who died. And was resurrected. Children. Witches. Magic. Symbols. Remember the illogic of the fantasy.
It seems to me more than ever that I am a victim of introspection. If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen. I am possessive about time alone...
She looked terrible, but very wise.
I am aware, sure, I am aware. Catastrophically aware.
This was the best time of the day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go.
When I was nineteen, pureness was the great issue. Instead of the world being divided up into Catholics and Protestants, or Republicans and Democrats, or white men and black men, or even men and women, I saw the world divided into people who had slept with somebody and people who hadn’t; and this seemed the only really significant difference between one person and another.
The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.
If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations; a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels.
For the first time in my life, sitting there in the sound-proof heart of the UN building between Constantin who could play tennis as well as simultaneously interpret and the Russian girl who knew so many idioms, I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.
I need someone real, who will be right for me now, here, and soon. Until then I’m lost. I think I am mad at times.
How clever of them, I thought. They kept the feeling all secret; they wouldn’t even let you write it down.
Do I love laziness more than I love the feeling of accomplishing work? I take the path of least resistance and curl up with a book.
I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.
And times there are when you feel very wise and ageless. You are sunning on the rocks, the water splashing at your feet, when a small chubby freckle faced girl of about ten approaches you, her hand holding something that is invisible, but evidently quite precious. ‘Do you know,’ she asks earnestly, ’do starfish like hot or cold water best?
I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down.
She used every emotional experience as if it were a scrap of material that could be pieced together to make a wonderful dress; she wasted nothing of what she felt, and when in control of those tumultuous feelings she was able to focus and direct her incredible poetic energy to great effect.