As an act recedes into the past and becomes imbedded in the network of one’s individuality it seems more and more a product of fate – – inevitable. However, an act in the immediate present seems to be more a product of free will.
There are a few times when the songs that are written, the poems that are written, the plays that are written, come alive. By accident you fall onto a stage-set put aside for a tragedy for the lesser gods, and you utter words that were in the script written in the leaves and in the grass for some heroic cast.
There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice – patched, retreaded and approved for the road, I was trying to think of an appropriate one when Doctor Nolan appeared from nowhere and touched me on the shoulder. “All right, Esther.
The black instrument on the hall table trilled its hysterical note over and over, like a nervous bird.
I am unattached; My heart is very quiet.
The voice came from a cool, rational region far above my head.
I was quite proud of the calm way I stared at all these gruesome things.
Unless you can be yourself, you won’t stay with anyone for long.
You can outline the people you’ve lived with these past years in a few sentences... yet could you give an account of their lives, their hopes, their dreams? You could try, perhaps, but they would be much the same as yours... for you are all an inexplicable unity – this family group with its twisted tensions, unreasoning loves and solidarity and loyalty born and bred in blood. These people are the ones most basically responsible for what you are.
I don’t really know,” I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.
I felt Mr Willard had deserted me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said No, his father simply couldn’t stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son’s sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will. Mr Willard had never been sick a day in his life.
No, I won’t try to escape myself by losing myself in artificial chatter.
I feel like a very efficient tool or weapon, used and in demand from moment to moment...
In that valley the train shrieks echo like souls on hooks.
The room blued into view, and I wondered where the night had gone.
Every day, writing. No matter how bad. Something will come.
I looked at the baby in the lap of the woman opposite. I had no idea how old it was, I never did, with babies – for all I knew it could talk a blue streak and had twenty teeth behind its pursed, pink lips.
Certain poems and lines of poetry seem as solid and miraculous to me as church altars or the coronation of queens must seem to people who revere quite different images.
Everywhere the pallid waiting. And you are the moving epitome of all this. Of you, by you, for you. God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?
You fool – you are afraid of being alone with you own mind. You just better learn to know yourself, to make sure decisions before it is too late. Your room is not your prison. You are.