I decided not to go down to the cafeteria for breakfast. It would only mean getting dressed, and what was the point of getting dressed if you were staying in bed for the morning?
Mr. Manzi stood at the bottom of the big, rickety old amphitheater, making blue flames and red flares and clouds of yellow stuff by pouring the contents of one test tube into another, and I shut his voice out of my ears by pretending it was only a mosquito in the distance and sat back enjoying the bright lights and the colored fires and wrote page after page of villanelles and sonnets.
The only trouble was, Church, even the Catholic Church, didn’t take up the whole of your life. No matter how much you knelt and prayed, you still had to eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world.
I record here the actions of optical nerves, of taste buds, of sensory perception.
At about this point I began to feel peculiar. I looked round me at all the rows of rapt little heads with the same silver glow on them at the front and the same black shadow on them at the back, and they looked nothing more or less than a lot of stupid moonbrains.
Endure, endure, and the syllables harden like stoic white sheets struck with rigor mortis on the clothesline of winter.
But perhaps the most overlooked feature of her life was that she was human, and therefore fallible.
Piece by piece, as at the strokes of a dull godmother’s wand, the old world sprang back into position.
It was only after seeing Irwin’s study that I decided to seduce him.
Winning or losing an argument, receiving an acceptance or rejection, is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity.
I am alone in my room, between two worlds.
I justified the mess I made of life by saying I’d give it order, form, beauty, writing about it;.
A heavy naughtiness pricked through my veins, irritating and attractive as the hurt of a loose tooth.
I can change, whittle my square edges to fit in a round hole. God, I hope I’m never going to massacre myself that way.
And damn it to hell, if I don’t be quiet I’ll never get that Botany done! –.
I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason. So I’d skipped it. They let you do that in honors, you were much freer. I had been so free I’d spent most of my time on Dylan Thomas. A friend of mine, also in honors, had managed never to read a word of Shakespeare; but she was a real expert on the Four Quartets.
I cannot undo myself, and the train is steaming.
It is amusing to wonder whether dreams would matter at all, or “freedom” or “democracy.” I think not; I think there would only be the wondering what to eat and where to sleep and how to build out of the wreckage of life and mankind.
Something about the frank, guileless blue eyes, the beautiful young bodies, the brief scent of the dying flowers smote me like the clean quick cut of a knife. And the blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.
I thought the small letter at the start might mean that nothing ever really began all new, with a capital, but that it just flowed on from what came before.