Within the limits of their nature, they make do with what they have.
Strange in a familiar way, familiar in a strange way.
I sang that tree’s glory, its solid, unhurried purity, its slow beauty. Oh, that I could be like it, rooted to the ground but with my every hand raised up to God in praise!
And she prays with her eyes closed. It’s just a crucifix. And if he’s an ape, so be it-he’s an ape. He’s still the Son of God.
You can keep your sweaty, chatty Son to yourself.
It’s a big ocean crossed by busy ships. I went slowly, observing much.
Life goes on and you don’t touch tigers.
At one point I turned to the French language, which gave me the gender of all things. But to no satisfaction. I would readily agree that trucks and murders were masculine while bicycles and life were feminine. But how odd that a breast was masculine. And it made little sense that garbage was feminine while perfume was masculine – and no sense at all that television, which I would have deemed repellently masculine, was in fact feminine. When.
Because to suffer and do nothing is to be nothing, while to suffer and do something is to become someone. And that is what he is doing: becoming someone.
An intellect confounded yet a trusting sense of presence and of ultimate purpose.
I would return home to la maison, feminine where, as likely as not, I would go to my room, la chambre, where I would settle to read un livre masculine, until supper. During the masculine meal, feminine food would be eaten. After my hard, productive masculine day, I would rest during the feminine night. At one time, for a few days, I even took an affected aversion to being in the kitchen, la cuisine.
On occasion we say to ourselves, panting, ‘Gosh, life is racing by.’ But that’s not it at all, it’s the contrary: life is still. It is we who are racing by.
I looked up. I couldn’t see him. He was hiding at the bottom of the boat. He appeared when he threw my mother’s body overboard. His mouth was red. The water boiled with fish.
The multitude of the curious and the offended descends upon him.
Truly I am in a sacred cosmic womb, a place where everything is born, and it is my sweet luck to behold its living core. My hands naturally come together in reverent worship.
So I flew to Bombay. This is not so illogical if you realize three things: that a stint in India will beat the restlessness out of any living creature; that a little money can go a long way there; and that a novel set in Portugal in 1939 may have very little to do with Portugal in 1939. I.
What if his words had the effect of polio on me? WHat a terrible disease that must be if it could kill God in a man.
Thus set up, pen in hand, for the sake of greater truth, I would turn Portugal into a fiction. That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence? What need did I have to go to Portugal? The.
Time became distance for me in the way it is for all mortals.
HIs life was always a happenstance.