Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion – you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.
We only know four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.
That night I couldn’t sleep at all. Mozart had shown me immortal light, and I now felt as though I were under direct orders from Mozart. He expressed his sadness not only with the minor scale but with the major scale as well.
Two Types Excitable A woman was depressed and distraught for days after losing her pen. Then she became so excited about an ad for a shoe sale that she drove three hours to a shoe store in Chicago. Phlegmatic A man spotted a fire in a dormitory one evening, and walked away to look for an extinguisher in another building. He found the extinguisher, and walked back to the fire with it.
I think I know what sort of person I am. But then I think, But this stranger will imagine me quite otherwise when he or she hears this or that to my credit, for instance that I have a position at the university: the fact that I have a position at the university will appear to mean that I must be the sort of person who has a position at the university.
Maybe I had been alone in that apartment so much by then that I had retreated into some kind of inner, unsociable space that was hard to come out of. Maybe I felt I had disappeared and I was comfortable that way and did not want to be forced back into existence. I don’t know.
Maybe happy memories can’t involve people who were only strangers or casual friends. You can’t be left alone, in your old age and pain, with memories that include only people who have forgotten you. The people in your happy memories have to be the same people who want to have you in their own happy memories.
Maybe for now I should try, each day, to be a little less than I usually am.
And then, there have always been days when my mind does not make connections very fast. There are always days when my mind is cloudy, or I forget things, or I feel as if I am in a different town or a different house – that something around me or about me is not normal.
And, everyone knows, to tolerate a person telling you about his childhood it is necessary to be in love with him.
I am happy doing the work I do, alone at a desk. That work is a great part of every day. But when I am old and alone all the time, will it be enough to think about the work I used to do?
Sometimes the grief was nearby, waiting, just barely held back, and I could ignore it for a while. But at other times it was like a cup that was always full and kept spilling over.
In those days, I wanted to cry, I wanted to shout, I wanted to wring my hands and complain, and I did try to complain to some people, though I could never cry or complain as much as I wanted to. Some people listened and tried to be helpful, but they could never listen long enough; the conversation always had to come to an end.
I have never associated myself with such an unexpected part of the body as the thyroid.
If I give all I have and you give all you have, isn’t that a kind of equality? No, he says.
She eats her potatoes as though she would make a revolution among them, as though they were the People.
Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before.
I was tired of so much thinking, which was what I did most in those days. I did other things, but I went on thinking while I did them. I might feel something, but I would think about what I was feeling at the same time. I even had to think about what I was thinking and wonder why I was thinking it.
That fall, after the summer when they both died, she and my father, there was a point when I wanted to say to them, All right, you have died, I know that, and you’ve been dead for a while, we have all absorbed this and we’ve explored the feelings we had at first, in reaction to it, surprising feelings, some of them, and the feelings we’re having now that a few months have gone by – but now it’s time for you to come back. You have been away long enough.
Today I am feeling that chronological order is not a good thing, even if it is easier, and that I should break it up. Is it that when these events are in chronological order they are not propelled forward by cause and effect, by need and satisfaction, they do not spring ahead with their own energy but are simply dragged forward by the passage of time?
I want to remember exactly what she said, but someone reading this does not mind if it is not exact: Please, says that someone, just choose one or the other and get on with the story. Give me fiction, if you have to – the approximation. Not the truth, along with your doubt.