Sometimes even now I think I see him in the street or standing in a window or bent over a book in a coffee shop. And in that instant, before I understand that it’s someone else, my lungs tighten and I lose my breath.
I’m fond of that little scene. Whether my memory is completely accurate or not, it has a sharpness that nothing I look at now can possibly have.
The articulation of the other’s body in words turns it into a map of possible pleasure, effectively distancing that body by transforming it into an erotic object.
Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book’s cover.
She meant that if your conscience holds you back, if it muddles the purity of your desire, if it gives you mixed feelings, don’t do it.
We had been pulled apart by absence, but that same absence had shackled us together for life.
But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives.
People imagine that hope has degrees, but I think not. There is hope and there is no hope.
Who had read my poems, who held my hand, who was dead before he could visit me in the hospital where he had been, too, landed, too, on his flights to heaven and drops into hell.
The misery I felt was grief. I wanted her back, my old self.
The tangible and intangible collide to cast a spell. But can a person or thing ever be stripped naked? Can we ever discover reality hiding under the meanings we give to people and things? I don’t think so. And I don’t think Fitzgerald thought so either. His book meditates on the necessity of fiction, not only as lies but as truths.
My mother’s idiosyncratic definition of the word is the following: we all suffer and we all die.“Never, ever,” my mother said to me when I was eleven,“say ‘pass away’ for ‘to die.’ People die. They don’t evaporate.
In a way,” I said to him, “that now you’re talking about hardly exists. We feel it, but it’s impossible to measure. The past is always eating up the present.
With Stephen, I had become a sour, witless bore. With others, I could be light. Men I cared nothing about called me, and every once in a while, I accepted an invitation. On them my indifference worked like an aphrodisiac, Because I didn’t want anything, I felt free an jabbered away spinning out all kinds of silliness that seemed only to augment their desire.
And perception is a complex phenomenon. Our brains are not cameras or recording devices. Visual perception is active and shaped by both conscious and unconscious forces. Expectation is crucial to perceptual experience, and what to expect about how the world works is learned, and once something is learned well, it becomes unconscious.
We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backward, too, not only forward, and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable.
Art can speak to what falls outside theory, and it can also embody felt ideas.
But mixing is the way of the world. The world passes through us – food, books, pictures, other people.
When you’re young, I think it’s harder to know what you want, how much of others you’re willing to take in. When I was living in Paris, I tried on ideas about myself like dresses. I was always reinventing who I was.
Most people aren’t attacked by colors.
The place where I am is missing from my view. It’s like that for everybody. We don’t see ourselves in the picture, do we? It’s a kind of hole.