What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I’d say it’s this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.
He had slept next to her for thirty-six years, and the mattress felt different without her weight, however slight, and without the rhythm of her breath the dark had no measure. There were times he woke feeling cold from the lack of the heat that once came from between her thighs and behind her knees. He might have even called her, if he could have momentarily forgotten that he already knew everything she could possibly say.
He was an average man. A man willing to accept things as they were, and, because of this, he lacked the potential to be in anyway original.
The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn’t happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder.
After all, the world population of artists has exploded, almost no one is not an artist now; in turning our attention inward, so have we turned all of our hope inward, believing that meaning can be found or made there. Having cut ourselves off from all that is unknowable and that might truly fill us with awe, we can only find wonderment in our own powers of creativity.
I considered my options. Either I could run away and never go back to school again, maybe even leave the country as a stowaway on a ship bound for Australia. Or I could risk everything and confess to her. The answer was obvious: I was going to Australia. I opened my mouth to say goodbye forever. And yet. What I said was: I want to know if you’ll marry me.
Doesn’t part of the awe that fills us when we confront the unknown come from understanding that, should it at last flood into us and become known, we would be altered?
Childhood is a process of slowly recomposing oneself out of the borrowed materials of the world.
At the end, all that is left of you are your possessions.
Some people, like your sister, just get happier and happier everyday. And some people, like Baba Asch, just get sadder and sadder. And some people, like you, get both.′ ‘What about you? Are you the happiest and the saddest right now than you’ve ever been?’ ‘Of course I am.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.
I found out how little is unbearable.
If they have to be named after anything at all, why can’t it be things, which have more permanence, like the sky or the sea, or even ideas, which never really die, not even bad ones?
Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought. Look at me.
She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air.
And yet isn’t it true of all of us? That there are things we feel to be at the heart of our nature that are not borne out by the evidence around us, and so, to protect our delicate sense of integrity, we elect, however unconsciously, to see the world other than the way it really is? And sometimes it leads to transcendence, and sometimes it leads to the unconscionable.
If you don’t know what it feels like to have someone you love put a hand below your bottom rib for the first time, what chance is there for love?
Once or twice a year I attended the English Romantic conferences held throughout Europe, brief gatherings perhaps not dissimilar in feeling for the participants than the feeling Jews have when they get off the plane in Israel: the relief of at last being surrounded on all sides by your own kind – the relief and the horror.
Then one day I was looking out the window. Maybe I was contemplating the sky. Put even a fool in front of the window and you’ll get a Spinoza.
It took seven languages to make me; it would have been nice if I could have spoken just one. But I couldn’t, so he leaned down and kissed me.
I looked at the map of India on the wall. Every 14-year-old should know the exact location of Calcutta. It wouldn’t do to go around without the faintest clue of where Calcutta was.
The whole afternoon might go by without our saying a word. If we do talk, we might never speak in Yiddish. The words of our childhood became strangers to us – we couldn’t use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.