The question any novel is really trying to answer is, Is life worth living?
Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
I really practiced hard and got to a certain level of technical proficiency. I overcame some of my limitations. I was a hard-working, dedicated bassoonist, but I have to say I’m not a natural musician.
Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity.
Just as the people who lived through the Second World War thought different things on different days, I think everybody who goes through that period carefully now thinks different things on different days.
I am closer to the pacifist side, in that I think that the British response to German aggression, which was to try to starve the Continent into a state of revolt and to terrorize German civilians with bombing raids, was part of the total catastrophe.
In fact, you could make the argument that a historian like Shlomo Aronson does in passing in one of his books, that the bombing campaign united the German nation behind Hitler, and actually contributed to the sustaining of his power.
I did not know that the planning for biological and chemical warfare was so widespread in England, and even in France before France fell. It was news to me that there had been talk, even in the First World War, of dropping Colorado beetles on German potato crops and that kind of thing.
It’s troubling to see how often Winston Churchill is a proponent of massive programs that are really aimed at civilians – starvation blockades and chemical warfare stockpiles and so on.
History isn’t a seesaw. If you have a really bad regime on one side, the actions on the other side don’t automatically become good. It doesn’t work that way.
Of course, individuals are responsible for individual actions – the pilots who flew over Pearl Harbor and dropped bombs on those ships did a terrible thing as part of an attack on a military base.
I’m a sucker for interiors and carefully, beautifully filmed people sitting in a big room. My appetites are simple.
And I’ll flip through the newest issue, walking back from my blue mailbox, hunting for the poem he chose over mine, and it’ll be the same thing as always. The prose will have pulled back, and the poem will be there, cavorting, saying, I’m a poem, I’m a poem. No, you’re not! You’re an impostor, you’re a toy train of pretend stanzas of chopped garbage. Just like my poem was.
And now I’m back outside again sitting in the white plastic chair looking at the dew on the gas cap of my car. A fly wants to bit me on the ankle. The mosquitoes are all asleep. They’re just not out at this hour. Only one biting fly. And a mourning dove, who blows through his thumbs to make that sound.
The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.
Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach a point where there will be a good chance, I mean a more than fifty-fifty chance, that any random idea popping back into the foreground of my consciousness will be an idea that first came to me when I was an adult, rather than one I had repeatedly as a child?
The nice thing about putting on your glasses in the dark is that you know you could see better if it were light, but since it is dark the glasses make no difference at all.
During a 10-year period the locomotives of Egypt made us of no other fuel than that furnished by the well-wrapped, compact mummies.
I was a man, but I was not nearly the magnitude of a man I had hoped I might be.
Also, mugs, like car bumpers and T-shirts, have become places for people to proclaim allegiances, names, hobbies, heroes, graphic tastes.
With fewer total cells, but more connections between each cell, the quality of your knowledge undergoes a transformation: you begin to have a feel for situations, people fall into types, your past memories link together, and your life begins to seem, as it hadn’t when you were younger, an inevitable thing composed of a million small failures and successes dependently intergrown, as opposed to a bright beadlike row of unaffiliated moments.