In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.
You blame your parents for so much, Tom. When does it start becoming your own responsibility? When do you take your life into your own hands? When do you start accepting the blame or credit for your own actions?
As I applauded, I knew that it would always be my burden, not that I lacked genius, but that I was fully aware of it.
I find myself happiest in the middle of a book in which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch.
Political correctness is going to kill American liberalism if it is not fought to the death by people like me for the dangers it represents to free speech, to the exchange of ideas, to openheartedness, or to the spirit of art itself. Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry.
Reading Tolstoy makes us strive to be better people: better husbands and wives, children, and friends. He tries to teach us how to live by letting us participate in the brimming, storied experiences of his fictional world. Reading Leo Tolstoy, you will encounter a novelist who fell in love with his world and everything he saw and felt in it.
Parisians and polar icecaps have a lot in common except that polar icecaps are warmer to strangers.
And each year, I lose a little bit more of what made me special as a kid. I don’t think as much or question as much. I dare nothing. I put nothing on the line. Even my passions are now frayed and pathetic.
I’ve spent most of my life avoiding the companionship of writers. I try never to be rude, just seldom available. Though I have met some of the great writers of our time, I’ve become good friends with very few of them. The tribe is contentious, the breed dangerous.
What I wanted most was a life of vigorous quality.
There is something glacial, fishlike, and prodigiously remote about Parisians. At the sound of an approaching foreigner, their faces are as bland and expressionless as salamanders.
I still believe that they both loved us deeply, but, as with many parents, their love proved to be the most lethal thing about them.
She took my hand and squeezed it. “You sold yourself short. You could’ve been more than a teacher and a coach.” I returned the squeeze and said, “Listen to me, Savannah. There’s no word in the language I revere more than teacher. None. My heart sings when a kid refers to me as his teacher and it always has. I’ve honored myself and the entire family of man by becoming one.
I studied their relationship with something approaching awe because I could not figure out what made it work. I felt love between these two people but it was a love without flame or passion. There were also no rancors or fevers, no risings or ebbings of the spirit to chart, just a marriage without weather, a stillness, a resignation, just windless days in the Gulf Stream of their quiet aging.
Both of them became adept at killing off the best qualities of the other. In some ways, there was something classic and quintessentially American in their marriage. They began as lovers and ended up as the most dangerous and unutterable of enemies. As lovers, they begat children; as enemies, they created damaged, endangered children.
Early on, I had contracted that dread affliction of oldest or only children – I lived for the absolute approval of my parents.
In the hour it took to finish that meal, I learned that silence could be the most eloquent form of lying.
Hell, Lowenstein! She made a schizophrenic! My mother should have raised cobras, not children!
It has always been difficult for me to face the truth about my childhood because it requires a commitment to explore the lineaments and features of a history I would prefer to forget. For years I did not have to face the demonology of my youth; I made a simple choice not to and found solace in the gentle palmistry of forgetfulness, a refuge in the cold, lordly glooms of the unconscious. But I was drawn back to the history of my family and the failures of my own adult life.
I wish I had no history to report. I’ve pretended for so long that my childhood did not happen. I had to keep it tight, up near the chest. I could not let it out.
As her children, we were the trustees of her dazzling evensongs of the imagination, but we did not know that mothers dreamed.