Our parents’ lives, even those enfolded in obscurity, offer us our first, strong assurance that human events have consequence. Here we are, after all.
I’m not a great hoper, Wade, I guess.” We’re not walking fast. Others pass us. “I just go in for generic hopes. That good comes to me, that I do little harm and die in my sleep.
Sometimes we do not really become adults until after we suffer a good whacking loss, and our lives in a sense catch up with us and wash over us like a wave and everything goes.
Somehow, and for no apparent reason, your decisions got tipped over and you lost your hold. And one day you woke up and you found yourself in the very situation you said you would never ever be in, and you did not know what was most important to you anymore. And after that, it was all over. And I did not want that to happen to me did not, in fact, think it ever would.
We do not, after all, deal in truths, only potentialities. Too much truth can be worse than death, and last longer.
In the thirties, after they were married, they lived simply and only for each other and for the day. They drank some, lived on the road with my father’s salesman’s job. They had a good time and felt they had little to look back on, and didn’t look.
And it did seem strange to me because I was certain then what the difference was between what had happened and what hadn’t, and knew I always would be.
Love, Henry remembered thinking then, was a lengthy series of insignificant questions whose answers you couldn’t live without.
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying as a present to myself but haven’t made much progress there – though I need to.
Though when I turn to regard life – my own or others’ – I now never fail to be struck, amid the onslaught of all that’s happened and still is happening, by how much that’s gone from me. Absences seem to surround and intrude upon everything. Though in acknowledging this, I cannot let it be a loss or even be a fact I regret, since that is merely how life is – another enduring truth we must notice.
I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.
The saved moment is the true art of love.
Anyone could be anyone else in most ways. Face the facts.
Would you think he was anybody like you?
And I knew that was not a bad thing at all, not for anyone, in any life.
It was such a thing to see, a view I had never seen and have not since.
I don’t know what makes people do what they do, or call themselves what they call themselves, only that you have to live someone’s life to be the expert.
Together – though perhaps only together – they were fully formed. They stayed on the road. Life went on as it had, from the thirties straight into the forties. They owned little – a bit of furniture, their clothes, no car.
Greater challenges might only have frustrated him and rendered him unhappy.
I believe in what you see being most of what there is, as I’ve taught my students, and that life’s passed along to us empty. So, while significance weighs heavy, that’s the most it does. Hidden meaning is all but absent.
But if I had to I would say that because I was his son, I can recognize now that life is short and has inadequacies, that once again it requires crucial avoidances as well as fillings-in to be acceptable.