We are entering the Dark Ages, my friend, but this time there will be lots of neon, and screen savers, and street lighting.
What could he do but accept the disturbing extent to which memory was fictional and hope that the fiction lay at the service of a truth less richly represented by the original facts?
What if memories were just memories, without any consolatory or persecutory power? Would they exist at all, or was it always emotional pressure that summoned images from what was potentially all of ex...
What was the thread that held together the scattered beads of experience if not the pressure of interpretation? The meaning of life was whatever meaning one could thrust down its reluctant throat.
Why had he said, ‘Some combination of pride and terror’? Did he still think it was uncool to admit to any enthusiasm, even in front of his greatest friend?
Why was he in this state? Or perhaps the question was why had he not always been in this state? Why had he not always found life so disturbing and so poignant?
With her curling blond hair and her slender limbs and her beautiful clothes, Inez was alluring in an obvious way, and yet it was easy enough to see that her slightly protruding blue eyes were blank sc...
Words are our slaves: they may be used to fetch a pair of slippers, or to build the great pyramid of Giza: they depend on syntax to make the order of the world manifest, to raise stones into arches an...
A genius of savoir faire,
Dilapidated
Experience of love is that you get excited thinking that someone can mend your broken heart, and then you get angry when you realize that they can’t. A certain economy creeps into the process and the...
Fall apart
Forced to observe the fringes of unconsciousness and make darkness visible;
Made him more conscious of how little experience he had of saying what he meant.
Observe everything . . . trust nobody . . . despise your mother . . . effort is vulgar . . . things were better in the eighteenth century.
The real failure: that he couldn’t be the sort of father he wanted to be, a man who had transcended his ancestral muddle and offered his children unhaunted love. He had made it out of what he thought...
The two men left the building with a sense of achievement, counterbalanced by desire.
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