Pupils were fixed in the position of wide black dilatation that signifies brain death, and obviously would never respond to light again.
Only upset mentally but are all unbalanced physically. No matter how calm and controlled they seemingly may be, no one can under such circumstances be normal. Their disturbed circulation makes them co...
Because in at least one respect California—the California we are talking about—resembles Eden: it is assumed that those who absent themselves from its blessings have been banished, exiled by some perv...
Because at the time I began it I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of the brightness. Blue nig...
Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible. That was why I needed to be alone. After
Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen.
We were not having any fun, he had recently begun pointing out. I would take exception (didn't we do this, didn't we do that) but I had also known what he meant. He meant doing things not because we w...
We had gone with David and Jean Halberstam to see the Lakers play the Knicks. David had gotten seats through the commissioner of the NBA, David Stern. The Lakers won. Rain had been sluicing down the g...
We closed the deal and moved to New York.Where in fact I had lived before, from the time I was twenty-one and just out of the English Department at Berkeley and starting work at Vogue (a segue so prof...
We all remember what we need to remember.
Vanish.Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her.Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes.Go back into the blue.I myself placed her ashes in the wall.I myself saw the ca...
To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in...
To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one ev...
This process, one of trading the state to outside owners in exchange for their (it now seems) entirely temporary agreement to enrich us, in toher words the pauperization of California, had in fact beg...
This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fort...
These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers...
There is an airport in Hermosillo, and Hermosillo is only eighty-five miles about Guaymas, but to fly is to miss the point. The point is to become disoriented, shriven, by the heat and the deceptive p...
There could be no snakes in Quintana Roo's garden.Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.
There could be no snake in Quntana Roo's garden.Only later did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.
The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted.