Death poem of Hyakka,
A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.
He looked at his foreword, written, as ever, in his customary green ink, with the simple, if guilty, hope that in the abyss that lay between his dream and his failure there might be something worth re...
Pushing away, pushing in: the pattern of so much that was to follow.
I am part of all that I have met.
Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words - all the words that did not say things directly - were for him the most truthful.
Panegyrics of a man they had never understood,
There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.
The world is, she would say. It just is, boy.
It was a fabled railway that was the issue of desperation and fanaticism, made as much of myth and unreality as it was to be of wood and iron and the thousands upon thousands of lives that were to be...
He waited for death as a traveller for a bus.
When forging money, I had always salved my conscience by concluding that I was merely extending the lie of commerce.
Thinking: The world is. It just is.
Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless...
Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of...
In trying to escape the fatality of memory, he discovered with an immense sadness that pursuing the past inevitably only leads to greater loss. To hold a gesture, a smell, a smile was to cast it as on...
And one thing, as they sometimes do, led not to another, but shattered a world.
At such times he had the sensation that there was only one book in the universe, and that all books were simply portals into this greater ongoing work—an inexhaustible, beautiful world that was not im...
There's always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott government's attitude to women.