Category Archives: literature
He suspected that he was beginning, ten years too late, to discover who he was; and the figure he saw was both more and less than he had once imagined it to be. He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence.
made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.
interior one in which we remain linked to the dead (because the
dream inside us ignores trivialities like breath, or absence) – this
vast life is not under our control. Everything we have seen and
everyone we have known goes into us and constitutes us, whether
we like it or not. We are linked together in a pattern we cannot
see and whose effects we cannot know. One slub here, a dropped
stitch there, a bump encounter in that place, and the whole fabric
will be different once it is woven.
independent as to have no needs, or at least none that they, single-
handedly, could meet. This is the curse of the capable, it leaves them
prone to pockets of aloneness, sudden elephant traps in the grounds.
make sense of the progression of random events that made them what they
are. This involves a kind of forward-looking faith in life; a conviction that
cause and effect are linked, and that they are themselves more than the
sum of their past.
Durham to play hero. He does not seem to lack the necessary
credentials. It is not that he isn’t handsome, or tall or strong, or
that he doesn’t want to help her, or that he doesn’t love her
– all those things are true. But maybe it is just the scenery that is
wrong. Maybe nothing that happens on stolen ground can
expect a happy ending.
Every little trifle for some reason does seem incalculably important today
and when you say of a thing that “nothing hangs on it” it sounds like blasphemy.
There’s never any knowing – how am I to put it? – which of our actions,
which of our idlenesses won’t have things hanging on it forever.
