52.
Thoughts are discussed, opinions displayed.
53.
The peril of arguing with you is forgetting to argue with myself. Don’t make me convince you: I don’t want to believe that much.
54.
Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone else’s lines.
55.
He prides himself on having lots of opinions, like bad moods he’s entitled to. Worse than stupidity is intelligence that claims the right to be stupid.
56.
No one blames you for having your dream, just for telling it.
57.
Everyone’s psyched that elections are decided by a single vote! That it’s a close game! That choice approximates chance!
58.
The lesser of two evils is the one with the less evil friends.
59.
How comforting, your paranoia: someone’s listening, someone’s watching, someone’s thinking about you all the time.
60.
Build bottom up, clean top down.
61.
Precision strike. We’re only killing that one guy. And actually only his worst thought. And there, just a little to the left of the middle, only the very worst part of that.
62.
The fire doesn’t know where all that smoke came from.
63.
The patterned shirt, the speckled wall-to-wall don’t show dirt. Sometimes, truth be damned, we need relief from seeing. Our response is a bigger problem than the problem.
64.
Forgive the evil done to you. Really? I can’t help thinking the Book just didn’t trust me enough to say what it meant: In time you will see that much of it was not evil, and that much of the evil was yours.
65.
Too much apology doubles the offense.
66.
Forgiveness is freedom, the saints say, but they are saints and do not care that it may be freedom even from love.
67.
All those days that changed the world forever! Yet here it is.
68.
Let us explain to ourselves the difference. A rock might be very big, like Plymouth Rock or the Rock of Gibraltar. Or underground, as in bedrock. A rock is rough. A stone is smooth: it might well be cut into a gravestone, a cobblestone. Rocks you clamber over, stones you step on. What’s that brilliance on her finger, a rock or a stone? The rock-thrower is anonymous. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.
69.
Do unto others and an eye for an eye have the same payment plan.
70.
For Sisyphus the trouble of pushing the rock uphill was worth it for the thrill of watching it smash everything on the way down.
71.
That little bird, pretty calm there in the snow, is cold, but it must be a discontinuous and lightly registered sensation. Cold. Peck peck. What’s that? Oh yeah, cold. Whereas I would be desperate in a few minutes thinking about freezing Forever and Ever. Somewhere in evolution we traded endurance for foresight. Intelligence was first of all the ability to worry.
72.
That half-second between stubbing your toe and convulsing with pain? Some live there forever.
73.
We ask What’s the worst that could happen? see that it wouldn’t be so bad, calm down a little. What I want to know is: what is that Worse than the Worst we have to figure out over and over is not going to happen?
74.
The squirrel struggling in the road. Something very deep says If it can’t live it should die. I kill it with a stick. Maybe to stop my own suffering, but I don’t think so: I’d rather walk away. Maybe Nature wants me to think this way about my own kind? The thought struggles in me. I kill it with a stick.
75.
Stones, toys, ants, birds, children: the more we decide is less than human, the less human we become.
76.
Her grief repeats with a high cracked sound, like an engine in which something has broken loose and is smashing around. People scare us when they’re like machines, when they’re so human.
77.
If we were really sure of our freedom we wouldn’t be so discomfited by those who make passion a habit, or habit a passion.
78.
Slug, fungus: part of your body has fallen out. Snake, rat: part of it might try to get back in.
79.
Treasury reports that its green ink absorbs opiates: every bill carries ten nanograms of cocaine. Amazing what this might be made to say about several addictions, but I’m going to stop right now.
80.
Roadkill. Something eats the eyes first, starved for… what?
81.
The rich man thought he was hoarding freedom, but he couldn’t stop and in the end it all turned out to be money.
82.
Last Day say all the stores.
83.
In a strange city, my one tenuous root is a lit room in Hotel X. Passing Hotel Y, I imagine taking a room there as well, traveling away from my travel, pure waste, lost or free, whatever the difference is. Has anyone ever done this and managed to get home? Please write.
84.
Of course I’m an escapist. I’m trying to get somewhere real.
85.
It’s not that they give things of no worth: that, too, is giving. It’s what they want for them.
86.
The Victorian hotel has a marble colonnade, gilt, oriental rugs, but there’s not a tux in sight: shirts-out-over-jeans mix with business suits. Is it freedom that we no longer have to dress up to such elegance, or is it history-is-ours arrogance? Probably it’s more that life now is a theme park: when you visit Disney World you don’t dress as Mickey or Goofy.
87.
Tragedy and comedy ended with death or marriage, but our shows, mystery and sitcom, begin with them.
88.
We don’t blame the victim, already murdered when the show starts. We don’t even blame the perp too much—we just want to find out who he is. We don’t blame the cops for blaming him. Best of all, we don’t blame ourselves, so trivial our own crimes in comparison. And if anyone wants to blame us we’ve got a perfect alibi for prime time.
89.
You have the right to lie when they have no right to ask.
90.
Since God died, no one has remembered you. But now it seems your DNA is everywhere and could be followed like a trail, if you could just act suspicious enough.
91.
He spends minutes looking for a parking place that shortens his walk by seconds, days looking for a price lower by an hour’s wage, as if he would otherwise be fooled.
92.
The boutique wants you to think you’re collecting, the discounter that you’re stealing.
93.
The thing about the natural world, beautiful or bleak or bleakly beautiful, is that nothing seems to be in the wrong place. From this window, however, I can see the trowel I left in the yard, and I’m going to have to go down and do something about it.
94.
The way your walk changes entering a store or museum, slowing, widening a little, eyes sweeping level. Foraging on the ancient savanna for something to eat, something to use.
95.
The Mystery we’re absorbed in takes precedence over all the mysteries that won’t be solved when the hour ends, a protective parenthesis within the larger stories of Love and Work, which are inside the story of Life, which is inside Big Bang. Actually scale is irrelevant: it’s just as likely we’d use cosmology to distract us from a bad day at the office. Theoretically all these are contained within a larger Storylessness, but that itself is only the romantic story I have at last attained freedom, which in an instant decays into more stable stories such as I’m so bored I’d rather be afraid or I must punish the deluded masses with this hard truth or Let’s watch TV.
96.
From the tipped tree you learn how shallow roots are. More meets the eye than doesn’t.
97
.
Joe Cool is playing at Cold. And his babe is Hot, which is also play, and in that more like Cool than like Warm: no one exclaims delightedly “Man, that’s Warm!” We’ll pay to watch the players of Hot and Cool, but we flee the salesmen, priests and politicians solemnly emitting Warm.
98.
That our feelings flicker so obviously in our faces must mean Nature thought it was more important that everyone be able to read them than that individuals be able to hide them. Maybe it tells us, too, that the most dangerous faces are the ones behind which there is no feeling at all.
99.
Glasses, for example, have gone from uptight to wide-eyed and back again. Fashion is feeling, opening and closing, cycling between warm and cool, welcoming and slick. Or rather, it decides which half of feeling will be paraded, which half will seem hidden, and somehow truer.
100.
The sun’s so bright it has no face.
101.
Yet sometimes maybe I decide to let an emotion I really could conceal flit faintly across my face. If it seems I betrayed it unwillingly, you are less likely to respond as if you had seen it. Though maybe that little bit of acting is not really a conscious strategy but a deep instinct: in the animal world, too, emotions are often merely theatrical, and so many threats, fake fights and sexual displays send messages but end in nothing.
102.
More and more graduates of the School of Theatrical Parenting. The guy being a Good Father so loudly we can all appreciate him, the woman with the wailing infant rolling her eyes as if to say “Can you believe this baby?”
103.
Passion is faintly rhetorical, as if we needed to convince ourselves we were capable of it.
104.
Am I trying to help, or do I just want you to like me? The way feelings are, it’s not so easy to distinguish your happiness from mine.
105.
Her grief is eased when all grieve with her, his when he sees that grief is only his.
106.
I say Be reasonable when I am afraid to feel what you feel.
107.
A feather lands on the pond and a dozen goldfish come to poke at it. We are whoever rises into our eyes to have a look.
108.
Those so thorough you cannot in mercy ask them to do anything. Those so empathetic it is cruel to tell them a trouble.
109.
As a couple they are salt of the earth, sodium chloride. As single elements, she was a poisonous gas and he a soft and desperate metal, turning even water into roil and flame.
110.
When we talk it’s not you or me we are getting to know. It may be nothing at all, it may be better than both of us.
111.
Don’t touch, don’t stare. But no one minds how hard you listen.
112.
No one so entertaining as the one who thinks you are.
113.
The Boy wants magical powers. He wants the world to respond gigantically to every little thing he does and says, and even all he doesn’t say and do. Until he meets the Girl who does just that.
114.
Loving yourself is about as likely as tickling yourself.
115.
That book, that woman, life: now that I understand them a little I realize there was something I understood better when they baffled and scared me.
116.
A knot is strings getting in each other’s way. What keeps us together is what keeps us apart.
117.
Nostalgia for a Lost Love. At a certain distance the parts of you and her that could never love each other become invisible, which is how you got into that whole mess in the first place.
118.
My loss is sad: I have not yet lost it all.
119.
Finally peace. And then the whisper: Does that passion work anymore? I’ll wake it up and see…
120.
The will has a will of its own.
121.
It is with poetry as with love: forcing yourself is useless, you have to want to. Yet how tiresome and ungenerous is the one sprawled among flowers waiting for his impulse. There’s such a thing as knowing how to make yourself want to.
122.
Our resolutions for self-control are like our wars for peace.
123.
Freedom has just escaped. Peace has forgotten. Boredom is pounding on the prison gates to be let back in.
124.
To begin the journey, buy what you need. To finish, discard what you don’t.
125.
As for my writing. I like it enough to keep going. I dislike it enough to keep going.
126.
What hope we had when we knew everything would last forever, and what hopelessness.
127.
Now the mail is not Hope but What Do They Want from Me? I still fetch it, perhaps knowing that someday I’ll be reduced to hoping they still want something from me.
128.
It takes thick gloves, prying down to the knotty junction, getting as many of the roots as I can, to take care of them for maybe a year, the brambles. But I’m avoiding the point, pastorally, which is the dull-witted malignancy that’s taking you over, that there’s no scalpel precise enough to excise one bad cell at a time, no chemotherapy bomb smart enough to kill them all without killing you. I need to be a gardener small enough to pull out one by one the runners that are re-wiring you. Here, the gods have granted my wish but I am just as helpless, hands bloodier and bloodier as I work far into the night. There are acres and acres to go before that little rise where the thorns have overgrown the castle where you are struggling not to sleep. I can do this, I can do whatever is necessary. It won’t take forever, nothing takes forever, but so many things take longer than we have.
129.
Of course when I look in the mirror I see what was there 10, 20, 30 years ago. It’s not just vanity, dear: I see through you the same way.
130.
The myths tell us what we already know: that it will be the last light left burning, waking us even after death. Seems I have spent my whole life fleeing Judgment, and yet I must not believe in it, since no failure, no betrayal forces me to admit Yes, at last that is myself. What a strange relief it would be to finally hit that bottom, a hypochondriac who learns at last what he will die of.
131.
Behind your face, which hardly changes, who knows what thoughts. It’s the opposite with the gods: their powers and stories are constant, but painters give them random faces.
132.
That letter, what would it have been, of love, of praise, of annihilating understanding? It seems, almost sadly, that I no longer want to get it. Occasionally I still want to write it, but how could I send to anyone else what I would not myself receive?
133.
Alas, how quickly my sincerest praise turns into apology for secret doubts.
134.
Faces are motion, which is why all the photos of you are bad. Even the most natural-looking portrait is a sentence interrupted. And faces in motion hide an even deeper motion. You seem to sit there and meet my eyes across the table, but you are so many other places, clinging here for a moment against all the currents that will soon sweep you onward. We are so moved by the faces caught in the windows of trains going the other way because they tell us how all faces really are.
135.
A very few people have seen me only at my best. They are precious friends, but I dare not meet them again.
136.
What was it like before language? My occasional thought, more than urge but still less than words, that would translate as Eat now, there may be no food where we’re going.
137.
Out walking, I think of that face I love or some scene of awful embarrassment and stop dead in my tracks, as if I had to choose between moving and being moved.
138.
Clarity, even in person, can be pretty hard. Telephones are harder: if I can’t see your eyes, how
do I know what I’m saying? With writing, misunderstandings multiply, since tiny shifts in tone and speed are no longer audible—the writer tries to compensate by managing rhythm and punctuation and deploying a larger and more nuanced vocabulary than we need for speech. Along comes e-mail and from all sides the complaint that it is a peculiarly toneless genre that regularly offends and annoys and misinforms. Though screens are not as stable as pages, e-mail is not essentially different from other writing. The difference is us: we write it too quickly, we read it even more quickly. A lot of e-mails are work, to be gotten out of the way. And even the young, who grew up with it—especially the young, who grew up with it—seem incapable of reading further than three sentences before flapping off into some heaven of I already know this. Not a problem if the e-mailers or texters are in constant chat and so deep in a shared context that misunderstanding can be averted with crude steering like smiley face and LOL, or if they’re using the form as a kind of contentless I was here, the way people used to leave their cards. But the temptation is to e-mail little essays. The temptation is, worse, to try to replace our unpredictable and wounding social drama with writing: the protection of its distance, the smoothness of its infinite rehearsals. But who has the patience to be a good writer all day? Inevitably, we send too soon and get back reports of the damage. I resolve to quit e-mail and get a life. Or maybe just do one more revision. Thanks for reading to the end.
By the Numbers Page 3