13 September 2008

Committed to Reading

I have three books left to read from my previous reading list - two of which I’m halfway through. And being the girl who’s never been taught to be where she is, I’ve already made a second list. Ugh!

The Conversations - Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
On Beauty
Walden
The New York Trilogy
White Teeth (Reread)
Wuthering Heights (Reread)
On the Road
Divisadero
Naked
Dress your family in corduroy and denim

They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank. But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

[More:]

…most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

I told Terry I was leaving. She had been thinking about it all night and was resigned to it. Emotionlessly she kissed me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

Dean had come to my house, slept several nights there, waiting for me; spent afternoons talking to my aunt as she worked on a great rag rug woven of all the clothes in my family for years, which was now finished and spread on my bedroom floor, as complex and rich as the passage of time itself.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

There was nothing clear about the things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

We wheeled through the sultry old light of Algiers, back on the ferry, back toward the mud-splashed, crabbed old ships across the river, back on Canal, and out; on a two-lane highway to Baton Rouge in purple darkness; swung west there, crossed the Mississippi at a place called Port Allen. Port Allen - where the river’s all rain and roses in a misty pinpoint darkness and where we swungaround a circular drive in ywllow foglight and suddenly saw the great black body below a bridge and crossed eternity again.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

It was sad to see his tall figure receding in the dark as we droe away, just like the other figures in New York and New Orleans: they stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, and everything about them is drowned. Where go? what do? what for? - sleep. But this foolish gang was bending onward.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

With frantic Dean I was rushing through the world without a chance to see it.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

‘Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there - and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end.’

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

I knew he was telling the truth and yet I didn’t want to bother with the truth.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

In the gray dawn that puffed ghostlike about the windows of the theater and hugged its eaves I was sleeping with my head on the wooden arm of a seat as six attendants of the theater converged with their night’s total of swept-up rubbish and created a huge dusty pile that reached to my nose as I snored head down - till they almost swept me away too. This was reported to me by Dean, who was watching from ten seats behind. All the cigarette butts, the bottles, the matchbooks, the come and gone were swept up in this pile. Had they taken me with it, Dean would never have seen me again. He would have had to roam the entire United States and look in every garbage pail from coast to coast before he found me embryonically convoluted among the rubbishes of my life, his life and the life of everybody concerned and not concerned.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

Noon usually found us reclined in Babe’s back yard among the little Denver kids who played cowboys and Indians and dropped on us from cherry trees in bloom. I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

‘He’s on his way already, I got this news from my grapevine. Dean bought a car and is coming out to join you.’ Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore - they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. The waves are Chinese, but earth is an Indian thing. As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the desert of ‘history.’ And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

It never, never occurred to me just to approach her and give her some money. I have a feeling she would have taken it with a degree of scorn, and scorn from the likes of her made me flinch. In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach. Strange that Dean and Stan also failed to approach her; her unimpeachable dignity was the thing that made her poor in a wild old whorehouse, and think of that. At one point I saw Dean leaning like a statue toward her, ready to fly, and befuddlement cross his face as she glanced coolly and imperiously his way and he stopped rubbing his belly and gaped and finally bowed his head. For she was the queen.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

When they talked they suddenly became frantic and almost silly. In their silence they were themselves.

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

‘How far do they carry out these loyaties and wonders! What’s going to happen to them? Would they try to follow the car all the way to Mexico City if we drove slow enough?’

(On the Road - Jack Kerouac)

—— ∫ ——

“You were the best in the whole show,” my mother said, stopping for frozen pizza on our way home. “I mean it, you walked onto that stage and all eyes went right to you.”

It occurred to me then that my mother was a better actor than I could ever hope to be. Acting is different than posing or pretending. When done with precision, it bears a striking resemblance to lying. Stripped of the costumes and grand gestures, it presents itself as an unquestionable truth. I didn’t envy my mother’s skill, neither did I contradict her. That’s how convincing she was. It seemed best, sitting beside her with a frozen pizza thawing on my lap, to simply sit back and learn.

(Naked - David Sedaris)

—— ∫ ——

It made me sad and desperate to see so many people, strangers whose sheer numbers eroded the sense of importance I was working so hard to invent. Where did they come from, and why couldn’t they just go home? I might swipe their trays off the belt without once wondering who these people were and why they hadn’t bothered to finish their breaded cutlets. They meant nothing to me, and watching them move down the line toward the cashier, it became apparent that the feeling was mutual. They wouldn’t even remember the meal, much less the person who had provided them with their piping hot tray. How was it that I was important and they were not? There had to be something that separated us.

(…)

Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you’ll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common. At the time, though, I still believed that such a warm and heady feeling might last forever and that in embracing it fully, I might approximate the ame wistful feeling adults found in their second round of drinks. I had hated Lisa, felt jealous of her secret life, and now, over my clotted mug of hot chocolate, I felt for her a great pride. Up and down our street the houses were decorated with plywood angels and mangers framed in colored bulbs. Over on Coronado someone had lashed speakers to his trees, broadcasting carols over the candy-cane forest he’d planted beside his driveway. Our neighbors would rise early and visit the malls, snatching up gift-wrapped Dustbusters and the pom-pommed socks used to protect the heads of golf clubs. Christmas would arrive and we, the people of this country, would gather around identical trees, voicing our pleasure with worn clichés. Turkeys would roast to a hard, shellacked finish. Hams would be crosshatched with x’s and glzed with fruit - and it was fine by me. Were I to receive a riding vacuum cleaner or even a wizened proboscis monkey, it wouldn’t please me half as much as knowing we were the only family in the neighborhood with a prostitute in our kitchen. From this moment on, the phrase “ho, ho, ho” would take on a whole different meaning; and I, along with the rest of my family, could appreciate it in our own clannish way. It suddenly occurred to me. Just like that.

(Naked - David Sedaris)

—— ∫ ——

Howard assumed his son was embarrassed by him. Shame seemed to be the male inheritance of the Belsey line. How excrutiating Howard had found hiw own father at the same age! HE had wished for someone other than a butcher, for someone who used his brain at work rather than knives and scales - someone more like the man Howard was today. But you shift and the children shift also. Would Levi prefer a butcher?

(On Beauty - Zadie Smith)

—— ∫ ——

One doesn’t have to deserve it; one has only to leave oneself open to it.

(On Beauty - Zadie Smith)

—— ∫ ——

Michael was quite a bit taller than Howard, which Howard was unused to and disliked. He was broad too; not that freshman muscle that Howard saw in his classes, the kind that begins at the top of the neck and makes young men trapezoid, no, this was more elegant than that. A birthright. He’s one of those people, thought Howard, who looks like one quality very much, and the quality in this case is ‘noble’. Howard didn’t much trust people like that, so full of one quality, like books with insistent covers.

(On Beauty - Zadie Smith)

—— ∫ ——

Kiki suspected already that this would be one of those familiar exchanges in which her enormous spellbinding bosom would play a subtle (or not so subtle, depending on the person) silent third role in the conversation. Women bent away from it out of politeness; men - more comfortably for Kiki - sometimes remarked on it in order to get on and over it, as it were. The size was sexual and at the same time more than sexual: sex was only one small element of its symbolic range. If she were white, maybe it would refer only to sex, but she was not. And so her chest gave off a mass of signals beyond her direct control: sassy, sisterly, predatory, motherly, threatening, comforting - it was a mirror-world she had stepped into in her mid forties, a strange fabulation of the person she believed she was. She could no longer be meek or shy. Her body had directed her to a new personality; people expected new things of her, some of them good, some not. And she had been a tiny thing for years and years! How does it happen?

(On Beauty - Zadie Smith)

—— ∫ ——

It was as if a sudden gust of wind had lifted and propelled this odd little conversation and now, just as suddenly, let it go.

(On Beauty - Zadie Smith)

—— ∫ ——

Kiki watched Carlene leave the room, unsteadily, leaning on things as she went. Alone, Kiki, put her hands between her knees and pressed in on them. The news that some girl was about to start out on the road she herself had walked thirty years earlier gave her a vertiginous feeling. A clearing opened in her mind, and in it she tried to restage one of her earliest memories of Howard - the night they first met and first slept together. But it could not be conjured so easily; for at least the past ten years the memory had presented itself to her like a stiff tin toy left out in the rain - so rusty, a museum piece, not her toy at all any more. Even the kids knew it too well. Upon the Indian rug on the floor of Kiki’s Brooklyn walk-up, with all the windows open, with Howard’s big grey feet halfway out the door resting on the fire escape. A hundred and two degrees in the New York smog. ‘Hallelluiah’ by Leonard Cohen playing on her dime-store record player, that song Howard liked to call ‘a hymn deconstructing a hymn’. Long ago Kiki had submitted to this musical part of the memory. But it was surely not true - ‘Hallelujah’ had been another time, years later. But it was hard to resist the poetry of the possibility, and so she had allowed ‘Halleluiah’ to fall into family myth. Thinking back, this had been a mistake. A tiny one, to be sure, but symptomatic of profound flaws. Why did she always concede what was left of the past to Howard’s edited versions of it? For example, she should probably say something when, at dinner parties, Howard claimed to despise all prose fiction. She should stop him when he argued that American cinema was just so much idealized trash. But, she should say, but! Christmas 1976 he gave me Gatsby, a first edition. We saw Taxi Driver in a filthy dive in Times Square - he loved it. She did not say those things. She let Howard reinvent, retouch. When, on their twenty-fifth anniversary, Jerome had played his parents an ethereal, far more beautiful version of ‘Halleluiah’ by a kid drowned in the Mississippi, recalled Kiki now, looking up from her knees to the colourful painting that hung behind Carlene’s empty chair. Jerome had wept: the tears you cry for someone whom you never met who made something beautiful that you loved. Seventeen years earlier, when lennon died, Kiki had dragged Howard to Central Park and wept while the crowd sang ‘All You Need is Love’ and Howard ranted bitterly about Milgram and mass psychosis.

(On Beauty - Zadie Smith)

—— ∫ ——

She found it difficult, this thing of being alone, awaiting the arrival of a group. She prepared a face - as her favourite poet had it - to meet the faces that she met, and it was a procedure that required time and forewarning to function correctly. In fact,when she was not in company it didn’t seem to her that she had a face at all… And yet in college, she was famed for being opinionated, a ‘personality’ - the truth was she didn’t take these public passions home, or even out of the room, in any serious way. She didn’t feel that she had any real opinions, or at least not in the way other people seemed to have them. Once the class was finished she saw at once how she might have argued the thing just as viciously and successfully the other way round; defended Flaubert over Foucault; rescued Austen from insult instead of Adorno. Was anyone ever genuinely attached to anything? She had no idea. It was either only Zora who experienced this odd impersonality or it was everybody, and they were all play-acting, as she was. She presumend that this was the revelation college would bring her, at some point. In the meantime, waiting like this, waiting to be come upon by real people, she felt herself to be light, existentially light, and nervously rumbled through possible topics of conversation, a ragbag of weighty ideas she carried around in her brain to lend herself the appearance of substance. Even on this short trip to the bohemian end of Wellington - a journey that, having been traversed by car, offered no opportunity whatsoever for reading - she had brought along, in her knapsack, three novels and short tract by De Beauvoir on ambiguity - so much ballast to stop her floating away, up and over the flood, into the night sky.

(On Beauty - Zadie Smith)

—— ∫ ——

…he laughed and looked at his son with fond wonder. What a period this was to live through! His children were old enough to make HIM laugh. They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. They weren’t even the same colour as him. They were a kind of miracle.

(On Beauty - Zadie Smith)

—— ∫ ——

Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest ofour lives, at every border that we cross.

(Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje)

—— ∫ ——

Somewhere there is an album made up of photographs our father took of Claire and me that provides a time-lapse progression of our growing up, from our first, unconcerned poses to feral or vain glances, as the truer landscape of our faces began to be seen (…) He insisted on modest clothing, although as we grew older Claire would arrive in chapped jeans or I would reveal a bare shoulder, causing a twenty-minute argument. He found little humour in this. The yearly episode was something he needed, like a carefully laid table that would clarify the past.

We would study ourselves in this evolving portrait. It made us secretly competitive. One became more beautiful, or reclusive, one became more self-conscious, or anarchic. We were revealed and betrayed by our poses. There wasr the year, for instance, that Claire lowered her face to hide a scar. In spite of having been almost inseparable, we were diverging, pacing ourselves privately into our own version of ourselves.

(Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje)

—— ∫ ——

Why was Coop never in our father’s photographs? There were a few pictures taken of him, but these seemed preoccupied with texture and light. And there were some abstract reflections of him in a window, or of his shadow on the grass or on the flank of an animal. How many things could you throw your image against?

(Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje)

—— ∫ ——

Cooper did not take his eyes off her rememebring face, The way her blond hair fell across her cheek, the shadow of light under her shirt. He swallowed these moments and textures, as if preparing for an eventual drought. Her becalmed voice interpreted the traffic of small things around her.

(Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje)

—— ∫ ——

All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the unknown and familiar behaviour of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.

(Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje)

—— ∫ ——

We have become unintelligible in our secrets, governed by our previous selves.

(Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje)

—— ∫ ——

‘What is your mission, do you think?’ Vea had asked her once, And she didn’t know. In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is how we differ in our realities from the way we are seen by others. What Claire later remembered, for instance, of her walk with Coop back to her hotel in Tahoe that day was the pleasure in his presence, and how invisible she believed herself to be in their brief hour or two together. She was simply happy to be walking beside him, nursing her tiredness, listening to him talk about the world he lived in. This extraordinary recurrence of him back into her life, the grandness of the naes of the towns - Vegas, Grass Valley, Nevada City, Tahoe - seemed iconic, something discovered on an adult’s map. If she had been told that Coop mused on her brown shoulders, that he had been remembering how she had saved his life in that ice storm, that somehow SHE was perhaps the heroine of their meeting, she would not have believed such a truth. We relive stories and see ourselves only as the watcher or listener, the drummer in the background keeping cadence. Eventually we come to a ford where our river meets a road and covers it, or from another perspective, where the road has come upon the river and sunk below its surface, as if from a life lived to a life imagined. We have been following the river, so that now we must look on the road as a stranger. The depth of the water is about twelve inches, more when the spring storms come racing at low level over the fields and leap into the trees so nests capsize and there is the crack of old branches and then silence before each plummets in their fall. The forest, Rafael says, always so full of revival and farewell.

(Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje)

—— ∫ ——

The skill of writing offers little to a viewer. There is only the five-centimeter relationship between your eyes and the pen. Any skill in the divining or dreaming is invisible…

(Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje)

—— ∫ ——

He was not my father, but he raised me. I learned, I suppose, a manner from him. Also that any trade or talent could be shaped discreetly without the sparks of exaggerated drama. And yet, with all his modesty, he loved the grandeur of Victor Hugo - and those slow, obedient descriptions that walked towards revolution.

(Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje)

—— ∫ ——

Sometimes truth is too buried for adults, it can be found only in hours of rewritings during the night, the way metal is beaten into fineness

(Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje)

—— ∫ ——

…for Lucien, writing was a place of emergency. He wanted what he had done those first few times, without awareness, when the page was a PIGEONNIER flown into from all the realms one had travelled through.

(Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje)

—— ∫ ——

With memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways. We can circle time. A paragraph or an episode from another era will haunt us in the night, as the words of a stranger can. The awareness of a flag fluttering noisily within its colour crings me into a sudden blizzard in Petaluma, Just as a folded map places you beside another geography. So I find the lives of Coop and my sister and my father everywhere (I draw portraits of them EVERYWHERE), as they perhaps still concern themselves with my absence, wherever they are. I don’t know. It is the hunger, what we do not have, what holds us together.

(Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje)

—— ∫ ——

‘A new language?’

‘Yes. A language that will at last say what we have to say. For our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. They have not adapted themselves to the new reality. Hence, every time we try to speak of what we see, we speak falsely, distorting the very thingwe are trying to represent. It’s made a messof everything. But words, as you yourself understand, are capable of change. The problem is how to demonstrate this. That is why I now work with the simplest means possible - so simple that even a child can grasp what I am saying. Consider a wrd that refers to a thing - “umbrella", for example. When I say the word “umbrella", you see the object in your mind. You see a kind of stick, with collapsible metal spokes on top that form an armature for a waterproof material which, when opened, will protect you from the rain. This last detail is important. Not only is an umbrella a thing, it is a thing that performs a function - in other words, expresses the will of man. When you stop to think of it, every object is similar to the umbrella, in that it serves a function. A pencil is for writing, a shoe is for wearing, a car is for driving. Now, my question is this. What happens when a thing no longer performs its function? Is it still the thing, or has it become something else? When you rip the cloth off the umbrella, is the umbrella still an umbrella? You open the spokes, put them over your head, walk out into the rain, and you get drenched. Is it possible to go on calling this object an umbrella? In general, people do. At the very limit, they will say the umbrella is broken. To me, this is a serious error, the source of all our troubles. Because it can no longer perform its function, the umbrella has ceased to be an umbrella. It might resemble an umbrella, it might once have been an umbrella, but now it has changed into something else. The word, however, has remained the same. Therefore, it can no longer express the thing. It is imprecise; it is false; it hides the thing it is supposed to reveal. And if we cannot even name a common, everyday object that we hold in our hands, how can we expect to speak of the things that truly concern us? Unless we can begin to embody the notion of change in the words we use, we will continue to be lost.’

(The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster)

—— ∫ ——

… the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold. Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next. There are certain things that Blue cannot possibly know at this point. For knowledge comes slowly, and when it comes, it is often at great personal expense.

(The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster)

—— ∫ ——

Until now, Blue has not had much chance for sitting still, and this idleness has left him at something of a loss. For the first time in his life, he finds that he has been thrown back on himself, with nothing to grab hold of, nothing to distinguish one moment from the next. He has never given much thought to the world inside him, and though he always knew it was there, it has remained an unknown quantity, unexplored and therefore dark, even to himself. He has moved rapidly along the surface of things for as long as he can remember, fixing his attention on these surfaces only in order to perceive them, sizing up one and then passing on to the next, and he has always taken pleasure in the world as such, asking no more of things than that they be there. And until now they have been, etched vivdly against the daylight, distinctly telling him what they are, so perfectly themselves and nothing else that he has never had to pause before them or look twice. Now, suddenly, with the world as it were removed from him, with nothing much to see but a vague shadow by the name of Black, he finds himself thinking about things that have never occurred to him before, and this, too, has begun to trouble him. If thinking is perhaps too strong a word at this point, a slightly more modest term - speculation, for example - would not be far from the mark. To speculate, from the Latin speculatus, meaning mirror or looking glass. For in spying out at Black across the street, it is as though Blue were looking into a mirror, and instead of merely watching another, he finds that he is also watching himself. Life has slowed down so drastically for him that Blue is now able to see things that have previously escaped his attention. The trajectory of the light that passes through the room each day, for example, and the way the sun at certain hours will reflect the snow on the far corner of the ceiling in his room. The beating of his heart, the sound of his breath, the blinking of his eyes - Blue is now aware of these tiny events, and try as he might to ignore them, they persist in his mind like a nonsensical phrase repeated over and over again. He knows it cannot be true, and yet little by little this phrase seems to be taking on meaning.

(The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster)

—— ∫ ——

For the first time in his experience of writing reports, he discovers that words do not necessarily work, that it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say.

(The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster)

—— ∫ ——

In the third chapter he comes across a sentence that finally says something to him - Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written - and suddenly he understands that the trick is to go slowly, more slowly than he has ever gone with the words before.
(…)
What he does not know is that were he to find the patience to read the book in the spirit in which it asks to be read, his entire life would begin to change, and little by little he would come to a full understanding of his situation - that is to say, of Black, of White, of the case, of everything that concerns him. But lost chances are as much a part of life as chances taken, and a story cannot dwell on what might have been.

(The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster)

—— ∫ ——

His life had stopped the moment we went our separate ways, and he belinged to the past for me now, not to the present. He was a ghost I carried around inside me, a prehistoric figment, a thing that was no longer real.

(The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster)

—— ∫ ——

If envy is too strong a word for what I am trying to say, then I would call it a suspicion, a secret feeling that Fanshawe was somehow better than I was. All this was unknown to me at the time, and there was never anything specific that I could point to. Yet the feeling lingered that there was more innate goodness in him than in others, that some unquenchable fire was keeping him alive, that he was more truly himself than I could ever hope to be.

Early on, his influence was already quite pronounced. This extended even to very small things. If Fanshawe wore his belt buckle on the side of his pants, then I would move my belt into the same position. If Fanshawe came to the playground wearing black sneakers, then I would ask for black sneakers the next time my mother took me to the shoe store. If Fanshawe brought a copy of Robinson Crusoe with him to school, then I would begin reading Robinson Crusoe that same evening at home. I was not the only one who behaved like this, but I was perhaps the most devoted, the one who gave in most willingly to the power he held over us. Fanshawe himself was not aware of that power, and no doubt that was the reason he continued to hold it. He was indifferent to the attention he received, calmly going about his business, never using his influence to manipulate others. He did not play the pranks the rest of us did; he did not make mischief; he did not get into trouble with the teachers. But no one held this against him. Fanshawe stood apart from us, and yet he was the one who held us together, the one we approached to arbitrate our disputes, the one we could count on to be fair and to cut through our petty quarrels. There was something so attractive about him that you always wanted him beside you, as if you could live within his sphere and be touched by what he was. He was there for you, and yet at the same time he was inaccessible. You felt there was a secret core in him that could never be penetrated, a mysterious centre of hiddenness. To imitate him was somehow to participate in that mystery, but it was also to understand that you could never really know him.

(The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster)

—— ∫ ——

AS IF YOU COULD KILL TIME WITHOUT INJURING ETERNITY.

(Walden - Henry David Thoreau)

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