do with him. He would never be popular: he saw that. “I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer. You must yield to my ardor without resisting me in the slightest, and be sure that I will respect your innocence.”
“Oh, damn,” said David very softly. “--Suck it yourself, sugarstick!”
Sometimes when I’m at work I find myself drifting off, thinking of the low light by which we dine, how he’s taken to keeping a bottle of my preferred bourbon in the house. But he must also accept the responsibility which goes with my gratitude.
He himself repeatedly said that—except for poetry—love was the only thing that absorbed his interest. Our entire reasoning comes down to surrendering to feeling.
At all events, his somber mood does not appear to have lifted.
42.
Joe was taking the offensive. “Say that I am asleep and tell her to go away. She depresses me.” He knew that her love for him would drown him, that he could not live with such a passion, with the sense of being always emotionally outclassed.
“Certainly not, it would be impolite. What were you doing–praying? Are you allowed to do that? Why would someone go on doing such things?”
“Why not,” he said rather stupidly.
“What are you thinking, boy?”
“Goddam if I know,” he said, his inflection implying that the answer to that question was hopelessly obscure. “It is a way of connecting with something larger than oneself and, indeed, larger than any self. I should like to see the mystery of being. I can’t find myself a second father.”
Exactly.
I like it when he calls me daddy. And yet the victory is not absolute. One who thinks he is a good father is not a good father; one who thinks he is a good husband is not a good husband. I never was very good at getting away with anything.
“What say you, Eleanor? And where have you been—if it isn’t indiscreet … ?”
She wore a blue dress and a white sailor hat. She did not know what to say, or how to express herself more genuinely. She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind. She reminded me of my mother, her infinite patience and the way she looked like a weeping saint asking to be slapped in the face. I can see her standing at the kitchen sink scraping carrots. She stands on the porch of her fabulous New England inn with her artificial dessert topping, made from lard, engine oil, preservatives extracted from offal and animal screams. History takes a certain course, and it adds up to New England. She highly disapproves of my deficiency (in household matters) and my (pathological) irresponsibility when it comes to heavy lifting, tidying up, cleaning and other domestic divertimenti, which, I admit, I hold in utter contempt.
It began to rain over the woods outside, and a mood of depression and of unspeakable loneliness suddenly felled me like a hammer-stroke. Soon I will be forty-four years old. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
I have not a desire but a need for solitude.
How often we need to be assured of what we know in the old ways of knowing—how seldom we can afford to venture beyond the pale into that chromatic fantasy where, as Rilke said (in 1908!), “begins the revision of categories, where something past comes again, as though out of the future; something formerly accomplished as something to be completed.” I love the old questions. But if the acutest sage be often at his wits’ ends to understand living character, shall those who are not sages expect to run and read character in those mere phantoms which flit along a page, like shadows along a wall? But I will not philosophize.
I would like to be a gigolo offering myself to all. (Wilde speaks of his “curious mixture of ardor and of indifference … I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a sceptic to the
“Oh, damn,” said David very softly. “--Suck it yourself, sugarstick!”
Sometimes when I’m at work I find myself drifting off, thinking of the low light by which we dine, how he’s taken to keeping a bottle of my preferred bourbon in the house. But he must also accept the responsibility which goes with my gratitude.
He himself repeatedly said that—except for poetry—love was the only thing that absorbed his interest. Our entire reasoning comes down to surrendering to feeling.
At all events, his somber mood does not appear to have lifted.
42.
Joe was taking the offensive. “Say that I am asleep and tell her to go away. She depresses me.” He knew that her love for him would drown him, that he could not live with such a passion, with the sense of being always emotionally outclassed.
“Certainly not, it would be impolite. What were you doing–praying? Are you allowed to do that? Why would someone go on doing such things?”
“Why not,” he said rather stupidly.
“What are you thinking, boy?”
“Goddam if I know,” he said, his inflection implying that the answer to that question was hopelessly obscure. “It is a way of connecting with something larger than oneself and, indeed, larger than any self. I should like to see the mystery of being. I can’t find myself a second father.”
Exactly.
I like it when he calls me daddy. And yet the victory is not absolute. One who thinks he is a good father is not a good father; one who thinks he is a good husband is not a good husband. I never was very good at getting away with anything.
“What say you, Eleanor? And where have you been—if it isn’t indiscreet … ?”
She wore a blue dress and a white sailor hat. She did not know what to say, or how to express herself more genuinely. She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind. She reminded me of my mother, her infinite patience and the way she looked like a weeping saint asking to be slapped in the face. I can see her standing at the kitchen sink scraping carrots. She stands on the porch of her fabulous New England inn with her artificial dessert topping, made from lard, engine oil, preservatives extracted from offal and animal screams. History takes a certain course, and it adds up to New England. She highly disapproves of my deficiency (in household matters) and my (pathological) irresponsibility when it comes to heavy lifting, tidying up, cleaning and other domestic divertimenti, which, I admit, I hold in utter contempt.
It began to rain over the woods outside, and a mood of depression and of unspeakable loneliness suddenly felled me like a hammer-stroke. Soon I will be forty-four years old. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
I have not a desire but a need for solitude.
How often we need to be assured of what we know in the old ways of knowing—how seldom we can afford to venture beyond the pale into that chromatic fantasy where, as Rilke said (in 1908!), “begins the revision of categories, where something past comes again, as though out of the future; something formerly accomplished as something to be completed.” I love the old questions. But if the acutest sage be often at his wits’ ends to understand living character, shall those who are not sages expect to run and read character in those mere phantoms which flit along a page, like shadows along a wall? But I will not philosophize.
I would like to be a gigolo offering myself to all. (Wilde speaks of his “curious mixture of ardor and of indifference … I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a sceptic to the
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