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[...] I went to bed deciding that to fall in love with this man would be stupid. I was lying in bed examining the phrase 'in love' as if it were the name of a disease I could choose not to have.
reminds me of the english patient
[...] I remember thinking it was odd that his diaries ran chronologically, not all split up like mine are. I leafed through some of the earlier ones, not reading them, but getting an impression, an unending list of new places, different jobs, an endless list of girls' names. And as a thread through the diversity of place-names, women's names, details of loneliness, detachment, isolation. I sat there on his bed, trying to marry the two images, the man I knew, and the man pictured here, who is totally self-pitying, cold, calculating, emotionless. Then I remembered that when I read my notebooks I didn't recognise myself. Something strange happens when one writes about oneself. That is, one's self direct, not one's self projected. The result is cold, pitiless, judging. Or if not judging, then there's no life in it-yes, that's it, it's lifeless. I realise, in writing this, I'm back at the point in the black notebook where I wrote about Willi. If Saul said, about his diaries, or, summing his younger self up from his later self: I was a swine, the way I treated women. Or: I'm right to treat women the way I do. Or: I'm simply writing a record of what happened, I'm not making moral judgements about myself-well, whatever he said, it would be irrelevant. Because what is left out of his diaries is vitality, life, charm. 'Willi allowed his spectacles to glitter across the room and said...' 'Saul, standing four-square and solid, grinning slightly-grinning derisively at his own seducer's pose, drawled: Come'n baby, let's fuck, I like your style.' I went on reading entries, first appalled by the cold ruthlessness of them; then translating them, from knowing Saul, into life. So I found myself continually shifting mood, from anger, a woman's anger, into the delight one feels at whatever is alive, the delight of recognition.
[...] I said, as I had said before: 'Don't you think it's extraordinary that we are both people whose personalities, whatever that word may mean, are large enough to include all sorts of things, politics and literature and art, but now that we're mad everything concentrates down to one small thing, that I don't want you to go off and sleep with someone else, and that you must lie to me about it?' For a moment he was himself, thinking about this, and then he faded away or dissolved and the furtive antagonist said: 'You're not going to trap me that way, don't you think it.' [...]
'As I crack up out of that 100 per cent revolutionary, I notice I crack up into aspects of everything I hate. That's because I've never lived with my eye on becoming what is known as mature. I've spent all my life, until recently, preparing myself for the moment when someone says: "Pick up that rifle"; or, "run that collective farm"; or, "organise that picket line." I always believed I'd be dead by the time I was thirty.'
'All young men believe they are going to be dead by the time they're thirty. They can't stand the compromise of ageing. And who am I to say they're not right?'
'I'm not all men. I'm Saul Green. No wonder I had to leave America. There's no one left who speaks my kind of language. What happened to them all-I used to know plenty once. We were all world-changers. Now I drive across my country, looking up my old friends, and they're all married or successful and having drunken private conversations with themselves because American values stink.'
A short story: or a short novel: comic and ironic: A woman, appalled by her capacity for surrendering herself to a man, determines to free herself. She determinedly takes two lovers, sleeping with them on alternate nights-the moment of freedom being when she would be able to say to herself that she has enjoyed them both equally. The two men become instinctively aware of each other's existence; one, jealous, falls in love with her seriously; the other becomes cool and guarded. In spite of all her determination, she cannot prevent herself loving the man who has fallen in love with her; freezing up with the man who is guarded. Nevertheless, although she is in despair that she is as 'unfree' as ever, she announces to both men that she has now become thoroughly emancipated, she has at last achieved the ideal of full sexual and emotional pleasure with two men at once. The cool and guarded man is interested to hear it, makes detached and intelligent remarks about female emancipation. The man she is in fact in love with, hurt and appalled, leaves her. She is left with the man she does not love and who does not love her, exchanging intelligent psychological conversation.
'Very well then. I can't write that short story or any other, because at that moment I sit down to write, someone comes into the room, looks over my shoulders, and stops me.'
'Who? Do you know?'
'Of course I know. It could be a Chinese peasant. Or one of Castro's guerrilla fighters. Or an Algerian fighting in the F. L. N. Or Mr. Mathlong. They stand here in the room and they say, why aren't you doing something about us, instead of wasting your time scribbling?'
'You know very well that's not what any of them would say.'
'No. But you know quite well what I mean. I know you do. It's the curse of all of us.'
'You're part of the team.'
'I don't feel that. I hate teams.'
'You think about it then. There are a few of us around in the world, we rely on each other even though we don't know each other's names. But we rely on each other all the time. We're a team, we're the ones who haven't given in, who'll go on fighting. I tell you, Anna, sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O. K., then I won't have to write it.'
'They said you were a left-winger,' said Anna, in appeal; interested that this was what she instinctively said in explanation of the state of affairs.
'Vintage, post-war.'
'I'm waiting for you to say: I and the other three socialists in the States are going to...'
'The other four.' [...]
cute
He had lost me. In the shadowy room, a single blade of sun pierced between the curtains and struck across the room, where it caught and blazed up in a tray of cut glass decanters, casting prisms that flickered and shifted this way and that and wavered high on the walls like paramecia under a microscope. Though there was a strong smell of wood smoke, the fireplace was burnt-out and black looking and the grate choked with ashes, as if the fires hadn’t been lit in a while.
i dont think 'pierced between' really feels right but this is pretty nonetheless
“No, not really,” I said curtly. Better wasn’t even the word for how I felt. There wasn’t a word for it. It was more that things too small to mention—laughter in the hall at school, a live gecko scurrying in a tank in the science lab—made me feel happy one moment and the next like crying. Sometimes, in the evenings, a damp, gritty wind blew in the windows from Park Avenue, just as the rush hour traffic was thinning and the city was emptying for the night; it was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live. For weeks, I’d been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I’d been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.