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[...] Will you tell dear Teen that’s why I haven’t called her? I’ve simply been up to my eyes with these decorators and upholsterers and God knows what since the day we were married and I hope she wasn’t annoyed at not being invited, I mean you only get married for the fourth time once but Bunker’s lawyers wanted to get it out of the way this year on account of his taxes since I’ve had these marvelous losses wherever you look, will you just hold him for a moment? and she thrust out the leash, digging in her purse.
She stood staring out over the pond for moments longer before she turned to him sitting there, his shoulders fallen, the watch closed tight in his hands. —I think, I think he was just trying to help, Oscar. He was, Harry was awfully fond of you, you knew that didn’t you? she said coming over to him, resting a hand on his fallen shoulder —trying to help you through a bad time that was all, he meant it for your own good he knew what you were going through, I think he admired you, that he really admired what you’d tried to do because he’d tried it himself that’s what he used to say, about failing at something worth doing because there was nothing worse for a man than failing at something that wasn’t worth doing in the first place simply because that’s where the money was, it was always the money . . .
—And Lily? from the kitchen, —the milk? and the butter? But she’d forgot them on this consuming mission to get his mind off things and was there another pail someplace? as the bucket brigade came about with each fresh gallon bearing a new lease of life for the goggling eyed tenants where their gigantic new landlord grudgingly restored the basic services of light and aeration, pH balance, filtration and an agreeable temperature sprinkled with krill and daphnia floating down upon them like the manna in the wilderness till another trip up the highway brought in a cohort of discus gleaming turquoise and red and cobalt blue bearing down like the Egyptians before green seafans, shaving brush and a fresh canopy of water sprite beckoned the promised land right down ten centuries to a Crusaders’ castle lofting its plastic battlements among the brown flecked young leaves of the Amazon swordplant —so they can hide in there if they want, isn’t it cute?
hehe
—Please excuse me yes how do you do, I’d just finished telling Mrs Lutz about my admiration for her husband’s handling of his last important case, I believe the only aspect that remains to be unraveled is the effect the merger may have in the Middle East markets and on cola enthusiasts of the Jewish faith but it’s hoped they’ll let bygones be bygones and feelers have already gone out to the Jews for Jesus who, but I’m afraid I could go on and on and . . .
oh my god lol
"One thing more," she said. "I'm not ashamed of any thing I've done. There's nothing to be ashamed of in loving a person and saying so."
It was not true. The shame of her surrender, her letter, her unrequited love would go on gnawing, burning, till the end of her life. (...)
After all, it did not seem to hurt much: certainly not; like more than could be borne in secret, without a sign. It had all been experience, and that was a salutary thing. You might write a book now, and make him one of the characters; or take up music seriously; or kill yourself.
epigraph - Rosamond Lehmann in Dusty Answer
There are beings who are overwhelmed by the reality of others, their way of speaking, of crossing their legs, of lighting a cigarette. They become mired in the presence of others. One day, or rather one night, they are swept away inside the desire and the will of a single Other. Everything they believed about themselves vanishes. They dissolve and watch a reflection of themselves act, obey, swept into a course of events unknown. They trail behind the will of the Other, which is always one step ahead. They never catch up.
There is no submission, no consent, only the stupefaction of the real. All one can do is repeat this can't be happening to me' or 'it is me this is happening to, but in the event, 'me' is no longer, has already changed. All that remains is the Other, master of the situation, of every gesture and the moment to follow, which only he foresees.
Then the Other goes away. You have ceased to interest him. He abandons you with the real, for example a stained pair of underwear. All he cares about is his own time now, and you are alone with your habit of obeying, already hard to shake: alone in a time bereft of a master.
wow
Over ten years have passed, eleven summers that raise to fifty-five the number of years that have elapsed since the summer of '58, with wars, revolutions and explosions at nuclear power stations, all in the process of being forgotten.
The time that lies ahead of me grows shorter. There will inevitably be a last book, as there is always a last lover, a last spring, but no sign by which to know them. I am haunted by the idea that I could die without ever having written about 'the girl of '58', as I very soon began to call her. Someday there will be no one left to remember. What that girl and no other experienced will remain unexplained, will have been lived for no reason.
No other writing project seems to me as - I wouldn't say luminous, or new, and certainly not joyful, but vital: it allows me to rise above time. The thought of 'just enjoying life' is unbearable. Every moment lived without a writing project resembles the last.
I have still not stepped through the portico of the camp. I am making no progress in my attempt to capture the girl of 58. It is as if I wanted to 'build her profile as meticulously as possible, adding never-ending psychological and social determinants', too many strokes to the portrait, thus rendering it illegible, whereas I could summarize with: 'Good student from a religious school in the provinces, raised in a modest home, aspires to an intellectual, bourgeois-bohemian lifestyle. Or, to adopt the language of magazines, 'a girl raised in an environment empowering to her self-esteem,' or, another variant, 'a girl whose healthy narcissism has been allowed free exercise.' I do not know if the girl in the car on her way to camp would have recognized herself in these descriptions. They certainly do not reflect the way in which she expresses or thinks of herself, though the words of Sartre and Camus on freedom and revolt may do. [...]
[...] should I adopt the view of French society in 1958, which reduced a girl's entire worth to a question of 'conduct', and say that in her naivete and lack of guile she is pathetic, laying the entire blame at her feet? Must I, as of now, move back and forth between one historical vision and another, between 1958 and 2014? I dream of a sentence that would contain them both, seamlessly, by way of a new syntax.
Everywhere abstraction reigns, abstraction made concrete. Everywhere abstraction's straight lines and pure curves order matters along complex but efficient vectors. But where education teaches what one may produce with an abstraction, the knowledge most useful for the hacker class is of how abstractions are themselves produced. Deleuze: "Abstractions explain nothing, they themselves have to be explained."