Longing, We Say, Because Desire Is Full

What Simone Weil Said Politics Has Meant All Along, Which Means That You Fight For 11 Percent, 12 Percent, 13 Percent, That You Avoid Golden-age Thinking And Romantic Melancholy And You Just Keep Pushing.

Take The Time To Write. You Can Do Your Life's Work In Half An Hour A Day.

After A While I Understood That, Talking This Way, Everything Dissolves: Justice, Pine, Hair, Woman, You And I. There Was A Woman I Made Love To And I Remembered How, Holding Her Small Shoulders In My Hands Sometimes, I Felt A Violent Wonder At Her Presence Like A Thirst For Salt, For My Childhood River With Its Island Willows, Silly Music From The Pleasure Boat, Muddy Places Where We Caught The Little Orange-silver Fish Called Pumpkinseed. It Hardly Had To Do With Her. Longing, We Say, Because Desire Is Full Of Endless Distances.

It Turns Out - This Is A Metaphor Out Of [charles] Dickens - That The Raw Sewage Emptied Into The Anacostia Comes From The Federal Triangle. I Have A Sewer Map, And On It You Can See The Pipe From Which Congressional Wastes Empty Into The River That Then Flows Through The Black Neighborhoods Of Washington, D.c. It Is Very Expensive To Do Anything About The River, But Somebody's Working On It.

Everybody Has A Different Idea Of When Those Good Old Days Were, But Everyone Is Convinced That There Was A Time When Literature Really Mattered And That It Doesn't Now. They Also Tend To Believe That It Really Matters Someplace Else - In Very Improbable Places Often. Russia Is Someone's Idea Of A Place Where Literature Really Counts.