Someone Has To Ask You A Question,"

I'm Like A Book You Have To Read. A Book Can't Read Itself To You. It Doesn't Even Know What It's About. I Don't Know What I'm About.

At One Campus Where I Was Lecturing, I Asked A Friend, "how Many Of My Colleagues Know I'm Gay?" He Answered, "all Of Them." I Wasn't Surprised. But, Just The Same, It Was Kind Of Spooky, Because Not One Of Them Had Ever Given Me The Faintest Sign That He Or She Knew. If I Had Spoken About It Myself, Most Of Them Would Have Felt It Was In Bad Taste.

Berlin Is A Skeleton Which Aches In The Cold: It Is My Own Skeleton Aching. I Feel In My Bones The Sharp Ache Of The Frost In The Girders Of The Overhead Railway, In The Iron-work Of Balconies, In Bridges, Tramlines, Lamp-standards, Latrines. The Iron Throbs And Shrinks, The Stone And The Bricks Ache Dully, The Plaster Is Numb.

His Life Has Been Lived, So Far, Within Narrow Limits And He Is Quite Naïve About Most Kinds Of Experience; He Fears It And Yet Is Wildly Eager For It. To Reassure Himself, He Converts It Into Epic Myth As Fast As It Happens. He Is Forever Play-acting.

A Few Times In My Life I've Had Moments Of Absolute Clarity, When For A Few Brief Seconds The Silence Drowns Out The Noise And I Can Feel Rather Than Think, And Things Seem So Sharp. And The World Seems So Fresh As Though It Had All Just Come Into Existence. I Can Never Make These Moments Last. I Cling To Them, But Like Everything, They Fade. I Have Lived My Life On These Moments. They Pull Me Back To The Present, And I Realize That Everything Is Exactly The Way It Was Meant To Be.