The Reader Is A Friend, Not An

Love Is About Bottomless Empathy, Born Out Of The Heart’s Revelation That Another Person Is Every Bit As Real As You Are. And This Is Why Love, As I Understand It, Is Always Specific. Trying To Love All Of Humanity May Be A Worthy Endeavor, But, In A Funny Way, It Keeps The Focus On The Self, On The Self’s Own Moral Or Spiritual Well-being. Whereas, To Love A Specific Person, And To Identify With His Or Her Struggles And Joys As If They Were Your Own, You Have To Surrender Some Of Your Self.

Patty Knew, In Her Heart, That He Was Wrong In His Impression Of Her. And The Mistake She Went To Go On To Make, The Really Big Life Mistake, Was To Go Along With Walter's Version Of Her In Spite Of Knowing That It Wasn't Right. He Seemed So Certain Of Her Goodness That Eventually He Wore Her Down.

You Encountered A Misery Near The End Of The Day And It Took A While To Gauge Its Full Extent. Some Miseries Had Sharp Curvature And Could Be Negotiated Readily. Others Had Almost No Curvature And You Knew You'd Be Spending Hours Turning The Corner. Great Whopping-big Planet-sized Miseries.

He And His Wife Loved Each Other And Brought Each Other Daily Pain. Everything Else He Was Doing In His Life, Even His Longing For Lalitha, Amounted To Little More Than Flight From Circumstance. He And Patty Couldn't Live Together And Couldn't Imagine Living Apart. Each Time He Thought They'd Reached The Unbearable Breaking Point, It Turned Out That There Was Still Further They Could Go Without Breaking.

She Wondered: How Could People Respond To These Images If Images Didn't Secretly Enjoy The Same Status As Real Things? Not That Images Were So Powerful, But That The World Was So Weak. It Could Be Read, Certainly, In Its Weakness, As On Days When The Sun Baked Fallen Apples In Orchards And The Valley Smelled Like Cider, And Cold Nights When Jordan Had Driven Chadds Ford For Dinner And The Tires Of Her Chevrolet Had Crunched On The Gravel Driveway; But The World Was Fungible Only As Images. Nothing Got Inside The Head Without Becoming Pictures.