To Own A Certain Book - And

When You’re Young You Prefer The Vulgar Months, The Fullness Of The Seasons. As You Grow Older You Learn To Like The In-between Times, The Months That Can’t Make Up Their Minds. Perhaps It’s A Way Of Admitting That Things Can’t Ever Bear The Same Certainty Again.

Discovering, For Example, That As Witnesses To Your Life Diminish, There Is Less Corroboration, And Therefore Less Certainty, As To What You Are Or Have Been. [p. 65]

Sometimes You Find The Panel, But It Doesn’t Open; Sometimes It Opens, And Your Gaze Meets Nothing But A Mouse Skeleton. But At Least You’ve Looked. That’s The Real Distinction Between People: Not Between Those Who Have Secrets And Those Who Don’t, But Between Those Who Want To Know Everything And Those Who Don’t. This Search Is A Sign Of Love I Maintain.

I'm Interested In Such Things As The Difference Between How We Perceive The World And What The World Turns Out To Be. The Difference Is Between The Stories We Tell Others And The Stories We Tell Ourselves. There Is A Wonderful Russian Saying, Which I Use As The Epigraph Of One Of My Novels, Which Goes, He Lies Like An Eyewitness. Which Is Very Sly, Clever And True.

We Live On The Flat, On The Level, And Yet - And So - We Aspire. Groundlings, We Can Sometimes Reach As Far As The Gods. Some Soar With Art, Others With Religion; Most With Love. But When We Soar, We Can Also Crash. There Are Few Soft Landings. We May Find Ourselves Bouncing Across The Ground With Leg-fracting Force, Dragged Towards Some Foreign Railway Line. Every Love Story Is A Potential Grief Story. If Not At First, Then Later. If Not For One, Then For The Other. Sometimes, For Both.