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“You know what Borges said about fathers and mirrors? They’re abominations. They both double the number of men.”
When you are ten, shame stitches itself into you like a monogram, broadcasting to the world what holds you, what rules your soul.
It’s possible, he thought, that the experience of gratitude was itself a luxury, a topless convertible driven through a rainless life.
it was a hate that made nothing happen.
It’s simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what’s actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t fuck or steal or kill, and you’ll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a
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She said it in English. I woke screaming. English, fifty years of sun. I wept for a week. Separation from what you love best, that is hell. To be twice separated, first by a nation and then by its language: that is pain deeper than pain. Deeper than hell. That is abyss.
What I really loved, what I love, is having-painted. That was the high. Making something that would never have existed in the entirety of humanity had I not been there at that specific moment to make it.
Any volcano that has erupted since the Holocene, ancient history, is considered active. I haven’t. Does that make me inert? Or overdue? —from BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx
When I say “nations,” I mean “armed marketplaces.” Always. That understanding made the world a little bit easier to comprehend, if not tolerate.
