More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Those who make their living flirting with catastrophe develop a faculty of pessimistic imagination, of anticipating the worst, that is often all but indistinguishable from clairvoyance.
He didn’t tell them what he now privately believed: that Josef was one of those unfortunate boys who become escape artists not to prove the superior machinery of their bodies against outlandish contrivances and the laws of physics, but for dangerously metaphorical reasons. Such men feel imprisoned by invisible chains—walled in, sewn up in layers of batting. For them, the final feat of autoliberation was all too foreseeable.
“Never worry about what you are escaping from,” he said. “Reserve your anxieties for what you are escaping to.”
“What am I saying—‘if I’m going’?” He spat a flake of tobacco at the ground. “I have to go.” “What you have to do, my boy,” Kornblum said, “is to try to remember that you are already gone.”
He could not shake the feeling—reportedly common among ghosts—that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future.
They stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, and that was when Sam Clay experienced a moment of global vision, one which he would afterward come to view as the one undeniable brush against the diaphanous, dollar-colored hem of the Angel of New York to be vouchsafed to him in his lifetime.
We have the idea that our hearts, once broken, scar over with an indestructible tissue that prevents their ever breaking again in quite the same place; but as Sammy watched Joe, he felt the heartbreak of that day in 1935 when the Mighty Molecule had gone away for good.
It seemed to him that his fortunes, his life, the entire apparatus of his sense of self were concentrated only on the question of what Rosa Saks would think of him now.
He was twenty years old, and he had fallen in love with Rosa Saks, in the wild scholastic manner of twenty-year-old men, seeing, in the tiniest minutiae, evidence of the systematic perfection of the whole and proof of a benign creation.
The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.
“They were children,” he said. “We were wolves.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said, reaching for Sammy’s hand. “Something like you and me is not a question of choosing or not choosing. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
I know that you still love me. It’s an article of faith for me that you do and that you always will.
And I don’t expect you to answer this letter, because I can feel the door to you slamming in my face and I know that it’s you slamming it shut. But I love you, Joe, with or without your consent. So that is how I plan to write to you—with or without your consent. If you don’t want to hear from me, just throw away this and all the letters that follow it. For all I know these words themselves are lying at the bottom of the sea. I have to go now. I love you.
Dear Rosa, It was not your fault; I do not blame you. Please forgive me for running away, and remember me with love as I remember you and our golden age.
Like many boys, Sammy supposed, Tommy had done most of his growing up when the man he called his father was not around, in the spaces between their infrequent hours together. Sammy wondered if the indifference that he had attributed to his own father was, after all, not the peculiar trait of one man but a universal characteristic of fathers.
