Speedboat

by Renata Adler

many of the most important things, I find, are the ones learned in your sleep.

Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them.

My own mind is a tenement. Some elevators work. There are orange peels and muggings in the halls. Squatters and double locks on some floors, a few flowered window boxes, half-dressed bachelors cooling on the outside fire steps; plaster falls.

“I yield to myself,” the congressman said, at the start of the speech with which he was about to enter history, “as much time as I will consume.”

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.

I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.

That “writers write” is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

We spoke of a friend of ours who had died the night before, at forty-three. “But my God! I’m forty-one,” a bearded banker said. “Don’t worry,” his wife, who is German, answered. “There is no order. It is not a line.”

There are times when every act, no matter how private or unconscious, becomes political. Whom you live with, how you wear your hair, whether you marry, whether you insist that your child take piano lessons, what are the brand names on your shelf; all these become political decisions.

People who are less happy, I find, are always consoling those who are more.

Suppose we blow up the whole thing. Everything. Everybody. Me. Buildings. No room. Blast. All dead. No survivors. And then I would say, and then I would say, Let’s just have it a little quiet around here.

One of the little truths people can subtly enrage or reassure each other with is who—when you have looked away a month, a year—is still around.

altogether too much of life is mood.

It was in the interest of absolutely nobody to get to the bottom of anything whatever.

In every city, at the same time, therapists earned their living by saying, “You’re too hard on yourself.”

Now Near New Raptures),

it is best not to think, nostalgically, “Hell, we’ve been through a lot together,” unless you are prepared to add, “You have caused, over the years, varieties of unhappiness for which I have not, perhaps, been sufficiently grateful.”

If people were always to cancel on the basis of the next day’s regrets, no contracts would go through.

It certainly does not do to have too low a threshold for being insulted. Even the affectionate insult, or the compliment with any sort of spin on it, can reverberate in memory in awful ways.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re lovely?” is, of necessity, a minefield. There is no conceivable proper answer. It all ends in disaster anyway.

there’s something to be said for assuring the next that the water’s fine—quite warm, actually—once you get into it. You can’t miss it.