Kindle Notes & Highlights
the admiration or criticism of others is immaterial, because nobody else can really know what you remember or how you remember it.
To us, it seemed like a super-reality, or, rather, reality itself seemed diffuse, disorganized, deprived of that rare, elegant concision that was the secret of cinema.
Forgetting stretches away, before and after;
This so-called “infantile amnesia,” the total oblivion that swallows up the first years of our lives, is a remarkable phenomenon, and has been explained and understood in various ways.
Small children lack linguistic or cultural frames to put around their perceptions. Reality enters them torrentially, without passing through the schematizing filters of words and concepts.
The immediate absorption of reality, which mystics and poets strive for in vain, is what children do every day. Everything after that is inevitably an impoverishment.
Words were his only guides in that great chaotic enumeration.
And anyway, he didn’t want to do anything unusual; he wanted to have a wife to hug and kiss and cuddle on cold winter nights like everyone else . . . You can’t get more normal than that. It’s the original urge of every living being, the motor of eternity that powers the car of time.
