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March 23 - April 1, 2021
By the early Sixties, when I finally began getting stories published, I was quite certain that reality is often best represented slantwise, backwards, or as if it were an imaginary country, and also that I could write about anywhere and anything I liked, with a hope though no expectation that somebody, somewhere, would publish it.
His patience was that of pride. He understood Stefan’s yearning but could not share it, for he lacked nothing; he was intact. He would go forward in the same, splendid, vulnerable integrity of body and mind towards whatever came to meet him on his road, like a king in exile on a land of stone, bearing all his kingdom—cities, trees, people, mountains, fields and flights of birds in spring—in his closed hand, a seed for the sowing; and, because there was no one of his language to speak to, silent.
solecism,
Good word
All of them, twenty-two, twenty-three, they’re in charge. In power. Seeking structure, order, but very definite: violence is defeat, to them, violence is the loss of options. They’re absolutely certain and completely ignorant. Like spring—like the lambs in spring. They have never done anything and they know exactly what to do.”
Donkeys do have beautiful faces. They are supposed to be stupid and balky but they look wise and calm, as if they had endured a lot but held no grudges, as if they knew some reason why one should not hold grudges. And the white ring around their eyes makes them look defenseless.
What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can’t live on realism alone.
But if people trust each other they can grumble, and a good bit of grumbling takes the fuel from wrath.
But then who, looking at a hand, would say it was made to do easy work? You can see from the look of it that it is meant to do difficult things, that it is the noble, willing servant of the heart and mind.
MESSAGES CAME, JOHANNA THOUGHT, USUALLY years too late, or years before one could crack their code or had even learned the language they were in.
My choices have become less. I never had a great many, as my sexual impulses were not appropriate to my position in life, and no one I fell in love with knew it.
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.
Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.
It is hard to meet a stranger. Even the greatest extravert meeting even the meekest stranger knows a certain dread, though he may not know he knows it. Will he make a fool of me wreck my image of myself invade me destroy me change me? Will he be different from me? Yes, that he will. There’s the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger.
priggishness
Good word
evinced.
Good word
Why should they have sympathy? That’s one of the things you give because you need it back.
Kaph sat in the small yellow aura of the lamp seeming to look past it at what he feared: the new clone, the multiple self of which he was not part. A lost piece of a broken set, a fragment, inexpert at solitude, not knowing even how you go about giving love to another individual, now he must face the absolute, closed self-sufficiency of the clone of twelve; that was a lot to ask of the poor fellow, to be sure.
“Staking everything on it,” the next voice took up the story, “because nothing works except what we give our souls to, nothing’s safe except what we put at risk.”
expiation,
Good word
She thought of the pages blackening and curling as the fire read them.
Good writing
I did not kill myself, as several boys did during those years, nor did I kill my mind and soul, as some did so their body could survive.
What is it like to return from the dead? Not easy. Not for the one who returns, nor for his people. The place he occupied in their world has closed up, ceased to be, filled with accumulated change, habit, the doings and needs of others. He has been replaced. To return from the dead is to be a ghost: a person for whom there is no room.
sycophants,
Good word
You owe us the story.” That was a powerful phrase, among my people. “The untold story mothers the lie,” was the saying. The doer of any notable act was held literally accountable for it to the community.
I learned that the story has no beginning, and no story has an end. That the story is all muddle, all middle. That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence.
We talked endlessly, in a communion that I will cherish and honor all my life, two young souls finding their wings, flying together, not for long, but high. The first flight is the highest.
I want very much to live among my people, to learn who they are, now that I know with at least an uncertain certainty who I am.
I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks smooth, from orbit.
thinking is one way of doing, and words are one way of thinking.”
And though it is of the others, of relationships, that I write, the heart of my life has been my being alone.
By solitude the soul escapes from doing or suffering magic; it escapes from dullness, from boredom, by being aware. Nothing is boring if you are aware of it. It may be irritating, but it is not boring. If it is pleasant the pleasure will not fail so long as you are aware of it. Being aware is the hardest work the soul can do, I think.
capricious
Good word
alar
Good word
cairn.
Good word
And those who can talk, but don’t, have the great advantage over the rest of us that they never say anything stupid. This may be why we are convinced that if they spoke they would have something wise to say.
seneschal,
Good word
