Asymmetry

by Lisa Halliday

and so on, ad nauseam, especially if you contemplated the mounting sum of so many laboratory-spun chemicals commingling in your gut—words reducing a not insignificant portion of life’s remainder to standing in pharmacy lines and looking at your watch and pouring glasses of water and waiting and counting and eating pills.

one can play a piano only so quietly. About as well as you can whisper a tune.

the aim in playing was simply to play: to match finger to key, one after the other or in their cherrylike clusters, and to enjoy the result as one enjoys listening to a story unfold. In his tiny bedroom that was more a corridor than a destination, my brother hunched over his piano with something like the charged necessity that grips chain smokers, or binge eaters, or people who bounce their knees. Maybe it absorbed a nervous energy. Maybe it blunted a pain; I don’t know.

I have always envied my brother his affair with that piano. You can tell when someone is unbedeviled by time.

People shuffled forward in suits and saris, stilettos and sweatpants, pushing strollers or carrying neck pillows or briefcases or teddy bears or shopping bags festooned with two-dimensional bows and holly. Sometimes only one passport would be stamped; other times you heard two or three or four stamped in quick succession—like library books, once upon a time. And the overall rhythm of people advancing and stamps stamping had a kind of prolonged regularity to it, like a jazz improvisation that, for all its deviations, never loses its beat.

in order to be truly creative a person must be in possession of four things: irony, melancholy, a sense of competition, and boredom.

I cannot be certain whether if there were no photograph there would be no memory.

roaring a silent yawn.

seemed, if you will, not unlike a prima ballerina wanting to become a dwarf.

knowledge that they have the strength to make the irreducible answers sincerely their own, as difficult as that is to do. Everyone—irreligious people included—relies on irreducible answers every day. All religion really does is to be honest about this, by giving the reliance a specific name: faith.

Sometimes I wonder whether we hide lovers from others because it makes it easier to hide ourselves from ourselves.

Rather than fabulous and enviable, then, I felt in London the way you do when you take one step too many at the bottom of a flight of stairs: brought up short by the unexpected plateau and its dull, unyielding thud.

If God has a definite power over the whole of existence, one can imagine this power extending to His ability, whenever He wills, to replace any given destiny with another destiny.

We all disappear down the rabbit hole now and again. Sometimes it can seem the only way to escape the boredom or exigencies of your prior existence—the only way to press reset on the mess you’ve made of all that free will. Sometimes you just want someone else to take over for a while, to rein in freedom that has become a little too free. Too lonely, too lacking in structure, too exhaustingly autonomous. Sometimes we jump into the hole, sometimes we allow ourselves to be pulled in, and sometimes, not entirely inadvertently, we trip.

Funny, I thought, how when you’ve been involuntarily subtracted from the world its problems begin to seem less the random luck of a mostly innocent people and more the consequences of their own had-it-coming stupidity.

the metaphysical claustrophobia and bleak fate of being always one person.

the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another.

an artist is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through certain experiences sideways?

it’s true of any sort of depression—emotional, economic: it occurs only after you’ve been riding too high. We ride too high on deceptive notions of power and security and control and then when it all comes crashing down on us the low is made deeper by the high. By its precipitousness, but also by the humiliation you feel for having failed to see the plummet coming. As I said: sometimes it’s personal, sometimes it’s economic, sometimes even a kind of political depression sets in. Lulled by years of relative peace and prosperity we settle into micromanaging our lives with our fancy technologies and custom interest rates and eleven different kinds of milk, and this leads to a certain inwardness, an unchecked narrowing of perspective, the vague expectation that even if we don’t earn them and nurture them the truly essential amenities will endure forever as they are. We trust that someone else is looking after the civil liberties shop, so we don’t have to. Our military might is unmatched and in any case the madness is at least an ocean away. And then all of a sudden we look up from ordering paper towels online to find ourselves delivered right into the madness. And we wonder: How did this happen? What was I doing when this was in the works? Is it too late to think about it now? Anyway, what good will it do, the willful and belated broadening of my imagination? A young friend of mine has written a rather surprising little novel about this, in its way. About the extent to which w...

an essay on late style—the notion that an awareness of one’s life and therefore one’s artistic contribution coming to an end affects the artist’s style, whether by imbuing it with a sense of resolution and serenity or with intransigence, difficulty, contradiction.