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Balance masks flaws,” he told me. I
always remember
what I fear most is my words floating separate from my body?
We make art insofar as it enhances our life, and insofar as it adds to the beauty of life—
It’s your unconcern that makes me want you to do whatever you want with my body, which can be for you, while yours cannot be for me. I can see that your body must be for many women, and though I once thought the same of mine—that mine must be for all the men who wanted me—I can just tease with it if you will keep on fucking me. I wouldn’t want your cum wasted on just one girl, not when there are so many girls to take your disinterested thrusting.
Fuck whichever sluts it’s your fancy to fuck.
I don’t understand this reading business when there is so much fucking to be done.
Yeah! And on the whole it makes you an intellectually more interesting person. The same might be true of sex. It seems very analogous. Like, Oh, it’s really fun to have sex with different people. Even if you liked to play squash, and you wanted to play squash with different people— SHEILA But sex is different from squash, no? Misha shrugs.
There will only be a burning without your body in the light. I will destroy all you have known, and all you will know is me.
Be like a shaking piece of grain in a sifter.
At first, the drugs gave us a feeling for the sublime in nature and ourselves. When we took them, we expanded into a thousand pieces. Then it seemed like cheating when we already were in a thousand pieces, and the sex and drugs didn’t expand us into a hundred thousand more or put us back together again.
I saw it all so clearly: I had come to New York as a student, like it was my teacher. And hadn’t I always gone into the world making everyone and everything a lesson in how I should be? Somehow I had turned myself into the worst thing in the world: I was just another man who wanted to teach me something!
I lay in bed and thought of cutting my wrists in the shower. I wanted to shoot myself in the face with a gun that released so many bullets at once, which would fan out and hit every part of my face and explode it into nothing, into mush. I tried to relax, but I could not because itchiness and heat were all over me everywhere. There was nothing in me that did not mourn. I knew I would always lose what was good. That was the kind of person I would always be. I could not believe the ripping, unbreathable pain in me, the shaking knot that twisted itself into my lower back, the ache in my jaw.
“You know, I find it really funny that someone who knows so much about painting, and who can talk so well about painting, and has such interesting ideas about painting—can’t produce beautiful paintings.”
His beautiful words became like silt at the bottom of the sea.
What sort of man cannot apologize?
every choice involved suffering—
was choosing one kind of suffering, while choosing to stay would involve another, whereas going back and forth as I was doing now was the worst suffering of all, as it was an attempt to avoid life, which would leave me finally with nothing!
Who am I to hold myself aloof from the terrible fates of the world? My life need be no less ugly than the rest.
felt my life was under the hand of an art student—a ruthless, Nietzschean art student.
But I had never wanted to be one person, or even believed that I was one, so I had never considered the true singularity of anyone else. I said to myself, You are only given one. The one you are given is the one to put a fence around. Life is not a harvest. Just because you have an apple doesn’t mean you have an orchard. You have an apple. Put a fence around it. Once you have put a fence around everything you value, then you have the total circle of your heart.
