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we see her, beneath linden trees, swaying as a child does, because the morning sways, because when it is the morning, isn’t everything swaying? It is only the old who are stiff, who can no longer feel the world’s slight breath.
When you are so used to saying something—isn’t it a kind of gladness to let it roll unexamined from your lips?
As much as we like to think there can be fairness, it is really a foolish idea, one we ought to have done away with long ago. Instead of fairness there is just order and its consequences.
Do the places we inhabit confine us by their very nature? Are we always imprisoned, eternally imprisoned, in body, in place, in community, do even our minds imprison us? What would it be like to be free, even for a second? Is that death? Do we live only in that final moment when we flee our shape?
Our minds behold the burning sun, and the thousands of revelers, in their wild riot, the tableau from overhead, a catastrophe of arms and fists, and all of it on the hardness, the impossible hardness of cement, roads banged flat, poured flat so that they might be walked upon, a place made expressly to serve as the stage for our life’s wreck.
We wear buckets on our heads and scream ceaselessly like lunatics—this is an accurate picture of life’s maraud.
These things have happened so often that it becomes clear: a man like this did not die because of what he did but because of what he was. We are the ones who have the privilege of having things happen to us because of what we do. Not everyone is so lucky.
Everyday life is the province of death. It is where all dying takes place—for the extraordinary lands we imagine simply do not exist. There is only the ordinary. It is what we inhabit, and when death comes to find us it is there that he looks.
What kind of suicide is it to kill in the world what you find in yourself?
