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like the story of a nursing home resident who had one book, one whodunit, that she was able to read over and over as though it were new. By the time she finished it she would’ve forgotten everything that came before, and as she started reading again she would forget how it all turned out.
In middle school, she wrote a poem about her father that included the lines “I was the one in the burning house / I was the one you heard screaming.”
And in French the great question sounds quite different: Quel est ton tourment?
You have to make every effort, she says those people said to her, you have to keep working.
This is the kind of sentence that reminds me of Cusk. We are hearing a story third-hand. It’s a spiraling narrative.
Checking the time, I tap my phone, which is sitting on top of a book on my desk, which happens to be Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04, and see that the time is 10:04.
Lerner, another auto-fictionist. I’m not surprised he’s mentioned.
was startled to hear this. Recently, classical music had begun unsettling me in much the same way. Music I once loved and considered a blessing and a balm I could no longer listen to, a change I didn’t at all understand but that I found heartbreaking.
The cure is to listen to more obscure pieces. Avoid Beethoven’s symphonies and lean into his chamber music.
don’t know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.
Not sure I would dichotomize like that.
Everything that a writer writes could just as easily have been different—but not until it’s been written. As a life could have been different, but not until it’s been lived. —Inger Christensen
Quite true.
She did not have the courage to confront him, my friend told me the woman told the others in the group.
Cuskian again.
