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Here a him; there a her. Here the young; there the old. Here the dapper; there the drab.
By the summer that Val and I had begun seeing each other, we were still in our thirties and had missed little more than a decade of each other’s adult lives; but that was time enough. It was time enough for whole lives to have been led and misled. It was time enough, as the poet said, to murder and create—or at least, to have warranted the dropping of a question on one’s plate. But Val counted few backward-looking habits as virtues; and in regards to the mysteries of my past, as in regards to so much else, he was a gentleman first.
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If excellence is to be expected, Miss Markham liked to observe, you can’t ask the wrestlers to throw the javelins.
Which is just to say, be careful when choosing what you’re proud of—because the world has every intention of using it against you.
Friends, Casper observed, are the envy of the angels.
When we stood up from the table we were all feeling the good graces of the second martini.
Old times, as my father used to say: If you’re not careful, they’ll gut you like a fish.
It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book,
The one thing for certain at Belmont was that on Wednesday at 5:00 A.M. there was no place for the common man. This was like the circles of Dante’s Inferno—populated with men of varied sins, but also with the shrewdness and devotion of the damned. It was a living reminder of why no one bothers to read Paradiso. My father hated wagering, but he would have loved the runarounds.
Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane—in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath—she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger. What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the conclusion of his own course, was that this risk should not be treated lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.
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What prompted you to do that? —I couldn’t stop thinking about you. —Blah, I said. —No, I’m serious. He looked at me with a gentle smile. —Right from the first, I could see a calmness in you—that sort of inner tranquility that they write about in books, but that almost no one seems to possess. I was wondering to myself: How does she do that? And I figured it could only come from having no regrets—from having made choices with . . . such poise and purpose. It stopped me in my tracks a little. And I just couldn’t wait to see it again.
I suppose we don’t rely on comparison enough to tell us whom it is that we are talking to. We give people the liberty of fashioning themselves in the moment—a span of time that is so much more manageable, stageable, controllable than is a lifetime.
It is a bit of a cliché to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time—by the slightest turn of the wheel, the wisdom goes, we influence the chain of events and thus recast our destiny with new cohorts, circumstances, and discoveries. But for the most of us, life is nothing like that. Instead, we have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options. Do I take this job or that job? In Chicago or New York? Do I join this circle of friends or that one, and with whom do I go home at the end of the night? And does one make time
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