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You think sometimes I dont listen. I think you listen. I’m not so sure what you hear.
I think what most people think. That it’s caring that heals, not theory. Good the world over. And it may even be that in the end all problems are spiritual problems.
As for the institutions, you have a sense that a place like Stella Maris was prepared with a certain amount of thought. They just didnt know who was coming. I think the care here is pretty good, but like care everywhere it can never keep up with the need. After so many years even the bricks are poisoned. There are remedies but there is no remedy. Sites that have been host to extraordinary suffering will eventually be either burned to the ground or turned into temples.
The simplest undertaking is predicated upon a future that has no warrant.
All recent history is about death. When you look at photos taken in the late nineteenth century what occurs to you is that all of those people are dead. If you go back a bit further everyone is still dead but it doesnt matter. Those deaths are less to us. But the brown figures in the photographs are something else. Even their smiles are woeful. Filled with regret. With accusation.
Did you ever ask her? Once. She denied everything. Pretty much. I would think it would be hard to deny. How long have you been in this business did you say?
I understood—really understood—that the equations were not a supposition of the form whose life was confined to the symbols on the page which described them but that they were there before my eyes. In actuality. They were in the paper, the ink, in me. The universe. Their invisibility could never speak against them or their being.
The world you live in is shored up by a collective of agreements. Is that something you think about? The hope is that the truth of the world somehow lies in the common experience of it. Of course the history of science and mathematics and even philosophy is a good bit at odds with this notion. Innovation and discovery by definition war against the common understanding. One should be wary.
Its general vacuity aside there seems to be a ceiling to well-being. My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow. Each deeper misery being a state heretofore unimagined. Each suggestive of worse to come.
Do you still play the violin? No. Were you playing it? Sporadically. You couldnt find time to practice. Wouldnt. How good did you think you would have to be? At least in the top ten. In the world? Yes. In the world. Where else?
Do you think you might have a tendency to divest yourself of the things in your life that actually sustain you? I suppose this is psychology. I dont know the answer to your question. What? Do I? Do we? How would such a predilection stack up against the world’s own desire to divest one of just those things. I think I understand your question. We’ve been there before. And it may be a superstition with us that if we will just give up those things we are fond of then the world will not take from us what we truly love. Which of course is a folly. The world knows what you love.
If birds couldnt fly they wouldnt sing. When you’re defenseless you keep your opinions to yourself.
You find yourself making a decision and finding two more decisions waiting and then four and then eight. You have to force yourself to just stop and go back. Begin again. You’re not seeking beauty, you’re seeking simplicity. The beauty comes later. After you’ve made a wreck of yourself.
Everything in my life is a part of my life. I dont have the luxury of forgetting things. I was probably eight or nine before I realized that things went away. When people said that they didnt remember I thought it meant that they just didnt want to talk about it. Where I live things dont go away. Everything that has happened is pretty much still here.
My experience has been that people with poor memories are just as ready to be right as anyone else.
A disappointed longing has a legacy of which its fulfillment can only dream.
My father’s group was about six miles from ground zero. They’d been given glasses that were very dark. I think something like welding goggles. But my father had brought his own because he didnt think you’d be able to see much with the government issue glasses. I guess you can read that as a metaphor.
Women enjoy a different history of madness. From witchcraft to hysteria we’re just bad news. We know that women were condemned as witches because they were mentally unstable but no one has considered the numbers—even few as they might be—of women who were stoned to death for being bright. That I havent wound up chained to a cellar wall or burned at the stake is not a testament to our ascending civility but to our ascending skepticism. If we still believed in witches we’d still be burning them. Hooknosed crones strapped into the electric chair. No one has ever seemed to comment that the
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When I was a child I used to daydream about living in some faraway place. I was always plotting how to get there. An imaginary place or a real one? I think you start with the imaginary. Later you get serious and you dig out the atlas.
You were comparing your math to a magic act? Yes. But surely you dont think that mathematics is magic? I think that it’s magic if you dont understand it. As you learn more about it it becomes less magical. Then as you realize that there is a clear sense in which you will never understand it it becomes magical again.
I dont think there is some way to prepare for death. You have to make one up. There’s no evolutionary advantage to being good at dying. Who would you leave it to? The thing you are dealing with—time—is immalleable. Except that the more you harbor it the less of it you have. The liquor of being is leaking out onto the ground. You need to hurry. But the haste itself is consuming what you wish to preserve. You cant deal with what it is you’ve been sent to deal with. It’s too hard.
You spoke of waking from ugly dreams. Did you ever see anything that was truly troubling? I never saw monsters. Creatures going around carrying their heads. I always sensed that the worst of it transcended representation. You couldnt put together something for them to look like. You didnt have the parts.
