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The book in my hand is The New York Trilogy. Auster: hermetic but nimble, both simple and twisted, at once paranoid and crystalline, and with an open sky between every word.
Some books stay in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory.
I asked myself if this was what structural violence looked like: to unconsciously teach someone about gifts, where to buy them, how to deliver them. To teach someone that you’re not supposed to buy the cheapest pair of pants, ready-made pesto, computer, or frying pan like I’d always done, but that you had to pick the best version. A couple of years later I saw that any notion of latent violence in this exchange was a figment of my own imagination, sparked by the experience of being abandoned and posthumously construed by a mind burning with indignation.
To read with a fever is a lottery; the contents of the text will either dissolve or penetrate deep into the cracks accidentally opened by an out-of-control temperature.
With her, my only reader and my best reader, my closest and most encouraging reader disappeared, and the hurdle to sitting down and finishing anything became insurmountable.
We installed ourselves in each other in a manner that only happens with people who are certain of a long life together, as if we’d received a guarantee that only death would tear us apart.
For my part, the conversations with Johanna lasted long after she left. Maybe they never truly stopped.
the little spectacle I’d later term ‘the frost’.
I couldn’t choose to hold on to or let go of feelings; instead it would be the feelings that finally gave up and released me.
I understood that ‘the frost’ was part of her – and not as deficiency but as tool, a useful little patch of ice.
The words for ‘forgiveness’ and ‘freedom’ are the same in several languages; an obvious point perhaps, but in this moment I realised that ‘letting go’ could be said in the same breath.
But just as we can’t choose our deaths, we can’t choose the extension of a broken relationship.
That’s all there is to the self, or the so-called ‘self’: traces of the people we rub up against. I loved Johanna’s words and gestures and let them become part of me, intentionally or not. I suppose that is at the core of every relationship, and the reason that in some sense no relationship ever ends.
Ever since my friendship with Niki I think of the anecdote as a form of chronic illness that attaches itself to some people; that compulsion to tell everything in the shape of a story, to turn life into a formula meant to captivate, impress, upset, or inspire laughter.
TV means that somebody else is trying to control my gaze, whereas books leave me to my own devices.
We’d say we were headed down to Drottninggatan to ‘get’ some books, not ‘buy’, as if the books with all their contents somehow already belonged to us, as if all we did was provide the bail to set them free and bring them home.
People who fell in love with Niki fell in love with the very things others were annoyed by, which put James in the position of incessantly having to manoeuvre and mediate.
‘Retroactive fidelity,’ the man across from him grinned, ‘maybe she expected you to be a twenty-eight-year-old virgin.’
He lived without plans and promises and without any sense of the future, he was afraid of ‘the terrorism of the everyday’, whereas I was helplessly attached to this everyday, the precise hours which pass in us with such care, the detailed plan for the aching miracle, which meant that the end to the story was perfectly visible from the start, a premise given in advance.
Only people who smoke once or twice a year smoke like that, they ‘smoke’, intensely communing with the mannerisms of smoking, demonstratively displaying their freedom.
We live so many lives within our lives – smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up – and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame.
I used to think that a sharper sense of being alive was to be found in the forest, that I would be able to walk my way to it between the tall pines, that I would find it while sitting alone on a tree stump with the sun in my eyes, or while gazing out on the sea from some rocks on the shore; that I could only be fully awake among the silent elements. But it turned out that I already had everything right here, in the details around me, that it’s simply a question of being attentive in looking at all of it, of letting myself go and directing my attention outwards, and I mean truly outwards.
It’s well known that whoever coined the expression ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ has never met a rape victim.
Most people who are worried about going mad don’t go mad,
Anxiety’s central task, as instructed by fear, is to run ahead and touch everything, circle potentialities with the intention of preventing them from happening, on and on and on in a process that never stops, that becomes one with life.
And I suppose that’s what’s at the heart of it for every person suffering from anxiety; the fact that life, by its very nature, is impossible to manage.
Like anyone with intense anxiety, she was perpetually floating towards the surface, consumed with keeping the world in place and looking out for potential dangers.
As far as the dead are concerned, chronology has no import and all that matters are the details, the degree of density, this how and what and everything to do with who.
When I was younger I often thought I should travel more and farther, spend more time in foreign countries, that I should be in a constant state of velocity so that I could get out there and truly live, but with time I have come to understand that everything I was looking for was right here, inside of me, inside the things that surround me, in the money jobs that became my actual jobs, in the constancy of the everyday, in the eyes of the people I meet when I allow my gaze to linger. I’m writing again after the fever, as if an old, welcome wound has opened and started to bleed, and I guess it’s
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