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Sure, there were some who ignored the fuss, who didn’t want to be bothered. It was seven forty-seven in the morning and they were too jacked up for anything but a desk, a pen, a telephone.
Some cops on the West Side Highway switched on their misery lights, swerved fast off the exit ramps, making the morning all the more magnetic.
I knew the Catholic hit parade—the Our Father, the Hail Mary—but that was all. I was a raw, quiet child, and God was already a bore to me.
People fell for him. On the street, women ruffled his hair. Workingmen punched him gently on the shoulder. He had no idea that his presence sustained people, made them happy, drew out their improbable yearnings—he just plowed along, oblivious.
Corrigan liked those places where light was drained.
He put on his clothes, stepped out into the landing, and she toweled his hair dry. “You won’t drink again, will you, love?” He shook his head no. “A curfew on Fridays. Home by five. You hear me?” “Fair enough.” “Promise me now.” “Cross my heart and hope to die.” His eyes were bloodshot. She kissed his hair and held him close. “There’s a cake downstairs for you, love.”
It might’ve been easy for me not to like Corrigan, my younger brother who sparked people alive, but there was something about him that made dislike difficult. His theme was happiness—what it is and what it might not have been, where he might find it and where it might have disappeared.
He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery.
The women struck poses. They wore hotpants and bikini tops and swimsuits, a bizarre city beach. An angled arm, in the shadowlight, reached the top of the expressway.
The silence of brothers.
Everyone in Dublin was a poet, maybe even the bombers who’d treated us to their afternoon of delight.
We seldom know what we’re hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what it really was, what it meant.
she had an interior order, and for all her toughness there was a beauty that rose easily to the surface.
The overexamined life, Claire, it’s not worth living.
I like fathers; I just think everyone should disown one.
The only thing you need to know about war, son, is: Don’t go.
The doorman nodded shyly when she came back in, cast a quick flick of his eyes to her breasts. ’Night, Mrs. Soderberg, he said. Oh, she wanted to kiss him right then and there. On the forehead. A thanks for peeping. It made her feel good. Thrilled her, to be honest. The cloth stretched tight across her chest, the outline of everything showing, the benefit of cold, a single snowflake melting down along the very front of her throat. Any other time she would have thought it crass. But there, in her nightdress, in the warmth of the elevator, she was thankful.
Are you okay, dear? says Gloria. —Oh, I’m fine, she says, just a little daydreamy
The latch on the door clicked. I lay still and trembling—it seemed possible to do both at once.
Finnegans Wake
it seemed to me that he had learned not only to destroy what was left behind, but also to poison what was to come.
On Nixon and Trump
Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.
On death
His hand brushed against mine. That old human flaw of desire.
The core reason for it all was beauty. Walking was a divine delight. Everything was rewritten when he was up in the air. New things were possible with the human form. It went beyond equilibrium.
Minolta SR-T 102.
The lobby of the building was all glass and suits and nice smooth calf muscles.
One of them was leaning out from the side of the columns on the south tower, held by a blue harness, his hat off, his body leaning outward, calling him a motherfucker, that he better get off the motherfucking wire right motherfucking now before he sent the motherfucking helicopter in to pluck him from the motherfucking cable, you hear me, motherfucker, right motherfucking now!—and
when he was young and headstrong, he’d been sure that one day he’d be the very axis of the world, that his life would be one of deep impact. But every young man thought that.
But a man learns sooner or later. You take your little niche and you make it your own. You ride out the time as best you can. You go home to your good wife and you calm her nerves. You sit down and compliment the cutlery. You thank your lucky stars for her inheritance. You smoke a fine cigar and you hope for an occasional roll in the silk sheets. You buy her a nice piece of jewelry at DeNatale’s and you kiss her in the elevator because she still looks beautiful, and well preserved, despite the years rolling by, she really does. You kiss her good-bye and you go downtown every day and you soon
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Always think of your doodles as masterpieces.
I told him that I loved him and that I’d always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it.
People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don’t. There’s no one knows except the person who carts it around her own self.
Sometimes she tries to claw her way through the awkwardness, but falls back down, suffocating.
she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.
We figured that Auntie would’ve wanted us to enjoy ourselves even in the worst of times.
The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
PHILIPPE PETIT WALKED A TIGHTROPE WIRE between the World Trade Center towers on August 7, 1974.
