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The city, as a local wit has said, gives off the phosphorescence of decay. Buffalo runs on spare parts.
What is apparent everywhere here is the noble shabbiness of industrial decline.
a comic drone effect, a vaudeville owl, or a bored investment counselor among the unwashed, playing his 33 rpm statements at 16 rpm.
He’s a virtuoso of cast-off ideas,”
He experiences wanly the need for quiet and sincerity, some antidote to cleverness.
The tone carries with it an aura of super-sedated vagueness, along with a fuzzy pointless aggression, and the voice resonates with that sleepy absentminded hipster attitude.
She was an inventory-taker, a psychic accountant, habitually noting quantities and qualities in rooms and in people.
Courtly love requires that men must be educated through rejection, patience, and gift-giving.
“You know, few people really want to become individuals,” he says. “People claim that they do, but they don’t. They want to retain the invisibility of childhood anonymity forever. But that’s not possible except in a police state. In an ordinary life, you have to become yourself.” He takes a deep breath.
Every identity consists of a pile of moldering personal clichés given sentimental value by the fact that someone owns them. The fallacy of the unique! A rubbish heap of personal data, anybody’s autobiography. You can’t sell it or trade it. Besides, everyone has an autobiography, the principle of inflation thereby causing each one to be worthless.
It is an era when people still know how to smoke and eat at the same time.
In his private faith are several articles: Life is a gift and is holy. Love is sacred. Existence is simple in its demands: We must serve others with loving-kindness. Some entity beyond our knowing is out there. Nathaniel believes that this unknowable force is paying attention to him. He has no idea why. The God that watches and loves him cannot be a personal God.
As in a Cocteau film, I fell into the mirror and swam in the glass.
Someone reached down for me and ordered me to stand up, someone who looked like Jesus. In the early 1970s, many men in their twenties looked like that. Jesus had broken out on their faces. There was an epidemic of Jesus.
“You know: it’s hard to find the right words when you’re about to talk to someone you once knew when you were someone else, someone you no longer are.”
This meant that about sixty percent of human behavior was simply beyond her comprehension. She had never wised up, and she never would. And yet—I insist on this, too—she was not a child. She just had a permanent immunity to evil. It baffled her.
ALTHOUGH MOST AIRPORTS seem to have been designed by committees made up of subcommittees, and are inevitably unattractive and unsightly, Los Angeles International has an exuberant ugliness all its own.
Theresa was attractive without being pretty. She had the banal sensibilities of a local librarian who’s moved to the big city and has started serious drinking and making semi-comical overstatements to disguise her obvious gaps.
