Michael > Recent Status Updates

“I pictured Villecourt at night, in the rain, selling key rings and old pornographic photographs on the street in the area around the Gare du Midi in Brussels. A mere shadow of himself.”

“I’ll read one book and be completely wild about it—I’ll trust it, I’ll assimilate it, I’ll sympathize with it, I’ll try to make it a part of my life. Then, I’ll read another book and, instantly, I’ll switch over to that one. The sly ability to steal someone else’s experience and recreate it as if it were my own is the only real talent I possess.”

“He passed into grateful sleep again, and it seemed a long while, hours later, before he was aware of the sound of their engines opening full, cremating the quiet of the first daylight. The noise rolled up from the runway, interminable, wavering in climax, and then gradually diminishing as they released the brakes and accelerated away, trailing their thunder, fainter quickly, then still fainter, then gone.”

“Perhaps it was true that through defeat men were made, and that victors actually lost, with every triumph, the vital strength that found exercise only in recovering strength. Perhaps the spirit grew greater in achieving the understanding that was first confused and then exquisitively clear after having lost.”

“He had reached a point, too, where a sense of lost time weighed on him. There was a constant counting of tomorrows he had once been so prodigal with. And he found himself thinking too much of unfortunate things. He was frequently conscious of not wanting to die. That was not the same as wanting to live. It was a black disease, a fixation that could ultimately corrode the soul.”

“When I got there the window was wide open and the bay breeze was blowing the pages of the ‘Chronicle’ at the foot of her bed. I couldn’t see her in there, but I could hear her flat voice inviting me to climb on through. It was her plain, straightforward voice, with no hint of false seduction or double-dealing. Midwestern. I’d never climbed through a sidewalk window before. It felt slightly illegal.”

“That summery night, I had decided to return home from the Charell’s on foot. … [S]orry that I hadn’t asked Alain more questions, but a kind of torpor had come over me: the entire evening I’d spent with them in the the twilight of the balcony had a dreamlike haziness. And again, down the empty streets of Neuilly, I thought I heard the clop of horses’ hooves and the rustle of leaves from 20 years ago.”

“…Yotlande watched the aged young man of sixty, alone at his table, head bowed under the weight of his peroxide couf. What was Pam-Pam Mickey thinking about this evening? And why do certain people remain prisoners, well into old age, of a single year in their lives, becoming the decrepit caricature of what they used to be in their heyday?”

“When I walk along the river, I remember the snow from those days, which coated the statues of Albert I, King of the Belgians, and of Simon Bolivar, symmetrically placed at a hundred yards’ distance. They, at least, haven’t budged, each one stiff as ever on his horse, indifferent to the swirls in the murky water that the houseboats leave in their wake.”

“Alas, with advancing age comes the realization that one won’t play major roles, but rather walk-ons, cameos.”

“Welcome to Sadness. Population one. A poetic line with a familiar ring, straight from the gates of the inferno, but I had thought it might work well here, as a glowing opener. I have no other defense.”

“But you I have no distance from. Every move you make feels like I’m traveling in your skin; every glance you take out the window, as though you were completely alone and dreaming in some other time. It does no good to wave my arms. Now everything’s reversed.”

“This was in the days when you could still mail-order wild baby animals from ads in the back of hunting and fishing magazines, like ‘Field and Stream.’ You just sent away for them with your check or money order, and a month or so later they’d arrive, snarling and spitting in a wooden crate, down at the train depot.”

“[W]e talked about the red string my teacher had once described. [He] had said each boy in the class had such a string tied to the baby toe of his right foot, but no one could see it. The other end was always attached to a girl’s baby toe. The string was very long, and it wouldn’t break even when the boy and girl were far apart… [T]his string meant that the boy and girl were destined to marry each other.”