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How We Are Almost Nothing. We Think, In Our Youth, We Are The Centre Of The Universe, But We Simply Respond, Go This Way Or That By Accident, Survive Or Improve By The Luck Of The Draw, With Little Choice Or Determination On Our Part.

-Michael Ondaatje

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How We Are Almost

Michael Ondaatje

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How We Are Almost Nothing. We Think, In Our Youth, We Are The Centre Of The Universe, But We Simply Respond, Go This Way Or That By Accident, Survive Or Improve By The Luck Of The Draw, With Little Choice Or Determination On Our Part.

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In The Desert You Celebrate Nothing But Water.

You Can See That The Care He Took Defiling The Beauty He Had Forced In Them Was As Precise And Clean As His Good Hands Which At Night Had Developed The Negatives, Floating The Sheets In The Correct Acids And Watching The Faces And Breasts And Pubic Triangles And Sofas Emerge. The Making And Destroying Coming From The Same Source, Same Lust, Same Surgery His Brain Was Capable Of. (on New Orleans Photographer E. J. Bellocq)

What Is Interesting And Important Happens Mostly In Secret, In Places Where There Is No Power.

The Past Is Still, For Us, A Place That Is Not Safely Settled.

What Is Interesting And Important Happens Mostly In Secret, In Places Where There Is No Power. Nothing Much Of Lasting Value Ever Happens At The Head Table, Held Together By A Familiar Rhetoric. Those Who Already Have Power Continue To Glide Along The Familiar Rut They Have Made For Themselves.

I Tend Not To Know What The Plot Is Or The Story Is Or Even The Theme. Those Things Come Later, For Me.

I Don't See Novels Ending With Any Real Sense Of Closure.

He Has Been Disassembled By Her. And If She Has Brought Him To This, What Has He Brought Her To?

A Blind Lover, Don't Know What I Love Till I Write It Out

I Am Someone Who Has A Cold Heart. If I Am Beside A Great Grief I Throw Barriers Up So The Loss Cannot Go Too Deep Or Too Far. There Is A Wall Instantly In Place, And It Will Not Fall.

As A Writer, One Is Busy With Archaeology.

I Thought I Was Being Loved Because I Was Being Altered.

Truth, At The Wrong Time, Can Be Dangerous.

That's Anil's Path. She Grows Up In Sri Lanka, Goes And Gets Educated Abroad, And Through Fate Or Chance Gets Brought Back By The Human Rights Commission To Investigate War Crimes.

I'm A Canadian Citizen. But I Always Want To Feel At Home In Sri Lanka. I'm A Member Of Both Countries.

There Is The Hidden Presence Of Others In Us, Even Those We Have Known Briefly. We Contain Them For The Rest Of Our Lives, At Every Border That We Cross.

It's A Discovery Of A Story When I Write A Book, A Case Of Inching Ahead On Each Page And Discovering What's Beyond In The Darkness, Beyond Where You're Writing.

Jung Was Absolutely Right About One Thing. We Are Occupied By Gods. The Mistake Is To Identify With The God Occupying You.

You Are Doing Something Over Here And Over There Someone Is Telling You A Joke, Or Giving You An Important Piece Of Information About Sanitation, And No Matter How Weird The Other Subject Is, There Is A Connection, Or You Can Make A Connection. I’ve Always Loved History And History Is Collage, It Is A Juxtaposition Of The Good And The Bad And The Strange, And How You Place Those Sentences Together Changes The Whole Mood Of A History.

For The First Forty Days A Child Is Given Dreams Of Previous Lives. Journeys, Winding Paths, A Hundred Small Lessons And Then The Past Is Erased.

What He Would Say, He Cannot Say To This Woman Whose Openness Is Like A Wound, Whose Youth Is Not Mortal Yet. He Cannot Alter What He Loves Most In Her, Her Lack Of Compromise, Where The Romance Of The Poems She Loves Still Sits With Ease In The Real World. Outside These Qualities He Knows There Is No Order In The World.

Come. We Must Go Deeper With No Justice And No Jokes.

There Always Should Be Something Hanging Unfinished Before A Scene Ends So That There's A Reason For Going To The Next Scene.

But We Were Interested In How Our Lives Could Mean Something To The Past. We Sailed Into The Past.

Sadness Is Very Close To Hate.

We Keep Wanting To Save Those Who Are Forlorn In This World. It’s A Male Habit.

You Want To Suggest Something New, But At The Same Time, Resolve The Drama Of The Action In The Novel.

In The Desert The Most Loved Waters, Like A Lover's Name, Are Carried Blue In Your Hands, Enter Your Throat. One Swallows Absence.

In Canada Pianos Needed Water. You Opened Up The Back And Left A Full Glass Of Water, And A Month Later The Glass Would Be Empty. Her Father Had Told Her About The Dwarfs Who Drank Only At Pianos, Never In Bars.

I See Myself As Someone Who's Been Saved By Writing. God Knows What I Would Have Been, Become Or How I Would Have Ended Up Without It.

The First Sentence Of Every Novel Should Be: Trust Me, This Will Take Time But There Is Order Here, Very Faint, Very Human.

One Of The Things That Happens In Novels It's Almost Like A Continual Debate With Yourself. That's Why You're Writing The Book. It's Why You Create Characters: So You Can Argue With Yourself.

The Music Of Gavin Bryars Falls Under No Category. It Is Mongrel, Full Of Sensuality And Wit And Is Deeply Moving. He Is One Of The Few Composers Who Can Put Slapstick And Primal Emotion Alongside Each Other. He Allows You To Witness New Wonders In The Sounds Around You By Approaching Them From A Completely New Angle. With A Third Ear Maybe.

We Own The Country We Grow Up In, Or We Are Aliens And Invaders.

There Are Betrayals In War That Are Childlike Compared With Our Human Betrayals During Peace. The New Lovers Enter The Habits Of The Other. Things Are Smashed, Revealed In A New Light. This Is Done With Nervous Or Tender Sentences, Although The Heart Is An Organ Of Fire.

...sometimes We Enter Art To Hide Within It. It Is Where We Can Go To Save Ourselves, Where A Third-person Voice Protects Us.

When We Are Young We Do Not Look Into Mirrors. It Is When We Are Old, Concerned With Our Name, Our Legend, What Our Lives Will Mean To The Future. We Become Vain With The Names We Own, Our Claims To Have Been The First Eyes, The Strongest Army, The Cleverest Merchant. It Is When He Is Old That Narcissus Wants A Graven Image Of Himself.

Water Is The Exile, Carried Back In Cans And Flasks, The Ghost Between Your Hands And Your Mouth.

You Built Your Walls Too, She Tells Him. So I Have My Wall. She Says It Glittering In A Beauty He Cannot Stand. She With Her Beautiful Clothes With Her Pale Face That Laughs At Everyone Who Smiles At Her.

He Turns His Back To The Far Shore And Rows Toward It. He Can In This Way Travel Away From, Yet Still See, His House....he Feels He Is Riding A Floating Skeleton...some Birds In The Almost-dark Are Flying As Close To Their Reflections As Possible.

In Sri Lanka A Well-told Lie Is Worth A Thousand Facts.

She Moved From Being A Young Woman Into Having The Angular Look Of A Queen, Someone Who Has Made Her Face With Her Desire To Be A Certain Kind Of Person. He Still Likes That About Her. Her Smartness, The Fact That She Did Not Inherit That Look Or That Beauty, But It Was Something Searched For And That It Will Always Reflect A Present Stage Of Her Character.

And It Would Be A Spare Life He Would Be Certain To Lead As A Schoolteacher In Some Urban Location. But He Had A Serenity That Came With The Choice Of The Life He Wanted To Live. And This Serenity And Certainty I Have Seen Only Among Those Who Have The Armour Of Books Close By.

There Was A Time When Mapmakers Named The Places They Travelled Through With The Names Of Lovers Rather Than Their Own.

Nicholas Temelcoff Is Famous On The Bridge, A Daredevil. He Is Given All The Difficult Jobs And He Takes Them. He Descends Into The Air With No Fear. He Is A Solitary. He Assembles Ropes, Brushes The Tackle And Pulley At His Waist, And Falls Off The Bridge Like A Diver Over The Edge Of A Boat.

That's One Of The Great Sadnesses Of Any Life - Knowing What You Know Now And Then Remembering What You Did Not Know Then.

You Have To Protect Yourself From Sadness. Sadness Is Very Close To Hate. Let Me Tell You This. This Is The Thing I Learned. If You Take In Someone Else's Poison – Thinking You Can Cure Them By Sharing It – You Will Instead Store It Within You. Those Men In The Desert Were Smarter Than You. They Assumed He Could Be Useful. So They Saved Him, But When He Was No Longer Useful They Left Him.

Kirpal's Left Hand Swoops Down And Catches The Dropped Fork An Inch From The Floor And Gently Passes It Into The Fingers Of His Daughter, A Wrinkle At The Edge Of His Eyes Behind His Spectacles.

Moments Before Sleep Are When She Feels Most Alive, Leaping Across Fragments Of The Day, Bringing Each Moment Into The Bed With Her Like A Child With Schoolbooks And Pencils. The Day Seems To Have No Order Until These Times, Which Are Like A Ledger For Her, Her Body Full Of Stories And Situations.

I Believe In Such Cartography – To Be Marked By Nature, Not Just Label Ourselves On A Map Like The Names Of Rich Men And Women On Buildings. We Are Communal Histories, Communal Books. ... All I Desired Was To Walk Upon Such An Earth That Had No Maps.

Tell Me, Is It Possible To Love Someone Who Is Not As Smart As You Are? ...but Isn't It Important For You To Think She Is Smarter Than You In Order To Fall In Love? ...why Is That? Because We Want To Know Things, How The Pieces Fit. Talkers Seduce, Words Direct Us Into Corners. We Want More Than Anything To Grow And Change. Brave New World.

Falling In Love

Brave New World

Research Can Be A Big Clunker. It's Difficult To Know How You Can Make The Historical Light.

Her Hand Touched Me At The Wrist. "if I Gave You My Life, You Would Drop It. Wouldn't You?" I Didn't Say Anything.

The Trouble With All Of Us Is We Are Where We Shouldn't Be.

Meanwhile With The Help Of An Anecdote I Fell In Love. Words Caravaggio. They Have A Power.

How Does This Happen? To Fall In Love And Be Disassembled.

Falling In Love

The One Of The Great Sadnesses Of Any Life Is Knowing What You Know Now And Then Remembering What You Did Not Know Then.

There Was Always, He Thought, This Pleasure Ahead Of Him, An Ace Of Joy Up His Sleeve So He Could Say You Can Do Anything To Me, Take Everything Away, Put Me In Prison, But I Will Know [her] When We Are Old.

I See The Poem Or The Novel Ending With An Open Door.

All I Desired Was To Walk Upon Such An Earth That Had No Maps.

Men Had Always Been The Reciters Of Poetry In The Desert.

People Don't Write About Kids; You Have To Give Them A Lot Of Freedom, And That Causes Anarchy And That Causes Farce.

Before The Real City Could Be Seen It Had To Be Imagined, The Way Rumours And Tall Tales Were A Kind Of Charting.

I Think Precision In Writing Goes Hand In Hand With Not Trying To Say Everything. You Try And Say Two-thirds, So The Reader Will Involve Himself Or Herself.

He Came To This Country Like A Torch On Fire And He Swallowed Air As He Walked Forward And He Gave Out Light

It's Why You Create Characters: So You Can Argue With Yourself.

If Any Of You On Your Journeys See Her-shout To Me, Whistle...he Sang, And It Became A Habit For Audiences To Shout And Whistle In Response To Those Lines. There Was Nowhere He Could Hide In Such A Song That Had All Of Its Doors And Windows Open, So That He Could Walk Out Of It Artlessly, The Antiphonal Responses Blending With Him As If He Were No Longer On Stage.

Love Is So Small It Can Tear Itself Through The Eye Of A Needle

Fathers Die.you Keep On Loving Them In Any Way You Can.you Can't Hide Him Away In Your Heart.

I Want The Marginality To Come Into The Center. This Is The Thing I Was Conscious Of Growing Up, When I Later Lived In England. I Saw All These War Movies That Came Out Shortly After The War, And They Were All About The War Being Fought By Englishmen Or Americans, There Were No Other "allies" In It - From India Or Australia, Etc.

Politically I Don't Believe Anymore That We Can Only Have One Voice To A Story, It's Like Having One Radio Station To Represent A Country.

I Don't Have A Plan For A Story When I Sit Down To Write. I Would Get Quite Bored Carrying It Out.

Githa Hariharan's Fiction Is Wonderful-full Of Subtleties And Humor And Tenderness.

To Write About Someone Like Myself Would Be Very Limiting.

So Many Nurses Had Turned Into Emotionally Disturbed Handmaidens Of The War, In Their Yellow-and-crimson Uniforms With Bone Buttons.

Most Of The Time In Our World, Truth Is Just Opinion.

Women Want Everything Of A Lover. And Too Often I Would Sink Below The Surface. So Armies Disappear Under Sand. And There Was Her Fear Of Her Husband, Her Belief In Her Honour, My Old Desire For Self-sufficiency, My Disappearances, Her Suspicions Of Me, My Disbelief That She Loved Me. The Paranoia And Claustrophobia Of Hidden Love.

I Have Spent Weeks In The Desert, Forgetting To Look At The Moon, He Says, As A Married Man May Spend Days Never Looking Into The Face Of His Wife. These Are Not Sins Of Omission But Signs Of Pre-occuopation.

As Someone Who Writes Novels That Are Often Set In Other Periods Of Time Or Other Ages Or Other Landscapes, There's A Certain Element Of Research I Have To Do, And Often, The More Laconic People Are, The More Interesting They Become.

Politically I Also Don't Believe Anymore That We Can Only Have One Voice To A Story, It's Like Having One Radio Station To Represent A Country. You Want The Politics Of Any Complicated Situation To Be Complicated In A Book Of Fiction Or Nonfiction.

This Was The Time In Her Life That She Fell Upon Books As The Only Door Out Of Her Cell. They Became Half Her World.

A Novel Is A Mirror Walking Down A Road

He Walked Out Of The Hospital Into The Sun, Into Open Air For The First Time In Months, Out Of The Green-lit Rooms That Lay Like Glass In His Mind. He Stood There Breathing Everything In, The Hurry Of Everyone. First, He Thought, I Need Shoes With Rubber On The Bottom. I Need Gelato.

What Began It All Was The Bright Bone Of A Dream I Could Hardly Hold Onto.

Once I've Discovered The Story, I Might Restructure It, Maybe Move Things Around, Set Up A Clue That Something Is Going To Happen Later, But That Happens Much Later In An Editorial Capacity.

When Someone Speaks He Looks At A Mouth, Not Eyes And Their Colors, Which, It Seems To Him, Will Always Alter Depending On The Light Of A Room, The Minute Of The Day. Mouths Reveal Insecurity Or Smugness Or Any Other Point On The Spectrum Of Character. For Him They Are The Most Intricate Aspect Of Faces. He's Never Sure What An Eye Reveals. But He Can Read How Mouths Darken Into Callousness, Suggest Tenderness. One Can Often Misjudge An Eye From Its Reaction To A Simple Beam Of Sunlight.

We All Have An Old Knot In The Heart We Wish To Untie.

We Are Expanded By Tears, We Are Told, Not Reduced By Them.

She Had A Laugh That Hinted It Had Rolled Around Once Or Twice In The Mud.

When I Read Biographies, I Skip The First Thirty Pages About The Childhood Because It Doesn't Seem Interesting To Me.

So The Books For The Englishman, As He Listened Intently Or Not, Had Gaps Of Plot Like Sections Of A Road Washed Out By Storms, Missing Incidents As If Locusts Had Consumed A Section Of Tapestry, As If Plaster Loosened By The Bombing Had Fallen Away From A Mural At Night.

I've Always Loved History And History Is Collage, It Is A Juxtaposition Of The Good And The Bad And The Strange, And How You Place Those Sentences Together Changes The Whole Mood Of A History.

Everything Is Biographical, Lucian Freud Says. What We Make, Why It Is Made, How We Draw A Dog, Who It Is We Are Drawn To, Why We Cannot Forget. Everything Is Collage, Even Genetics. There Is The Hidden Presence Of Others In Us, Even Those We Have Known Briefly. We Contain Them For The Rest Of Our Lives, At Every Border We Cross.

Forget Everything

This Last Night We Tear Into Each Other, As If To Wound, As If To Find The Key To Everything Before Morning.

The Desert Could Not Be Claimed Or Owned — It Was A Piece Of Cloth Carried By Winds, Never Held Down By Stones, And Given A Hundred Shifting Names Before Canterbury Existed, Long Before Battles And Treaties Quilted Europe And The East ... All Of Us, Even Those With European Homes And Children In The Distance, Wished To Remove The Clothing Of Our Countries. It Was A Place Of Faith. We Disappeared Into Landscape.

I Have To Teach Myself Not To Read Too Much Into Everything. It Comes From Too Long Having To Read Into Hardly Anything At All.

So We Came To Understand That Small And Important Thing, That Our Lives Could Be Large With Interesting Strangers Who Would Pass Us Without Any Personal Involvement.

We Die Containing A Richness Of Lovers And Tribes, Tastes We Have Swallowed, Bodies We Have Plunged Into And Swum Up As If Rivers Of Wisdom, Characters We Have Climbed Into As If Trees, Fears We Have Hidden In As If Caves. I Wish For All This To Be Marked On By Body When I Am Dead. I Believe In Such Cartography - To Be Marked By Nature, Not Just To Label Ourselves On A Map Like The Names Of Rich Men And Women On Buildings. We Are Communal Histories, Communal Books. We Are Not Owned Or Monogamous In Our Taste Or Experience.

I Am Not In Love With Him, I Am In Love With Ghosts. So Is He, He's In Love With Ghosts.

Between The Kitchen And The Destroyed Chapel A Door Led Into An Oval-shaped Library. The Space Inside Seemed Safe Except For A Large Hole At Portrait Level In The Far Wall, Caused By Mortar-shell Attack On The Villa Two Months Earlier. The Rest Of The Room Had Adapted Itself To This Wound, Accepting The Habits Of Weather, Evening Stars, The Sound Of Birds.

When You're Writing, It's As If You're Within A Kind Of Closed World.

Do You Understand The Sadness Of Geography?

The Joyful Will Stoop With Sorrow, And When You Have Gone To The Earth I Will Let My Hair Grow Long For Your Sake, I Will Wander Through The Wilderness In The Skin Of A Lion

When I Began To Write Novels, I Wanted To Keep That Element Of Interaction With The Reader That Exists In Poetry, Not Just For The Reader To Be Shepherded From A To B To C To D But To Participate, And The Less You Say Sometimes, The Better It Is. You Know, It's The Way When Someone Speaks Very Quietly, You Move Forward So You Can Listen More Carefully.

He Will Hear The Rain Before He Feels It, A Clicking On The Dry Grass, On The Olive Leaves.

A Writer Uses A Pen Instead Of A Scalpel Or Blow Torch.

You Must Talk To Me, Caravaggio. Or Am I Just A Book? Something To Be Read, Some Creature To Be Tempted Out Of A Loch And Shot Full Of Morphine, Full Of Corridors, Lies, Loose Vegetation, Pockets Of Stones.

If You Look At Japanese Film, It Is Made Up Of Collage Or Bricolage, It Is Made Up Of Lists, And Suddenly When You Stand Back From The Lists You Begin To See The Pattern Of A Life.

She Is A Woman Of Honour And Smartness Whose Wild Leaves Out Luck, Always Taking Risks, And There Is Something In Her Brow Now, That Only She Can Recognize In A Mirror. Ideal And Idealistic In That Shiny Dark Hair! People Fall In Love With Her. She Is A Woman I Don’t Know Well Enough To Hold In My Wing, If Writers Have Wings, To Harbour For The Rest Of My Life.

Falling In Love

She Lights A Match In The Dark Hall And Moves It Onto The Wick Of The Candle. Light Lifts Itself Onto Her Shoulders. She Is On Her Knees. She Puts Her Hands On Her Thighs And Breathes In The Smell Of The Sulphur. She Imagines She Slap Breathes In Light.

There Is A Story, Always Ahead Of You. Barely Existing. Only Gradually Do You Attach Yourself To It And Feed It. You Discover The Carapace That Will Contain And Test Your Character. You Will Find In This Way The Path Of Your Life.

There's A Lot Of Thievery Involved In Writing. You're Breaking Into Other People's Spaces And Other People's Stories.

It's An Odd State To Be In, Blowing The Whistle On Your Home Country.

All I Ever Wanted Was A World Without Maps.

Don't We Forgive Everything Of A Lover? We Forgive Selfishness, Desire, Guile. As Long As We Are The Motive For It...there Are Some European Words You Can Never Translate Properly Into Another Language.

She Had Always Wanted Words, She Loved Them; Grew Up On Them. Words Gave Her Clarity, Brought Reason, Shape.

Here. Where I Am Anonymous And Alone In A White Room With No History And No Parading. So I Can Make Something Unknown In The Shape Of This Room. Where I Am King Of Corners.

Death Means You Are In The Third Person.

Right Now, I Have No Idea What I Will Write Or If I Will Write Again.

I Promised To Tell You How One Falls In Love.

Falling In Love

A Man In A Desert Can Hold Absence In His Cupped Hands, Knowing It Is Something That Feeds Him More Than Water.

You Don't Want To Write Your Own Opinion, You Don't Want To Just Represent Yourself, But Represent Yourself Through Someone Else.

In The Book The Relationship With Katharine And Almasy Is Sort Of Only In The Patient's Mind.

Half A Page--and The Morning Is Already Ancient.

You're Getting Everyone's Point Of View At The Same Time, Which For Me, Is The Perfect State For A Novel: A Cubist State, The Cubist Novel.

Nowadays He Doesn't Think Of His Wife, Though He Knows He Can Turn Around And Evoke Every Move Of Her, Describe Any Aspect Of Her, The Weigh Of Her Wrist On His Heart During The Night.

From This Point On, She Whispered, We Will Either Find Or Lose Our Souls.

I Often Need A Limited Space. It's Like Having A House To Roam Around In And Reinvent And Have Things To Happen In, Kind Of Like A French Farce. Doors Opening, Doors Closing, New People Arriving, And Disappearing, And So Forth.

Love Is The Use One Makes Of Another.

She Had Lived In That House Fourteen Years, And Every Year She Had Demanded Of John That She Be Given A Pet Of Some Strange Exotic Breed. Not That She Did Not Have Enough Animals. She Had Collected Several Wild And Broken Animals That, In A Way, Had Become Exotic By Their Breaking. Their Roof Would Have Collapsed From The Number Of Birds Who Might Have Lived There If The Desert Hadn't Killed Three- Quarters Of Those That Tried To Cross It. Still Every Animal That Came Within A Certain Radius Of That House Was Given A Welcome-the Tame, The Half Born, The Wild, The Wounded.

I Love The Performance Of A Craft, Whether It Is Modest Or Mean-spirited, Yet I Walk Away When Discussions Of It Begin - As If One Should Ask A Gravedigger What Brand Of Shovel He Uses Or Whether He Prefers To Work At Noon Or In Moonlight. I Am Interested Only In The Care Taken, And Those Secret Rehearsals Behind It. Even If I Do Not Understand Fully What Is Taking Place.

I Believe This. When We Meet Those We Fall In Love With, There Is An Aspect Of Our Spirit That Is Historian, A Bit Of A Pedant Who Reminisces Or Remembers A Meeting When The Other Has Passed By Innocently…but All Parts Of The Body Must Be Ready For The Other, All Atoms Must Jump In One Direction For Desire To Occur.

Falling In Love

Over The Years, Confusing Fragments, Lost Corners Of Stories, Have A Clearer Meaning When Seen In A New Light, A Different Place.

Snap. Lady With Dog. Lady On Sofa Half-naked. Snap. Naked Lady. Lady Next To Dresser. Lady At Window. Snap. Lady On Balcony Sunlight. (on New Orleans Photographer E. J. Bellocq)

There's More Danger In The Violence You Don't Face.

Some Events Take A Lifetime To Reveal Their Damage And Influence.

Her Father Had Taught Her About Hands. About A Dog's Paws. Whenever Her Father Was Alone With A Dog In A House He Would Lean Over And Smell The Skin At The Base Of Its Paw. This, He Would Say, As If Coming Away From A Brandy Snifter, Is The Greatest Smell In The World! A Bouquet! Great Rumours Of Travel! She Would Pretend Disgust, But The Dog's Paw Was A Wonder: The Smell Of It Never Suggested Dirt. It's A Cathedral! Her Father Had Said, So-and-so's Garden, That Field Of Grasses, A Walk Through Cyclamen--a Concentration Of Hints Of All The Paths The Animal Had Taken During The Day.

It Doubles Your Perception, To Write From The Point Of View Of Someone You're Not.

The Rulers Of The Country Generally Believed That Betting Eliminates Strikes. Men Had To Work In Order To Gamble.

She Had Grown Older. And He Loved Her More Now Than He Had Loved Her When He Understood Her Better, When She Was The Product Of Her Parents. What She Was Now Was What She Herself Had Decided To Become.

I Kind Of Was Shoveled Onto A Boat At 11 And Went To England. I Didn't Have Any Parent Watching Over Me. It Was Very Free And May Have Been A Bit Of A Scary Time For Me, But I Really Don't Remember Much About The Voyage Apart From Playing Ping-pong A Lot With A Couple Friends.

... The Desert, Where There Is The Communal Book Of Moonlight. We Were Among The Rumour Of Wells. In The Palace Of Winds.

Her Life With Others No Longer Interests Him. He Wants Only Her Stalking Beauty, Her Theatre Of Expressions. He Wants The Minute Secret Reflection Between Them, The Depth Of Field Minimal, Their Foreignness Intimate Like Two Pages Of A Closed Book.

He Knows That The Only Way He Can Accept Losing Her Is If He Can Continue To Hold Her Or Be Held By Her. If They Can Somehow Nurse Each Other Out Of This. Not With A Wall.

I Want To Die On Your Chest But Not Yet She Wrote Sometime In The 13th Century Of Our Love

How We Are Almost Nothing. We Think, In Our Youth, We Are The Centre Of The Universe, But We Simply Respond, Go This Way Or That By Accident, Survive Or Improve By The Luck Of The Draw, With Little Choice Or Determination On Our Part.

All This Beethoven And Rain

What Night Gave Rafael Was A Formlessness In Which Everything Had A Purpose. As If Darkness Had A Hidden Musical Language.

A Love Story Is Not About Those Who Lost Their Heart But About Those Who Find That Sullen Inhabitant Who, When It Is Stumbled Upon, Means The Body Can Fool No One, Can Fool Nothing—not The Wisdom Of Sleep Or The Habit Of Social Graces. It Is A Consuming Of Oneself And The Past.

A Postcard. Neat Handwriting Fills The Rectangle. Half My Days I Cannot Bear To Touch You. The Rest Of My Time I Feel Like It Doesn’t Matter If I Will Ever See You Again. It Isn’t The Morality, It’s How Much You Can Bear. No Date. No Name Attached.

She Entered The Story Knowing She Would Emerge From It Feeling She Had Been Immersed In The Lives Of Others, In Plots That Stretched Back Twenty Years, Her Body Full Of Sentences And Moments, As If Awaking From Sleep With A Heaviness Caused By Unremembered Dreams.

When I Write My Novels I Don't Really Have A Huge Plan Beforehand; I Don't Have The Whole Plot And Architecture, So The Story Is Sort Of Discovered As I Write It.

He Was A Man Who Wrote, Who Interpreted The World. Wisdom Grew Out Of Being Handed Just The Smallest Sliver Of Emotion. A Glance Could Lead To Paragraphs Of Theory.

For We Live With Those Retrievals From Childhood That Coalesce And Echo Throughout Our Lives, The Way Shattered Pieces Of Glass In A Kaleidoscope Reappear In New Forms And Are Songlike In Their Refrains And Rhymes, Making Up A Single Monologue. We Live Permanently In The Recurrence Of Our Own Stories, Whatever Story We Tell.

There's Always Been Anger In The Making Of Music Or Literature Or Dance.

The Last Three Books Are Much More A Case Of A Moment Of History, What Happened Almost By Accident Or Coincidence, Like Being In The Same Elevator Or Lifeboat.

Everyone Has To Scratch On Walls Somewhere Or They Go Crazy

It's A Responsibility Of The Writer To Get The Reader Out Of The Story Somehow.

A Man In A Desert Can Hold Absence In His Cupped Hands Knowing It Is Something More Than Water. There Is A Plant Whose Heart, If One Cuts It Out Is Replaced With Fluid Containing Herbal Goodness. Every Morning One Can Drink The Liquid Amount Of The Missing Heart.

Every Night I Cut Out My Heart. But In The Morning It Was Full Again

I'll Be Looking At The Moon, But I'll Be Seeing You.

Read Him Slowly, Dear Girl, You Must Read Kipling Slowly. Watch Carefully Where The Commas Fall So You Can Discover The Natural Pauses. He Is A Writer Who Used Pen And Ink. He Looked Up From The Page A Lot, I Believe, Stared Through His Window And Listened To Birds, As Most Writers Who Are Alone Do. Some Do Not Know The Names Of Birds, Though He Did. Your Eye Is Too Quick And North American. Think About The Speed Of His Pen. What An Appalling, Barnacled Old First Paragraph It Is Otherwise.

Some People You Just Had To Embrace, In Some Way Or Another, Had To Bite Into The Muscle, To Remain Sane In Their Company. You Needed To Grab Their Hair And Clutch It Like A Drowner So They Would Pull You Into Their Midst. Otherwise They, Walking Casually Down The Street Towards You, Almost About To Wave, Would Leap Over A Wall And Be Gone For Months.

Every Immigrant Family, It Seems, Has Someone Who Does Not Belong In The New Country They Have Come To. It Feels Like Permanent Exile To That One Brother Or Wife Who Cannot Stand A Silent Fate In Boston Or London Or Melbourne. I’ve Met Many Who Remain Haunted By The Persistent Ghost Of An Earlier Place.

Could You Fall In Love With Her If She Wasn't Smarter Than You? I Mean, She May Not Be Smarter Than You. But Isn't It Important For You To Think She Is Smarter Than You In Order To Fall In Love? Think Now.

Falling In Love

Why Are You Not Smarter? It's Only The Rich Who Can't Afford To Be Smart. They're Compromised. They Got Locked Years Ago Into Privilege. They Have To Protect Their Belongings. No One Is Meaner Than The Rich. Trust Me. But They Have To Follow The Rules Of Their Shitty Civilised World. They Declare War, They Have Honour, And They Can't Leave. But You Two. We Three. We're Free.

You Think That You Are An Iconoclast, But You’re Not. You Just Move, Or Replace What You Cannot Have. If You Fail At Something, You Retreat Into Something Else. Nothing Changes You.... I Left You Because I Knew I Could Never Change You. You Would Stand In The Room So Still Sometimes, As If The Greatest Betrayal Of Yourself Would Be To Reveal One More Inch Of Your Character.

How Can You Smile As Though Your Whole Life Hasn't Capsized

If She Were A Writer She Would Collect Her Pencils And Notebooks And Favourite Cat And Write In Bed. Strangers And Lovers Would Never Get Past The Locked Door.

For Echo Is The Soul Of The Voice Exciting Itself In Hollow Places.

...the Heart Is An Organ Of Fire.

Sometimes When She Is Able To Spend The Night With Him They Are Wakened By The Three Minarets Of The City Beginning Their Prayers Before Dawn. He Walks With Her Through The Indigo Markets That Lie Between South Cairo And Her Home. The Beautiful Songs Of Faith Enter The Air Like Arrows, One Minaret Answering Another, As If Passing On A Rumor Of The Two Of Them As They Walk Through The Cold Morning Air, The Smell Of Charcoal And Hemp Already Making The Air Profound. Sinners In A Holy City.

Sleep Is A Prison For A Boy Who Has Friends To Meet.

…even The Idea Of A City Never Entered His Mind. It Was As If He Had Walked Under The Millimeter Of Haze Just Above The Inked Fibers Of A Map, That Pure Zone Between Land And Chart, Between Distances And Legends, Between Nature And Storyteller. The Place They Had Chosen To Come To, To Be Their Best Selves, To Be Unconscious Of Ancestry. Here, Apart From The Sun Compass And The Odometer Mileage, And The Book, He Was Alone, His Own Invention. He Knew During These Times How The Mirage Worked, The Fata Morgana, For He Was Within It.

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James L. Buckley

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