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While You Are Living, Part Of You Has Slipped Away To The Cemetery.

-Elizabeth Hardwick

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While You Are Living,

Elizabeth Hardwick

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While You Are Living, Part Of You Has Slipped Away To The Cemetery.

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Sex Can No Longer Be The Germ, The Seed Of Fiction. Sex Is An Episode, Most Properly Conveyed In An Episodic Manner, Quickly, Often Ironically. It Is A Bursting Forth Of Only One Of The Cells In The Body Of The Omnipotent I, The One Who Hopes By Concentration Of Tone And Voice To Utter The Sound Of Reality.

Gossip, Or, As We Gossips Like To Say, Character Analysis.

The Famous Carry About With Them A Great Weight Of Patriarchal Baggage-the Footnotes Of Their Lives.

The Private And Serious Drama Of Guilt Is Not Often A Useful One For Fiction Today And Its Disappearance, Following Perhaps The Disappearance From Life, Appears As A Natural, Almost Unnoticed Relief, Like Some Of The Challenging Illnesses Wiped Out By Drug And Vaccines.

Biographers, The Quick In Pursuit Of The Dead, Research, Organize, Fill In, Contradict, And Make In This Way A Sort Of Completed Picture Puzzle With All The Scramble Turned Into A Blue Eye And The Parts Of The Right Leg Fitted Together.

They Had Created Themselves Together, And They Always Saw Themselves, Their Youth, Their Love, Their Lost Youth And Lost Love, Their Failures And Memories, As A Sort Of Living Fiction.

Many People Believe Letters The Most Personal And Revealing Form Of Communication. In Them, We Expect To Find The Charmer At His Nap, Slumped, Open-mouthed, Profoundly Himself Without Thought For Appearances. Yet, This Is Not Quite True. Letters Are Above All Useful As A Means Of Expressing The Ideal Self; And No Other Method Of Communication Is Quite So Good For This Purpose. In Conversation, Those Uneasy Eyes Upon You, Those Lips Ready With An Emendation Before You Have Begun To Speak, Are A Powerful Deterrent To Unreality, Even To Hope.

Sometimes One Has The Feeling Of An Almost Supernatural Character To The Shifts And Changes In Our National Mood. They Appear Beyond The Prose Of Cause And Effect.

Here In The City The Worst Thing That Can Happen To A Nation Has Happened: We Are A People Afraid Of Its Youth.

Sentences In Which I Have Tried For A Certain Light Tone -- Many Of Those Have To Do With Events, Upheavals, Destructions That Caused Me To Weep Like A Child.

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I Have Come To The Belief That There Is Not Merely An Accidental Relationship Between Bad Writing And Routine Sociological Research, But A Wonderfully Pure, Integral Relationship; The Awkwardness Is Necessary And Inevitable.

History ... With Its Long, Leisurely, Gentlemanly Labors, The Books Arriving By Post, The Cards To Be Kept And Filed, The Sections To Be Copied, The Documents To Be Checked, Is The Ideal Pursuit For The New England Mind.

The Fifties - They Seem To Have Taken Place On A Sunny Afternoon That Asked Nothing Of You Except A Drifting Belief In The Moment And Its Power To Satisfy.

Sunny Afternoon

Art Is A Profession, Not A Shrine.

Writing Is Not "the Establishment Of A Professional Reputation" As If One Were A Doctor Or Lawyer; It Is Not Properly In The Sentence With Creation Of A Family And The Purchase Of A Home.

Memory - The Very Skin Of Life.

[on Sociability In Italy:] You May Be A Hermit Or An Innkeeper.

Books Give Not Wisdom Where None Was Before. But Where Some Is, There Reading Makes It More.

Biology Is Destiny Only For Girls.

Adversity Is A Great Teacher, But This Teacher Makes Us Pay Dearly For Its Instruction; And Often The Profit We Derive, Is Not Worth The Price We Paid.

While You Are Living, Part Of You Has Slipped Away To The Cemetery.

Flattery Is A Challenge. The Proper Turning Away From It, Undercutting, Diminishing It Without Offense Or Vehemence, Is A Social Grace Sweeter Even Than The Swift Determination To Keep Ahead In The Race Of Hospitality.

It Is June. This Is What I Have Decided To Do With My Life Just Now. I Will Do This Work And Lead This Life, The One I Am Leading Today. Each Morning The Blue Clock And The Crocheted Bedspread, The Table With The Phone, The Books And Magazines, The Times At The Door.

Mothers Born On Relief Have Their Babies On Relief. Nothingness, Truly, Seems To Be The Condition Of These New York People. They Are Nomads Going From One Rooming House To Another, Looking For A Toilet That Functions.

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