how life is a flea circus

I must be whole and learn to eat days like apples only after making as sure as possible that no plague therein will give me future indigestion.

Contentment is a warm positive feeling, but it is most easily described as incuriosity toward the outside world and as absence of desire for a change of scene.

When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness -- and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.

what to do? think & create & love people & give of self like mad. go outward in love and creation and maybe you will fall into knowing what you want simultaneously as what you want walks by your picket gate singing a never-again song with a nonchalant catch-me-quick hat aslant on his head and a book of "how life is a flea circus" under his einstein arm.

...You'll roll your feet together in the tense befuddles of ten thousand evenings in company in the parlor, in the pad - that is known as, ah, socializing. You'll grow numb all over from inner paralytic thoughts and bad chairs, - that is known as Solitude...You'll look at a wall of blank flesh and fritter to explain yourself - that is known as Love... Bye and bye you'll rise to the sun and propel your mean bones hard and sure to huge labors, and great steaming dinners, and spit your pits out, aching cocklove nights in cobweb moons, the mist of tired dust at evening, the corn, the silk, the moon, the rail - that is known as Maturity - but you'll never be as happy as you are now in your quiltish innocent book-devouring boyhood immortal night.

“Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path… It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.”