And now to begin as if to begin.

“But the first voice kept rummaging through pieces of satin, peering out onto balconies with strictly kept hours; crossing a station left dusty and rattled by a passing express train; but almost always on a balcony, at dusk, when a trunk catalogued by the nostalgia of strange women was a prospect still far away. And as they smoothed out a piece of darkly colored felt, or returned a locket to its place, I thought of how there should be no such thing as fatherless women (children mattered little to me, I thought only of women), unprepared, suddenly abandoned when someone turned cold beside long needles slowly injecting an intravenous liquid; a bandage gripping a thigh, until the listless, futile dripping went on no more, and someone in the same room suggested potential funeral parlors, without understanding, without despairing to think of how unschooled they were after the way they smiled, the way they said they were willing to work, to be brave—when it wasn’t true, they, with their agonizing predicaments, weren’t even ready for the most ordinary happiness, or the recommended job, or the silent house with visiting days, or the moment they might be hungry—even if it wasn’t true hunger, but a hunger for small, varied servings—or to grow weary of things that were easy, of things that were too much, or of things awaited at the end of the day, the struct and calculated day that didn’t end with a belated good night in the certainty of brushing against the same cheek the next day.” 

“It is an extremely painful and dangerous way to live--split between a publicly acceptable persona, and a part of yourself that you perceive as the essential, the creative and powerful self, yet also as possibly unacceptable, perhaps even monstrous.”

“It’s like you said about knowing people. I hate her because I know why she went away. I know--because I’ve got her in me.” His head was down and his voice was heartbroken.

"Unhappy leaves of my cypress tree, you had to fall, like everything else that is lovely and beautiful; if I had eyes, I would shed a tear of remembrance for you. And this is the great advantage in being dead, that if you have no mouth with which to laugh, neither have you eyes with which to cry.”

“I will go one last time,” Teng resolves, “then give up.” On his last journey he particularly cherishes the sequence of images, as one might dwell upon the sight of snow one knows will shortly melt. What will her days be like, he wonders, without his visit, his question? Has she come in any way to depend upon it, as he has, regardless of answer? Will she be relieved or regretful to realize he’ll come no more? So weary and sorrowful is Teng by the time he arrives that he cannot even gaze at her as he asks the final time, turning away even before the sound has emerged from her lips, then toward her again, startled, unable to believe that he has heard, “Yes, I will pledge myself.”

“The bomb did not fall. But during those seconds of suspense all thinking stopped. All feeling, save one dull dread, ceased. A nail fixed the whole being to one hard board. The emotion of fear and of hate is therefore sterile, unfertile. Directly that fear passes, the mind reaches out and instinctively revives itself by trying to create. Since the room is dark it can create only from memory. It reaches out to the memory of other Augusts—in Bayreuth, listening to Wagner; in Rome, walking over the Campagna; in London. Friends’ voices come back. Scraps of poetry return. Each of those thoughts, even in memory, was far more positive, reviving, healing and creative than the dull dread made of fear and hate. Therefore if we are to compensate the young man for the loss of his glory and of his gun, we must give him access to the creative feelings. We must make happiness. We must free him from the machine. We must bring him out of his prison into the open air. But what is the use of freeing the young Englishman if the young German and the young Italian remain slaves?” 

Motherfucking cocksucker. Motherfucking shit fucker!

“Love me Sophia, in my foolishness, love my words and not my mortal remains. Be tidal to me in the constancy of change. Break over me where I feel most safe, be a shore to me, when I fear I am wave in the water, endlessly slipping away. Lift me up like a shell from the beach, now empty, now full. Lift me up and there are still songs.”