put some faith in me.

Time had lost its strobic beat and all structures of movement and sensation and taste and sight and sound became fragmented, shifting around like particles in lakewater. I love getting lost like this.

An elite group of artists may produce objects that are aesthetically pleasing, but that in itself doesn’t make the world around us any more beautiful. On the contrary, the influence of the ugly and deformed continues to grow ever stronger. If it is our ideal to live in a world surrounded by beautiful things, in a virtual Kingdom of Beauty, then we must raise the ordinary things of our daily lives to a higher level. The way to do this is not to place emphasis on appearance to the detriment of utility. (...) Utilitarian crafts have been looked down on as something of a lower rank. As a result, our aesthetic sense has been severely impaired owing to the fact that beauty and life are treated as separate realms of being. Beauty is no longer viewed as an indispensable part of our daily lives. Confining beauty to visual appreciation and excluding the beauty of practical objects has proven to be a grave error on the part of modern man.

What I remembered of other terminal illnesses was how the human form had seemed to pulsate, like a fist opening and closing, moving back and forth from strength to weakness and then from lesser strength to greater weakness—the way the body would open as if into a palm, vulnerable, extended, and then reform into the fist in search of survival. Then, at some point, the fist would not reform itself, the pulsating would stop.

My legs felt funny as I went up the stairs. I wondered if I was dying. I emerged on the roof, late afternoon mid-July in New York, the city spread out across the ten directions, heavy gold clouds in the blue sky. I wondered if the funny feeling I had was good or bad and then it was doubtless. A single cloud moved through the blue sky. I was on my back looking up. My eye was a glass box, and inside it there was no time. I kept the cloud inside it. I wish I could show it to you. I never imagined this could happen. A breath entering my nostrils coiled over the nerves, losing all dimension. This was the end of desire. The end of wanting. The end of fear.

At times I cannot entirely believe I ever was alive, that I ever was another self, and wrote—and loved or failed to love. I do not really understand this erasure. Oh, I can comprehend a shutting down, a great power replacing me with someone else (and with silence), but this inability to have an identity in the face of death—I don’t believe I ever saw this written about in all the death scenes I have read or in all the descriptions of old age. It is curious how my life has tumbled to this point, how my memories no longer apply to the body in which my words are formed.

But to become a devotee and disciple of deception! To fix your every thought and all your knowledge on lies! To reject all feeling, not only pain, but even joy, since no happiness was conceivable outside the confines of untruth! Such was my existence!

Dying, too, has a certain rhythm to it. It slows and quickens. Very little matters, but that little is of commanding importance to me. I feel the silence ahead of me as I have all my life felt the silence of God as a given and a source of reasonable terror. This is something one must bear, beyond the claims of religion, not the idea of one’s dying but the reality of one’s death. One schools oneself in an acceptance of the terror. It is the shape that life takes toward its end. It is a form of life.

Without recognizing what had happened as a miracle, nor seeking an explanation for how it came about, I felt, in that moment, that I was a natural and welcomed member of all creation, friend and companion to all things, no less than a plant or an animal or any other happy little girl.

These highly scented people are not to be trusted. They are predators. They are like the dogs who roll around in one another’s feces.

In other words, I never had to forgive those I loved for their faults, because I never perceived them to have any. The fire-like luminosity of the same sins that I hated in others dimmed when committed by my loved ones, extinguished by my sanctitude and zeal. The life of anyone beloved to me took on an exalted radiance.

Looking at my reflection really did soothe me, though I hated my face with a passion. Such is the life of the self-obsessed. The time I languished in the agony of not being beautiful was more than I care to admit even now.

New York was the capital of American sexuality, the one place in America where you could get laid with some degree of sophistication, and so Peggy Guggenheim and André Breton had come here during the war, whereas Thomas Mann, who was shy, and Igor Stravinsky, who was pious, had gone to Los Angeles, which is the best place for voyeurs.

Her failed ambitions burned inside of her, consuming her and withering her away.

Their deaths produced a brutal transformation in me. Before, I had been a sensible, observant, even fastidious little girl; from then on, I was visited by extravagant, depraved spirits and surrounded by a lunatic miasma. Though shy and skittish by nature, I had previously been friends with other children my age. Now, I became a nun-like recluse, possessed and crazed.