Reminders for the heart

“Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives, and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.”

“The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.”

It is harder to write about fathers. Perhaps this is because an invisible umbilical cord to the mother remains intact throughout our childhoods: she is somewhere near you, she makes your lunch, she takes care of you when you’re sick, puts her hand on your forehead, she is the air you swim in. The father is a different sort of presence—shadowy, mysterious, sometimes frightening, often absent—clinging to the snorkel of a cigarette, he swims in other waters and clouds.

“If someone asked me “What are the signs of love?” I would have said without hesitation, It’s the familiarity and the removal of cost, And to find yourself not having to lie, and the embarrassment removed between you two, and see yourself acting in your nature without trying to be something else so she likes you, And that you two keep silent and the silence gets delicious, And that one of you two talk and listening gets delicious.”

Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.

Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always “save ten percent of yourself.” What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on.

Talk to me, like lovers do

“To love a handful of people very well, that’s a good life.”