#good lit

Then shall my heart have no need of the sun to shine in it, for thyself wilt be the light of it, and there shall be no night there.

From alcohol he went on to the specific neuroses of history, the different masks of God in our waking and sleeping lives that are extended into our public, collective life. Nothing was amiss except that he seemed unaware that his head was connected in any meaningful way to his body. He told me he once nearly drowned because he simply forgot he was swimming.

Never mind, she tells herself. Think about flowers, because now you're safe. Except she isn't safe. Maybe no one can ever be safe. You run into your room and you slam the door, but there isn't any lock.

Thus a novel starts in us all sorts of antagonistic and opposed emotions. Life conflicts with something that is not life.

But her mind can’t hold him, she can’t fix the memory of what he looks like. It’s as if a breeze blows over the water and he’s dispersed, into broken colors, into ripples; then he reforms elsewhere, past the next pillar, taking on his familiar body. Around him is a shimmering.

Therefore we must harken closely to our inner voice. We must strive through the penumbra of words to the core within. « The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. » And then the inner core breaks free — now feebly and now violently — from the words within which it dwells like a charm. « It happened to me according to the Word. »

Through a sky the color of wet slate they fly towards each other on dark invisible winds, searching, searching, doubling back, drawn by hope and longing, baffled by fear. In their dreams they touch, they intertwine, it’s more like a collision, and that is the end of the flying. They fall to earth, fouled parachutists, botched and cindery angels, love streaming out behind them like torn silk. Enemy grounder comes up to meet them.

Above all, your must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world of gloves and shoes and stuffs swaying up and down among the faint scents that come through chemists' bottles down arcades of dress material over a floor of pseudo-marble.