The Humble Art

“Every man can be broken when things happen to him in a certain order, with a momentum and an intensity that awaken ancient fears in the back of his mind. He knows what he must do, but suddenly the body will not obey the mind. Panic becomes like an unbearably shrill sound.”

…but I think the real problem may be that fewer and fewer people really read any more, really consume literature as if printing the words on the interiors of their bodies.

“When I kissed him, it was like I was kissing all his things, all the signifiers and trappings of adulthood or success coming at me in a rush. Fucking was just seeing that to its end, a white yacht docking.”

“The rules about the fence were simple: you could not go over it, you could not go under it, you could not go around it, you could not go through it. And if your kite got stuck on it? That was an easy one. You let the kite go.”

“When an airliner crashes there is wreckage strewn on either side for a mile. We are all human wreckage and there is not one place on this earth we have not walked. [...] We are wreckage strewn across a planet - evidence of some monstrous crime against ourselves. [...] The century of disasters.”

“If I thought it was my business to make someone’s pain palatable and undisturbing for an audience I would prefer to close up shop.”

“The point is not to suffer the world but to change it.”

“It’s not that human beings cannot bear too much reality. It’s that reality is too much to bear.”

“Difference, if I noticed it or if it appeared, took the attractive form of those mixed-race couples on billboards for United Colors of Benetton. Or it was the cute interracial kids hugging at the end of the music video for Michael Jackson’s ‘Heal the World’. It was never hard or hateful or ugly.”

“But being in love is pretty much the most uncertain, tangled sort of knowledge there is. You can’t know it in the way you can know if it’s raining outside or if you have food on your face. It’s too fitful, too complicated. If knowledge excludes room for doubt, maybe love can’t be ‘known’ at all.”

“the inconnu - the figure of someone unknown to others and so free to define themselves”

“...the power of an assured self rests on the oppression of others. One person’s certainty comes at the expense of another’s freedom. But the self is something open and unknowable. Like love, identity should be founded on doubt. [...] This is what he wants, right? Empirical certainty.”

“The wanderer-figure stands in for the author: placeless and unknown, desperate for something but unsure what. [...] The wanderer is beyond self-knowledge, or self-knowledge is beyond him. His only hope is a second mask.”

“... he is consumed by a mission only he can fulfill. Everyone else is superfluous because his power comes from within, burning on the fuel of ego alone. What makes the strongman strong is his rejection of others. He does, while they watch.”

“He stated it as a natural consequence, when to our mind, that was hardly the case. Someone might be your blood relative, but it didn’t mean you had to love her. Our magazine articles and afternoon talk shows were teaching us that people had to earn their love from one day to the next.”