Translated by Gustavo Pérez Firmat Life is too short. We’re always running late.Not enough days in our livesto learn anything. You wake up,you hug your girlfriend,you have breakfast, you work,you eat, you sleep, you watch a movieand you don’t even have timeto read Seneca and convince yourselfthat there’s nothing in the worldthat can’t be fixed….
Translated by Gustavo Pérez Firmat She gave me a brief, hard hug,one of those you feel downto your toenails, a mortal leapinto life, an incandescentcaress, the kind that doesn’t lastbut scalds, sudden and fleeting:a spell rather than a squeeze.To be embraced like this oncein a while is irrefutable proofthat, sometimes, life providesarguments against loneliness.
When I imagine the dead I think of them doing absolutely nothing. Every morninga tiny red anthas left bites up my arm. I’m not god as far as I know, though it’s possible. Mostly I feel like a child or elder, or a thing scraped together from what’s in between. One wants the blue indifference of…
All I beg of this blighted yearis to wake up well-sleptearly one August morningand to pull on yesterday’sclothes and ride the mile or twoto the deli on Brackett Roadwhen the sun is soft and lowand the waves in the distance soundlike a second breeze and to leanmy bike against the picnic tableand on my way…
At first, I meant to write a treatise on happiness, but only as a kind of anti-history. —Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women Recently, I’ve had a case of Anita Brookner-itis—by which I mean a propensity to read and reread her twenty-four novels despite the aching sadness they leave in the pit of my stomach. Given…
When you’re in a helicopter with ableeding brain and the pilot reassuresyou it’s a beautiful night to fly,it’s hard to know whether to feelrelieved. I suppose that’s betterthan an iffy or a terrible night to fly.Though isn’t every night a terriblenight to fly with a bleeding brain. And would dying in a helicopter be worsethan…
What is this thing that must be won by experience?It has me walking on sidewalks next to myself, bothselves watching women and men coming toward us,the fruit vendors and lovers— I wonder about the husband and wife, she collectsmoney and bags the fruit, he loads and unloads, and they alwaysseem cold, her face chapped by…
What is this thing that must be won by experience?It has me walking on sidewalks next to myself, bothselves watching women and men coming toward us,the fruit vendors and lovers— Why does everything occur in pairs, the glanceand the glance averted, the gaze and the gazereturned? A woman drops her scarf and anotherreaches toward it….
—from Definitions Freudenschreck, or “intense pleasure-fright”—leave it to the GermansTo coin a word for the fleeting sense of being seizedBy such an inexplicable joy it verges on terror.Or maybe it’s inexplicable terror pretending to be joy.Also, a physical phenomenon: neurologists say the amygdalaGlows red as a jack ball whether subjects gaze at images of planetesimals…
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