I didn't say no because between safety and adventure I choose adventure.
We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.
It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.
How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper.
We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.
I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?
No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of lights that stretches from Boston to Philadelphia after nightfall, over the Arabian deserts which gleam like mother-of-pearl, over the Ruhr or the city of Frankfurt, it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding.
I smoke two cartons of unfiltered cigs and down a bottle of American rye whiskey as a warm up, generally. Then swallow beach sand and general aggregate to get some texture in the voice, followed by a stick of butter to smooth it all out. This works for me, but may not be for everyone.
Life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly.
One swallow maketh not summer.
Hot flush, raging bluch. Ice flash, instant crash.