Now I have shaken off what is extraneous to me: people, friends and enemies, habits, comforts, books; I live in solitude—years of it, if needs be—until once more, ripened and complete as a philosopher of life, I may associate with people (and then probably be obliged to do so)…
I suppose that the fact that I got into the Government (and in a post where I ought to have made good) and was thereafter discarded has created the impression that I am a dud…
Abstract representations of space like Vignelli’s map might make the viewer imagine that she is lost in an overgrown circuit board, a geometry problem, a modern Arabesque designed to awe without representing life. Maps, after all, are always more than utilitarian schematics; at times they are expressions of faith.
Indeed a life lived altogether for me and mine, and all saved up and centered on three things: Dorothy, Charlie, and the sawmill house. The Nation, of course, goes hang. So does Columbia. So does New York…
Without flattery, Langston, you are the brains of this argosy. All the ideas have come out of your head…
Weeping (treacherously) I said when he askd what was the matter—“I’m so selfish it hurts” and felt, as if there were reason or vindication there, intimate pangs of a heart that had drawn up tight as a fist…
All around us we see those who once suffered the same thing and saved themselves by taking refuge in coldness and superiority. It is not that we fear what we are experiencing, but rather the dreadful result: that after the lived experience we will become numb and assume the same cowardly gesture unto eternity…
A: She did not seem to understand we were talking about a comedy book and not the transcripts from the Nuremberg Trial.
B: That hamster was going to start appearing in press conferences.
A: Right? For selfish reasons, I wish she’d decided to spend more time being a genius.
B: Obviously. Efficiency is great for U.S. Steel, but it doesn’t necessarily make sense for books.
A: Right…
I think it would be better, for Lawrence’s sake, for them to remain if the collection is sold intact. Would you consider changing your original will, or in some other way making it possible not to have to leave these out?
Now I believe that this is a modern man’s achievement (or rather the achievement for which he should strive): to shed the myth of a teleological “paradise” (whether metaphysical or on earth) as man’s true homeland, and to find this human homeland instead in the heart of his own works and days…
