book bits

When I began to realize how often we quarrelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into a love-affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn’t settle to work: I would reconstruct what we had said to each other: I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make-believe that love lasted, I was happy - I think I was even good to live with and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

Here, then, is age. Here are the little consolations, the lamp and the book. Here is the world, increasingly managed by people who are not you; who will do either well or badly; who do not look at you when they pass you in the street.

‘I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.’

When I first began writing I felt that writing should go on I still do feel that it should go on but when I first began writing I was completely possessed by the necessity that writing should go on and if writing should go on what had commas and semi-colons to do with it what had commas to do with it what had periods to do with it what had small letters and capitals to do with writing going on which was at the time the most profound need I had in connection with writing.

nice and softly

would you like to join me for coffee?
do you even drink coffee?
i bet i know how you take it
you will look at me and say
“nice and softly, nice and softly,
i like some sugar with my cream and coffee”
and i will pass you the little jar of sugar
the one we keep on the counter
because we too, are fans of sugar
don’t be so nervous, really
i don’t know why your hand is shaking
you have already seen me naked
haven’t you?

There isn’t a damn thing wrong with you except that you think you’re a failure. You’re not, of course, but as a result of thinking you are you’ve scratched the surface of your mind all over, and when you sit here like this, looking out at the rain, you keep rubbing it so that it doesn’t heal. Booze, lovemaking, and hard work - they keep your hands away from the sore surface, and then it heals of its own accord.

The growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bright and furnished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second potrait, and a third - before long the best lines cancel out - and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping that such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true.