Note to self: are you ready for a life of smallness?
'You rarely succeed, yet the urge for completeness is a kind of love, doomed to be outgrown but not forgotten.'
---Anthony Lane, The New Yorker.
Walser certainly seems to be the writer for you: the supreme artist of the person in the process of erasing himself from the books. Sum the totals. What does it all amount to? Pessoa, too, seems to be a kindred spirit (25 pages in). Like a corkscrew, turning inwards around the same point, through dry-as-dust material, though his darkness can be oppressive. And you wonder to yourself: when will the wine flow, when will there be forgetfulness?
I somehow look forward to sleeping more than to meeting people. Not a good sign, I know, but the tedium is draining and there is little to say. The trick is to be able to go through with the motions without a second thought, so that no-one really sees you and you can then glide through, invisibly, like the man from the moon who was held in prison.
Small one-liners, incidents, like the shining five pence piece you keep next to the bathroom mirror for good luck, to remind you of home. As long as it carries on shining, there's an opening.
"And then nothing happened", Plenty Coups says in that great book by Lear, Radical Hope. Nothing happens but you go on, until you can't. Waiting.Patience. This is where you need your religious hat. Really do. If you are in the possession of sound instincts, good health, firm habits...is this really down to your own volition or is your constitution determined elsewhere, by other means?
You think: maybe we have a store of memories that we think we can retrieve when required, at will, like a bucket that fetches cool, fresh water from a dark well. Be careful not to spill it now! But more than likely it seems as if it is chance or fate or something, something beyond our will that can draw us back.
'You rarely succeed, yet the urge for completeness is a kind of love, doomed to be outgrown but not forgotten.'
---Anthony Lane, The New Yorker.
Walser certainly seems to be the writer for you: the supreme artist of the person in the process of erasing himself from the books. Sum the totals. What does it all amount to? Pessoa, too, seems to be a kindred spirit (25 pages in). Like a corkscrew, turning inwards around the same point, through dry-as-dust material, though his darkness can be oppressive. And you wonder to yourself: when will the wine flow, when will there be forgetfulness?
I somehow look forward to sleeping more than to meeting people. Not a good sign, I know, but the tedium is draining and there is little to say. The trick is to be able to go through with the motions without a second thought, so that no-one really sees you and you can then glide through, invisibly, like the man from the moon who was held in prison.
Small one-liners, incidents, like the shining five pence piece you keep next to the bathroom mirror for good luck, to remind you of home. As long as it carries on shining, there's an opening.
"And then nothing happened", Plenty Coups says in that great book by Lear, Radical Hope. Nothing happens but you go on, until you can't. Waiting.Patience. This is where you need your religious hat. Really do. If you are in the possession of sound instincts, good health, firm habits...is this really down to your own volition or is your constitution determined elsewhere, by other means?
You think: maybe we have a store of memories that we think we can retrieve when required, at will, like a bucket that fetches cool, fresh water from a dark well. Be careful not to spill it now! But more than likely it seems as if it is chance or fate or something, something beyond our will that can draw us back.
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