Intimations: Six Essays

A woman in her forties has lived long enough to see the dreams of childhood—hoverboards!—appear in the streets. She has lived long enough to see the social protections of her youth, which had not seemed to her dreams, but rather mundane realities—universal health care, free university education, decent public housing*—all now recast as revolutionar

It’s a delusional painter who finishes a canvas at two o’clock and expects radical societal transformation by four.

Each novel you read (never mind the novels you write) will give you some theory of which attitude is best to strike at which moment, and—if you experience enough of them—will provide you, at the very least, with a wide repertoire of possible attitudes. But out in the field, experience has no chapter headings or paragraph breaks or ellipses in which

I’d make up hard things to do, or things to abstain from. Artificial limits and so on. Running is what I know. Writing is what I know. Conceiving self-implemented schedules: teaching day, reading day, writing day, repeat. What a dry, sad, small idea of a life. And how exposed it looks, now that the people I love are in the same room to witness the

Everybody learns the irrelevance of these matters next to “real suffering.”

War transforms its participants. What was once necessary appears inessential; what was taken for granted, unappreciated and abused now reveals itself to be central to our existence.

to write is to swim in an ocean of hypocrisies, moment by moment. We know we are deluded, but the strange thing is that this delusion is necessary, if only temporarily, to create the mold in the first place, the one into which you pour everything you can’t give shape to in life.

The artists without children are delighted by all the free time, for a time, until time itself begins to take on an accusatory look, a judgmental cast, because the fact is it is hard to fill all this time sufficiently, given the sufferings of others.

What strikes me at once is how conflicted we feel about this new liberty and/or captivity. On the one hand, like pugs who have been lifted out of a body of water, our little limbs keep pumping on, as they did when we were hurrying off to our workplaces. Do we know how to stop?