Invisible

I found it revolting and brilliant. My faux ancestor was a true samurai madman, wasn’t he? But at least he had the courage of his convictions. At least he knew what he stood for. How little the world has changed since eleven eighty-six, no matter how much we prefer to think otherwise. If the magazine gets off the ground, I think we should publish d

A couple of months ago, he told me that if he died before he finished it, he wanted me to delete the text from his computer. Just wipe it out and forget it, he said, it’s of no importance. So you erased it? Of course I did. It’s a sin to disobey a person’s dying wish. Good, I thought to myself. Good that this woman won’t have to set eyes on Walker’

You and your sister are no longer the floundering, ignorant puppies you were on the night of the grand experiment, and what you are proposing now is a monumental transgression, a dark and iniquitous thing according to the laws of man and God. But you don’t care. That is the simple truth of the matter: you are not ashamed of what you feel. You love

Fear is a good thing, I continued, repeating the word he had used in his first letter, fear is what drives us to take risks and extend ourselves beyond our normal limits, and any writer who feels he is standing on safe ground is unlikely to produce anything of value.

You’re a special case, Adam, and what makes you special is that you have no idea of the effect you have on other people.

Born looked at me across the table, disgorged a large puff of smoke from his cigar, and smiled. You made a favorable impression on Margot the other night, he said. I was impressed by her too, I answered. You might have noticed that she doesn’t say much. Her English isn’t terribly good. It’s hard to express yourself in a language that gives you trou

That’s the way I am. Life is too short for dawdling. My third-grade teacher used to tell us the same thing—with exactly those words.

By writing about myself in the first person, I had smothered myself and made myself invisible, had made it impossible for me to find the thing I was looking for. I needed to separate myself from myself, to step back and carve out some space between myself and my subject (which was myself), and therefore I returned to the beginning of Part Two and b

No, you have not forgotten the vow you took when you were twelve years old, the promise you made to yourself to live your life as an ethical human being. You want to be a good person, and every day you struggle to follow the oath you swore on your dead brother’s memory, but as you sit on the sofa watching your sister put her glass down on the table