Fromm was one of the first—perhaps the very first—to come out against pointlessness. It was a historic moment, like Einstein discovering relativity or Heidegger coming up against nothingness.

It’s not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.

The bed called to me from the other room. How small it was for all the distances we had traveled in it. We had been like angels dancing on the head of a pin. Leaning on the doorjamb, I gazed at the bed as you gaze in museums, from behind a tasseled cord, at the curtained four-posters of kings and queens.

They were more real than anything I had ever known, real as only imagined things can be, real as dreams that seem so unbearably actual because they are cleansed of all irrelevances. These uncles, these books, moved into the vacuum of my imagination.

Kafka was as popular in the Village at that time as Dickens had been in Victorian London.

Schapiro said that when van Gogh loaded his palette with pigment he couldn’t afford, he was praying in color. He put his anxiety into pigment, slapped color into its cheeks. Color was salvation. It had to be thick, and tangible.

I hadn’t yet realized that loneliness was not so much a feeling as a fate. It was loneliness that walked the streets of the Village and filled the bars, loneliness that made it seem such a lively place.

The closest I can come to it is to say that sex was as much a superstition, or a religious heresy, as it was a pleasure. It was a combination of Halloween and Christmas—guilty, tormented, clumsy, unexamined, and thrilling. It was as much psychological as physical—the idea of sex was often the major part of foreplay. A naked human body was such a

You try to feel like a native, not a foreigner; you progress from grammar to idioms in an attempt to talk as if you belonged. Still, you never succeed in feeling at home. You remain a visitor, perhaps only a tourist. There was always something else, something more, another even larger adjustment to be made.