Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

He frowned; he shook his head at his mother. Her will, he said, is a terrible force.

It shook my faith. It was my first great disappointment as an adult, my first postwar defeat. I rallied briefly and painted the walls grass green. I tacked burlap on the windows, but I was still lonely. It was a green loneliness now.

While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us.

To open a bookshop is one of the persistent romances, like living off the land or sailing around the world.

Is something the matter? I asked, but of course she didn’t answer. She didn’t believe in questions.

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.

Besides, he talked so well—it would be like punching literature in the mouth.

I tried to imagine what Meyer Schapiro would say about jazz. Was it like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a fracturing of music, like the splitting of the atom?

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.