Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

I was always thinking about the past, pursuing other people’s memories and dashed dreams. The aspect of my course work I loved was the archival research, snooping through boxes of old files, looking for ways to access some deeper understanding of someone’s art. I was fascinated by the kinds of stories you could tell with the things someone left beh

Out of principle, I stopped reading fiction. I wanted to learn only about histories that had been denied to us.

was responsible for my friends’ safety, and for their enrichment, too.

“Only the future can provide the key to the interpretation of the past; and it is only in this sense that we can speak of an ultimate objectivity in history. It is at once the justification and the explanation of history that the past throws light on the future, and the future throws light on the past.”

We seemed to spend hours apart, occasionally intersecting in some unlikely aisle. Everything seemed a possibility, a clue, an invitation to experience new, unprecedented emotional realities. We were enthralled by the same music, but it showed us different things.

I’d never been around someone with such a lust for life, an appreciation for its exultant highs as well as its darkest lows.

I even felt protective of him in that moment, surprised, and slightly awed, by the fact that he held on to such grand visions of what life could offer.

“It is useless to go looking for goodness and happiness far away,” he concludes. They’re closer than you think.

That’s the dilemma of life: you have to find meaning, but by the same time, you have to accept the reality. How to handle the contradiction is a challenge to everyone of us.