The Passion According to G.H. (New Directions Books)

Hope for what? For the first time I was astonished to feel that I’d based an entire hope on becoming something that I was not.

more than awareness of life, was the actual process of life inside me.

I had superimposed upon the inextricable part of myself,

perhaps that awareness was my life itself.

How can I explain it to you: suddenly the whole world that was me shriveled up in fatigue, I could no longer bear on my shoulders

epithet

Only later would I understand: what seems like a lack of meaning — that’s the meaning. Every moment of “lack of meaning” is precisely the frightening certainty that that’s exactly what it means, and that not only can I not reach it, I don’t want to because I have no guarantees.

No. I immediately figure that the hardest thing my vanity will have to face is the judgment of myself:

And living my “bad,” I lived the other side of something I couldn’t even manage to want or attempt.