Yoga

And, considering all the things that can be chalked up against me, I find life generous to give me another chance.

Not only did I believe what I wrote there with all my heart, but I continued to believe it confidently for the next ten years, which were the best of my life. I knew that a love like that is rare, and that if you let it go by you’ll be doomed to regret it and to the bitter taste of being too slow on the uptake. Where so many others failed, I though

No one had been able to rest in complete confidence in my love and I would not rest, at the end, in anyone else’s.

true. I remembered Fitzgerald’s famous dictum All life is a process of breaking down, and there I had to disagree.

the way we circled, feigned, dodged, and parried, was a way of making love whose power would have been weakened if we’d actually hit the sack.

Is there a criterion that lets us see whether a story we read is truth or fiction? Whether a painting in a museum depicts a real person or an imaginary one? I don’t have an answer, but it seems to me that intuitively, without being able to explain it, we feel it. I can feel it, in any case.

Frederica is a fictional character. I mean, a partly fictional character. She’s modeled on a real person with whom I gave a few lessons at the Pikpa, had a memorable booze-up, and listened to Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise, but most of the rest is invented. That’s what happens, inevitably, I think, as soon as you start changing proper names: fiction t

For others—including myself—the opposite is the case: the less the film or book resembles what they’d imagined, the longer and more unpredictable the path between the starting point and the end, the more the result surprises them, the happier they are.

demiurges