it. In this way he became a great saint, and it’s only at the end of his life, on his deathbed, that he understands that the treasure was just that: his life in the monastery, his prayers, his relations with the brothers, and that if he acceded to it, it was because he was a thief. When I criticize myself too much for my foul character, when I comp

My yoga mat. A little terra-cotta statue representing the Gemini twins. Five inches tall, with full, round curves: a woman I loved gave me this discreet fetish, which I take with me wherever I go.

I view the last quarter of my life—because statistically, at almost sixty, that’s the phase I’m entering—in line with Glenn Gould’s maxim, which I’ve copied so often into so many successive notebooks: “The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder

It’s both moving and cruel to see how Atiq, at just seventeen, refuses to delude himself, how he knows that life is a machine for separating people.

So she rehearsed and rehearsed, she must have worked on it several hours a day for years, with a stopwatch. All the great pianists play it in around seven minutes: Rubinstein, Pollini, Arrau, Gilels, I’ve listened to them all, compared them all. The fastest is Horowitz, six minutes fifteen.

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

It also takes at least three lives to master tai chi, but rather than three hours it takes more like three years merely to memorize the series of movements that serve as a framework for the practice itself, and to begin to understand what they’re for. You cannot be in a hurry. You have to consent, for months on end, to do nothing more than walk in

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.

Everything, even the bags they packed in three layers of rubbish bags in Istanbul in preparation for the crossing. They have to abandon their only possessions, their most precious things. For Hassan it’s a photo of his dead parents, his parents who would at least have helped him pack his bag if they’d still been alive, and he begins to cry, thinkin