I Want To Live In A Place

She Would Simply Wait On The Bridge, Calm And Obstinate, Until Events, Real Events, Not Her Own Fantasies, Roe To Her Challenge, And Dispelled Her Insignificance.

Someone Once Asked Me "if Your Life Could Be Extended To 150 And You Could Start Another Career, Would You?" And I Said "no, Thanks, I Think I'll Stick At This."

Four Or Five Years - Nothing At All. But No One Over Thirty Could Understand This Peculiarly Weighted And Condensed Time, From Late Teens To Early Twenties, A Stretch Of Life That Needed A Name, From School Leaver To Salaried Professional, With A University And Affairs And Death And Choices In Between. I Had Forgotten How Recent My Childhood Was, How Long And Inescapable It Once Seemed. How Grown Up And How Unchanged I Was.

...beauty, She Had Discovered Occupied A Narrow Band. Ugliness, On The Hand, Had Infinite Variation.

How Can A Novelist Achieve Atonement When, With Her Absolute Power Of Deciding Outcomes, She Is Also God? There Is No One, No Entity Or Higher Form That She Can Appeal To, Or Be Reconciled With, Or That Can Forgive Her. There Is Nothing Outside Her. In Her Imagination She Has Set The Limits And The Terms. No Atonement For God, Or Novelists, Even If They Are Atheists. It Was Always An Impossible Task, And That Was Precisely The Point. The Attempt Was All.