Faced with a camera lens, hideously overwitnessed, I immediately start trying to impersonate myself.
Some people love only those they can condescend to, those they can tenderly despise.
It’s interesting to watch my friend speak carefully about what he thinks I’ll find interesting.
If you can’t be with the one you love, my friend says, love the one who looks like the one you love. Other people call this having a type. It’s an expression of grief for an original loss.
Mothers must have sung to their babies before there was such a thing as music. I wonder what they thought of it, how they understood it, that singing.
After I submitted the final draft of my book about a train-track suicide, the art department produced sketches for my book cover: a needle and a long skein of red thread; a length of fluffy pinkish lace; a yellow hand mirror lying on a patch of green grass. I gave my editor a note for the designers, and the next day they delivered a perfect cover design: a photograph of the book’s subject, a man sitting on a train. This was the note: Pretend this book was written by a man.
The trouble with setting goals is that you’re constantly working toward what you used to want.
It can be worth forgoing marriage for sex, and it can be worth forgoing sex for marriage. It can be worth forgoing parenthood for work, and it can be worth forgoing work for parenthood. Every case is orthogonal to all the others. That’s the entire problem.
It can’t be said too often: we get better at using words, whether hearing, speaking, reading, or writing, under one condition and only one–when we use those words to say something we want to say, to people we want to say it to, for purposes that are our own.
Confronted with what we do not know, we try to protect ourselves by saying that it is not worth knowing.
The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied and into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know.
We can hardly ever hurt children by putting too much information within their reach.
He finds it mysterious and exciting that the label that said FRUIT COCKTAIL yesterday still says it today–always says it. And indeed it is mysterious and exciting that, in writing, we should be able to freeze and preserve for as long as we want such perishable goods as thought and speech.
Now and then he would say indignantly, “Too much peoples!” To which I could only agree.
Pictures are flat; life has depth. The business of turning real objects into flat pictures is a convention, like language, and like language, it must be learned.
The children, of course, were not drawing a tree but what they had learned to recognize as a symbol of a tree, almost like a large hieroglyph. The lines they put on the paper did not look to them like a tree; they meant tree.
It seemed as if their schooling had been for so long so far removed from reality that they were no longer able to see reality, to grasp it, to come to grips with it.
They see the world as a whole, mysterious perhaps, but a whole none the less. They do not divide it up into airtight little categories, as we adults tend to do.
As I have since learned very well, little children strongly dislike being given more help than they ask for.
Their curiosity grows by what it feeds on. Our task is to keep it well supplied with food.
But children, at least before they meet the ready-made fantasies of TV, don’t want to be omnipotent. They just want not to be impotent. They want to be able to do what the bigger people around them do–read, write, go places, use tools and machines. Above all, they want, like the big people, to control their immediate physical lives, to stand, sit, walk, eat, and sleep where and when they want.
We are seeing something new in human history, a generation or two of children who have most of their daydreams made for them.
The two processes are, after all, the same; as we move farther and farther into the world, we take more and more of it into ourselves.
All my fantasies did for me–no small thing–was to keep alive a feeling that the world is in many ways a fascinating and beautiful place.
By now the art or science of giving complicated instructions to incredibly quick but still stupid machines has become the giant field of computer programming.