from My Life: Reason looks for two, then arranges it from ther
Reason looks for Where I woke and was awake, in the
two, then room fitting the wall, withdrawn, I
arranges it had my desk and thus my corner.
from there While waiting, waltz. The soles of
our boots wear thin, but the soles of
our feet grow thick. The difference
between “he presented his argument”
and “they had an argument.” I still respond to the academic
year, the sound of the school bell, the hot Wednesday morn-
ing after Labor Day. Must the physiologist stand apart from
the philosopher. We are not forgetting the patience of the
mad, their love of detail. The sudden brief early morning
breeze, the first indication of a day‘s palpability, stays high in
the trees, while flashing silver and green the leaves flutter, a
bird sweeps from one branch to another, the indistinct
shadows lift off the crumpled weeds, smoke rises from the
gravel quarry——all this is metonymy. The “argument” is the
plot, proved by the book. Going forward and coming back
later. Even posterity, alas, will know Sears. As for we who
“love to be astonished,” there are fences keeping cyclones.
Might be covered, on the ground, by no distance. She spread
her fingers as she spoke, talking of artifice, which extends
beauty beyond nature. Perhaps it is only a coincidence. For,
as Neitzsche put it, “If a man has character, he will have the
same experience over and over again.” In the morning at eight
I sense the first threat of monotony. Give a penny with a
knife. Candor is the high pitch of scrutiny. I was tired of
ideas, or, rather, the activity of ideas, a kind of exercise, had
first invigorated me and then made me sleepy, so that I felt
just as one does after a long, early morning walk, returning
unable to decide whether to drink more coffee or go back to
sleep. The uncommon run of keeping oneself to oneself. The
piggy-back plant is o.k. Tell anyone who telephones that I’m
not home. I liked doing that, had made rooms for dolls on
trucks that way, looking in on them through windows. It was
a pretense of keeping our distance from anything that ap-
peared pretentious. A sorry mess, but well-framed. As if a
contorted checkerboard formed the portrait of a handsome
woman in a hat of several ochres and umbers. The dog circles
more than a moth before resting. Let the traffic pass. They
were on vacation and therefore bored. Someone wanted to go
away from everywhere forever but jumped into the bay. We
were warned such accidents happen while mothers talk on
phones. A doodled gnarled tree. Milk belongs to the
mythology of cats but it makes them sick. Ours was a stray
with ringworm. One night each year on Boston’s Beacon Hill
the curtains remained undrawn and the public was invited to
peek in. I didn’t wear my dark glasses because I didn’t want a
raccoon tan. Yet this needs shading in. It seemed that I didn’t,
after all, want a birthday empty of sentimentality. It’s on the
compulsive buyer’s rack up front. The real adversary of my
determination was determinism, regulating and limiting the
range and degree of difference between things of one day and
things of the next. I got it from Darwin, Freud, and Marx.
Not fragments but metonymy. Duration. Language makes
tracks.
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