It dawned on me much later that evening that our truest, most private moments, like our truest, most private memories, are made of such unreal, flimsy stuff. Fictions.
. . .
We seldom ever see, or read, or love things as they in themselves really are, nor, for that matter, do we even know our impressions of them as they really are. What matters is knowing what we see when we see other than what lies before us. It is the film we see, the film that breathes essence into otherwise lifeless objects, the film we crave to share with others. What we reach for and what ultimately touches us is the radiance we’ve projected on things, not the things themselves - the envelope, not the letter, the wrapping, not the gift.
. . .
What I found in the authors I grew to love was precisely the right to assume that I hadn’t misread them at all, that I wasn’t making up what I was seeing, and that I was getting the obvious meaning as well as the one they were not too keen to proclaim and might gainsay if confronted, perhaps because they themselves were not seeing it as clearly as they should, or were pretending not to. I was intuiting something for which there was no proof but that I knew was essential, because without this one unstated thing, their work wouldn’t hold.
. . .
Temporizing comes to the present the long way around, the way some people come to love, counterintuitively. Some seize today on condition they’ll come back to it tomorrow. Some reach out for what life throws their way provided they come close enough to almost lose it. And some elegize the past, knowing that what they truly love is not the past they’ve lost or the things they elegize and learn to think they love but their ability to speak their love for it, a love that may never have even been there but which is none other than the child of their ability to craft their way into some sort of imperfect-conditional-anterior-preterit. Writing, they say seem to say, works. Writing will get you there. Burrowing in a cork-lined room reinventing your life is life, is the present.
. . .
Indeed, the disconnect, the hiatus, the tiny synapse - call it once again the spread between us and time, between who we are and wish we might have been - is all we have to understand our place in life. One measures time not in units of experience but in increments of hope and anticipated regret.
. . .
New York may end up being no more than a scrim, a spectral film that is none other than our craving for romance - romance with life, with masonry, with memory, sometimes romance with nothing at all. This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion. It has its flare-ups, its cold nights, its sudden lurches, and its embraces. It is our life finally revealed to us in the most lifeless hard objects we’ll ever cast eyes on: concrete, steel, stonework. Our need for intimacy and love is so powerful that we’ll look for them and find them in asphalt and soot.
. . .
Similarly, it is not the things we long for that we love; it is longing itself - just as it is not what we remember but remembrance itself that we love.
