As he spoke of these friends, I felt that despite my missteps he had decided I was worthy of his confidence, of a deeper confidence than he had already shown; or maybe it wasn't judgment but need that drove him to speak to me as he did, not for some virtue of my own but merely for the function I could serve.
. . .
I was grateful for the pause, I was exhausted by listening to him, by the effort of it in that noisy space but also by the obligation it imposed, not just to listen but to feel in a way I had grown unaccustomed to feel.
. . .
That's the worst thing about teaching, that our actions either have no force at all or have force beyond all intention, and not only our actions but our failures to act, gestures and words held back or unspoken, all we might have done and failed to do; and more than this, that the consequences echo across years and silence, we can never really know what we've done.
. . .
[I]t's a large world, we're never as solitary as we think, as unique or unprecedented, what we feel has always already been felt, again and again, without beginning or end.
. . .
And even as I climbed or sought to climb I knew that having been shown it I would come back to it, when the pain had faded and the fear, maybe not to this man but to others like him; I would desire it, though I didn't desire it now, and for a time I would resist my desire but only for a time.
. . .
Look, if it's just energy, we should hope it stops, right away, energy without a plan can't build anything, it's more likely to make things worse.
. . .
She was admirable, everything about her spoke of sacrifice, and something in me shied away from her, I didn't doubt the good she did but I avoided her whenever I could.
. . .
Of course it wasn't his fault, I would say, of course he was blameless, entirely blameless; there wasn't any invitation he could have given, even if he had wanted it there wasn't any permission he could give. But none of this was right, I rejected the phrases even as they formed, not just because none of them answered his real fear, which was true, I thought: that we can never be sure of what we want, I mean of the authenticity of it, of its purity in relation to ourselves.
. . .
I wanted to root into him, even as the wind said all rootedness was a sham, there was only passing arrangements, makeshift shelters and poor harbors, I love you, I thought suddenly in that rush that makes so much seem possible, I love you, anything I am you have use for is yours.
. . .
That mastery must grow feebler by the day, I thought, it must be painful to feel it go.
. . .
But I didn't trust myself, I was too eager, I caught myself looking at him, at almost every man I passed, with a kind of hunger R. had shielded me from, I mean the thought of R. It might be possible, I thought about the other writer, he looked at me sometimes in a way that made me think maybe I could have him, or he could have me, we could have a little romance, though that wasn't what I wanted; I wanted something brutal, which was what frightened me, I wanted to go back to what R. had lifted me out of. It was a childish feeling, maybe, I wanted to ruin what he had made, what he had made me, I mean, the person he had made me.
. . .
Many of the things he listed were things I wanted, too, what I liked to be done to me, which is why I took so long to write him; we wanted the same things and so were incompatible, as people say.
. . .
Because it was an ethics, I thought as I lay with him, it was more coherent than my own life, with its alternating precaution and risk; I tried to imagine his life of wholeheartedness but I knew it would never be mine.
. . .
Things are different here, Gospodine, maybe in America what you say is true; you try something there and if you fail it is no problem, you try something else, Americans love starting over, you say it's never too late. But for us it is always too late, she said.
. . .
I must look foolish, I thought, but there was so much pleasure in being a fool, why had I spent so much of my life guarding against it?
