For all his friendliness, as we spoke he had seemed in some mysterious way to withdraw from me; the longer we avoided any erotic proposal the more finally he seemed unattainable, not so much because he was beautiful, although I found him beautiful, as for some still more forbidding quality, a kind of bodily sureness or ease that suggested freedom from doubts and self-gnawing, from any squeamishness about existence. He had about him a sense simply of accepting his right to a measure of the world’s beneficence, even as so clearly it had been withheld him.
. . .
But then there’s something theatrical in all our embraces, I think, as we weigh our responses against those we perceive or project; always we desire too much or not enough, and compensate accordingly.
. . .
I’ve never been good at concealing anything, the whole bent of my nature is toward confession.
. . .
I know they’re all I have, these partial selves, true and false at once, that any ideal of wholeness I long for is a sham; but I do long for it, I think I glimpse it sometimes, I even imagine I’ve felt it.
. . .
Nor could I find anywhere else the closeness I had taken for granted: the friends I turned to were scared off by the need I felt for them, and soon the best I could hope for was their indifference. It was then that I retreated into the uneasy solitude form which I’ve never entirely emerged.
. . .
For months our friendship consisted of nothing but words, and though I wanted to see him this was a comfort; already I felt that the best of me was words, that it was in words our friendship would flourish.
. . .
Disease was the only story anyone ever told about men like me where I was from, and it flattened my life to a morality tale, in which I could either be chaste or condemned. Maybe that’s why, when I finally did hav sex, it wasn’t so much pleasure I sought as the exhilaration of setting aside restraint, of pretending not to be afraid, a thrill of release so intense it was almost suicidal.
. . .
That’s all care is, I thought, it’s just looking at a thing long enough, why should it be a question of scale? This seemed like a hopeful thought at first, but then it’s hard to look at things, or to look at them truly, and we can’t look at many at once, and it’s so easy to look away.
. . .
But then almost everywhere I went I imagined a place more accommodating of the life I wanted, as if happiness were a matter of streets or parks, as maybe to a point it is; and with R. away for so long I was accustomed to thinking of my real life existing in some distant place or future time, projecting forward in a way that I was afraid might keep me from living fully where I was.
. . .
What had I done but extend my rootlessness, the series of false starts that became more difficult to defend as I got older? I think I hoped I would feel new in a new country, but I wasn’t new here, and if there was comfort in the idea that my habitual unease had a cause, that if I was ill-fitted to the place there was good reason, it was a false comfort, a way of running away from real remedy.
. . .
I looked once more at the little boy, whom I felt I would never forget, though maybe it wasn’t exactly him I would remember, I thought, but the use I would make of him. I had my notes, I knew I would write a poem about him, and then it would be the poem I remembered, which would be both true and false at once, the image I made replacing the real image. Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But that wasn’t what it felt like when I looked back at the boy, wanting a last glimpse of him; it felt like a loss. Whatever I could make of him would diminish him, and I wondered whether I wasn’t really turning my back on things in making them into poems, whether instead of preserving the world I was taking refuge from it.
. . .
Love isn’t just a matter of looking at someone, I think now, but also of looking with them, of facing what they face.
. . .
[W]ords in a foreign language never wound us like words in the language to which we’re born.
. . .
What would it mean to do enough, I wondered, as I had wondered before about that obligation to others that sometimes seems so clear and sometimes disappears altogether, so that now we owe nothing, anything we give is too much, and now our debt is beyond all counting.
