"No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. . . . It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. What’s real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed."
To Charlie Rose on his early suck-cess.
"The problem was I started out, I think, wanting to be a writer and wanting to get some attention and I got it really quick and . . . realized it didn’t make me happy at all, in which case, “Hmm. Why am I writing?” You know, “What’s the purpose of this?” And I don’t think it’s substantively different from the sort of thing — you know, somebody who wants to be a really successful cost accountant, right, and be a partner of his accounting firm and achieves that at 50 and goes into something like a depression. “The brass ring I’ve been chasing does not make everything okay.” So that’s why I’m embarrassed to talk about it. It’s just not particularly interesting. It’s — what it is, is very, very average."
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2 comments:
Yeah. It's never the brass ring. It's the ride on the pony while the music plays.
You got it, Ms. Moon.
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