p. 3 Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake. Cataract sufferers must see like this when the bandages are removed after the operation: every detail as sharp as if seen for the first time, yet familiar too, known from before the time of blindness, the remembered and the seen coalescing as in a stereoscope.
p. 10 [Reminiscing] is what I do for a good long time. It is no effort. Everything compels it. From the high porch, the woods pitching down to the lake are more than a known and loved place. They are a habitat we were once fully adapted to, a sort of Peaceable Kingdom where species such as ours might evolve unchallenged and find their step on the staircase of being. Sitting with it all under my eye, I am struck once more, as I was up on the Wightman road, by its changelessness. The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come.
p. 18 Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting? Was our friendship for the Langs born out of simple gratitude to this woman who had the kinds to call on a strange young wife stuck in a basement without occupation or friends? Was I that avid for praise, to feel so warm toward them both because the professed to like my story? Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me? Or did I (I hope I did) like Charity Lang on sight because she was what she was, open, friendly, frank, a little ribald as it turned out, energetic, interested, as full of vitality as her smile was full of light?
p. 43 I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something - forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something.
p. 46 But he won't talk about his poems. He turns the conversation to that banal subject, fascinating to non-writers, of why writers write. Ego enhancement, sure. What else? Psychological imbalance? Neurosis? Trauma? And if trauma, how far can trauma go before it stops being stimulating and becomes destructive? Academic pressures to publish, do those mean anything? Not much, we agree. How about the reforming impulse, a passion for social justice?
p. 57 Aunt Emily believes in the freedom of summer. She doesn't much care what the children do so long as they do something, and know what they are doing. It is idleness and randomness of mind that she cannot abide.
p. 59 it is a fact that no child ever followed George Barnwell Ellis to his work, or aped his way with any tool. His routines are simply not imitable. He appears mistily and cheerfully at breakfast, and shortly disappears - in winter to his office or to the Divinity School, where a child would have a difficult time finding anything at all to do, and in summer up the path to his think house, which by his assumption and Aunt Emily's interdict is off limits to the young.
p. 88 "She's great, she's thoughtful, and loving, she's kept a book on both of the children since the day they were born - you know, first smile, first tooth, first word, first sign of individuality as they develop. Pictures at every stage. She's teaching Barney to count and tell time and read already, they set aside a half hour every afternoon. She's simply incredible, the way she can organize a day. But one thing, I don't think I ever saw her pick up one of those cute kids and give him a big squeeze, just because he's himself, and hers, and she loves him. When we get ours, don't let me have an agenda every time I'm with him."
p. 89 But what memory brings back from there is not politics, or the meagerness of living on a hundred and fifty dollars a month, or even the writing I was doing, but the details of friendship - parties, picnics, walks, midnight conversations, glimpses from the occasional unencumbered hours. Amicitia lasts better than res publica, and at least as well as ars publica. Or so it seems now. What really illuminates those months is the faces of our friends.
p. 123 Some things that astonished Sally - hard beds, hard chairs, unfinished walls, Ivory soap, no liquor harder than sherry - could not dispel the impression I got of a complicity expensively purchased and self-consciously cherished…
p. 130 It seemed to me that nothing could do so much for a man as a good long jail sentence. To have all of one's physical needs taken care of by specially appointed assistants; to be marched to and from meals with neither choice nor cooking, payment nor dishwashing, on one's mind; to be sent at stipulated times to the yard for exercise; to have whole mornings, afternoons, evenings of freedom from interruption, with only the passing and repassing of a guard's steps in the corridor to assure and emphasize it; to hear the clang of opening and closing of doors down the cellblock and know that one needn't be concerned, one still had months to serve - who could not write the history of the world under such circumstances? Who could not, in a well-insulated but austerely padded cell, think all the high thoughts, read all the great books, perhaps even write one or two?
p. 157 While we were at it, we might have discussed the dangers inherent in conducting your life according to rules whimsically adopted from some book, and ignoring the testimony and experience of people around you.
p. 174 I said, "Puttering can be a comfort. It goes with rumination, and he's a ruminator. He should have been a literate gentleman farmer with a telescope in his backyard, and a big library, and all kinds of time to think." "A rustic Newton?" she flashed. "Where's his Principia?" There was something so close to contempt in her voice that she made me mad. "Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals?" I said. "We're all decent godless people, Hallie. Let's not be too hard on each other if we don't set the world afire. There's been enough of that."
p. 185 Good cooks dirty a lot of dishes, especially when they themselves don't have to wash them.
p. 194 - Hallie, you've got the wrong idea of what writers do. They don't understand any more than other people. They invent only plots they can resolve. They ask the questions they can answer. Those aren't people that you see in books, those are constructs. Novels or biographies, it makes no difference. I couldn't reproduce the real Sid and Charity Lang, much less explain them; and if I invented them I'd be falsifying something I don't want to falsify.
p. 202 Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
p. 237 "[Death]'s as natural as being born," she said, "and even if we stop being the individuals we once were, there's an immortality of organic molecules that's absolutely certain. Don't you find that a wonderful comfort? I do. To think that we'll become part of the grass and trees and animals, that we'll stay right here where we loved it while we were alive. People will drink us with their morning milk and pour us as maple syrup over their breakfast pancakes. So I say we should be happy and grateful, and make the most of it. I've had a wonderful life, I've loved every minute."
p. 263 For a moment I studied her sad, resigned, trying-to-be-cheerful face. I thought of how it might be to look at the face of the woman you loved and had lived your life with, and know that this might be the last, or the next-to-last, or the next-to-next-to-last time you would see it.
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