Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life

March tokenized several important events. The birth of a friend, the death of another, etc. Revisiting Yiyun Li’s autobiography (however she denies it) is the one thing I could manage and had to rely on here.

Altered sceneries are at best distractions, or else new settings for old habits. What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one's self. Even the most inconsistent person is consistently himself.

The present--what is the present but a constant test: in this muddled in-between one struggles to understand what about oneself has to be changed, what accepted, what preserved.

...not leaving had never felt like an option.

...the possession of immunity--to illness, to follies, to love and loneliness and troubling thoughts and unalleviated pains--a trait that I have desired for my characters and myself, knowing all the while the futility of such a wish. Only the lifeless can be immune to life.

...capable of not only enlarging but also diminishing our precarious selves.

One has to have a solid self to be selfish.

What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance, if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.

Instead, the pain of being close to another person and the pain of isolation invalidate each other.

Yet for months after the hospital stays I tried to explain to those around me that anyone can be, and should be, replaceable. What does this I matter to you when it means so little to myself?

In between, time spent with other people is the time to prepare for their disappearance.

Why write autobiographically?

The intense emotions around suicide--anger, pity, unforgivingness, even condemnation--demand what no one has the right to claim: an explanation, and the authority to judge the explanation.

The world will always quote Mann on Zweig's death. Yet the latter's silence prevails.

A glimpse into the depth of other people's misfortunes makes us cling to the hope that suffering is measurable. There are more sorrowful sorrows, more despondent despondencies. When we recognize another's suffering, we cannot avoid confronting our own, from which we escape to the thought of measurability. Well, at least, we emphasize. Our capacity to console extends only to what we can do to console ourselves.

Waiting is treacherous. Rather than destroying one with the clean stroke of catastrophe, it erodes the foundation of hope.

Exert yourself.

In War and Peace, Prince Andrei, after losing his first wife in childbirth, "thought over his whole life and reached the same old comforting and hopeless conclusion, that there was no need for him to start anything, that he had to live out his life without doing evil, without anxiety, and without wishing for anything." He was thirty-one and had not met Natasha, the true love of his life.

There was the possiblity of death, which allowed one to bypass digressions into a life that had to be lived in detail.

The fact is, I must admit, that we ususally examplify--in some measure--the faults against which we inveigh. I am prone to excess, in arts as in life, so that I resist anything which implies that the line of least resistance is normall... Make allowance, William, and muster charity. But no charity is needed so far as friendship is concerned, for friendship is my phobia. It is after all, loyalty which makes one resistful?

To remember is my instinct.

Do you, a friend aksed me years ago, understand that you are in people's real lives?

One cannnot sustain that kind of in-between--living and yet not living--forever. For the first time I wanted my life as legitimate as my characters', as solid, as habitable. Make me real, as you are to me--this cry could only be directed toward my characters. They were not meant to see me; why then let the novel live on? I had refued realness to people in my life; why then let myself linger?

One does not will oneself to love; one does not kill oneself because one ceases to love. The difficulty is that love erases: the more faded one becomes, the more easily one loves.

...willfully selfish.

"The moment one is sad one is ordinary." She wrote. But that is not enough. The moment one feels anything one feels fatal.

Writing is an option, so ist not writing; being read is a possibility, so ist not being read. Reading, however, I equate with real life: life can be opened and closed like a book; living is a choice, so is not living.

Innocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous. Finding no language in which to speak in their own terms, they resign themselves to being translated imperfectly. They exist alone; when they try to enter into relations they compromise falsifyingly--through anxiety, through desire to impart and to feel warmth. The system of our affections is too corrupt for them. They are bound to blunder, then to be told they cheat. In love, the sweetness and violence they have to offer involves a thousand betrayals for the less innocent. Incurable strangers to the world, they never cease to exact a heroic happiness. Their singleness, their ruthlessness, their one continuous wish makes them bound to be cruel, and to suffer cruelty.

One's grief belongs to oneself; one's tragedy, to others.

I know exactly where I fail.

Under what circumstances can a writer and a reader become contemporaries?

Come and visit before too long, he said.

Practitioners of that vanishing act develop the belief--illusion, really--that one can exist unobserved.

Dear friend, we have waited this out.