The Blazing World

Of course we need the rich. We always have: to ogle and envy and imitate. They are our spectacle and our joy because in the head of every American lies the thought That could be me.

Art is not a democracy, but this blatant truth must not be even whispered in our prickly, tickly city of do-gooder, liberal, decaffeinated-skim-latte-drinking mediocrities blind to the facts.

I know now it's easier to be disappointed by a spouse than by your parents. It must be because, at least in early childhood, parents are gods. They slowly become human over time, and it's kind of sad, really, when they diminish into plain old mortals.

This amnesia is our phenomenology of the everyday - we don't see ourselves - and what we see becomes us while we're looking at it.

'Rachel,' she said, 'isn't it strange that we don't know who we are? I mean, we know so little about ourselves it's shocking. We tell ourselves a story and we go along believing in it, and then, it turns out, it's the wrong story, which means we've lived a wrong life.'

Imagine getting up in the morning and scouring the apartment for yourself, turning out drawers and rifling though closets and checking under the bed for yourself. Where had I mislaid him, that bright, curly-headed youth with prospects shining just over yonder hill?

She is wrapped up daily, he thinks, in the magic of money, which means simply this: you can tell she isn't thinking about the coat or the boots; they just are. The poor wear their prizes - the gleaming new leather shoes, the just-off-the-rack swater, the expensive gloves - with a stiff self-conscious air that gives them away.

I am going away, far away, to the Himalayas, to the Sahara, to Paris, to Timbuktu, but first to Queens to get my stuff out of storage.

He wanted me to come to dinner, but I said no. No, I said, no. I believe in no. I believe in a hard, resistant, diamantine no. No and no again. No, I will not. No and never and not. I prefer not to. I have grown sick to death of yes. Oh yes, I will. Yes, certainly, of course, yes, darling, yes, sweetheart. Yes, yes, yes. And she said yes.

And didn't you wait at home like Penelope, without any suitors, sadly, just two children? And were you not faithful? And were you not kind? And were you not long-suffering?