The Moment Had Passed, The

Our Kiss Was Niticlimactic. It Wasn't That The Kiss Was Bad, But It Was Just A Note Of Punctuation In Our Long Conversation, A Parenthetical Remark Made In Order To Assure Each Other Of A Deeply Felt Agreement, A Mutual Offer Of Companionship, Which Is So Much More Rare Than Sexual Passion Or Even Love.

One Is Always Changing. I Don't Want To Write The Same Book And I Couldn't, Because I'm A Different Person.

Even Now, All Possible Feelings Do Not Yet Exist, There Are Still Those That Lie Beyond Our Capacity And Our Imagination. From Time To Time, When A Piece Of Music No One Has Ever Written Or A Painting No One Has Ever Painted, Or Something Else Impossible To Predict, Fathom Or Yet Describe Takes Place, A New Feeling Enters The World. And Then, For The Millionth Time In The History Of Feeling, The Heart Surges And Absorbs The Impact.

I Think In The Whole Field Of Questions About What We Take To Be "real," One Of Those Questions Is About The Self. When You Talk About The Self We're Always Talking About Whether It's A Construction And It's A Construction We're Always In The Process Of Working On. I Don't Think That Work Ever Ends, To Some Degree.

The Clarity Was Startling And Samson Wondered Whether He Was Imagining These Moments. Not That They Hadn't Happened At All, But That They Had Been Embellished By Details From Elsewhere, Fragments That Survived The Obliteration Of Other Memories, Vagrant Data That Gravitated And Stuck To What Was Left To Remember. But In The End He Rejected This Idea. The Memories Were Too Perfect: Take One Detail Away And They Collapsed Into Disorder.