The Normal Economic System Works

You’re So American. You Believe Everything Is Possible, Everything Will Come. I Know Differently.

One Is Seduced And Battered In Turn. The Result Is Presumably Wisdom. Wisdom! We Are Clinging To Life Like Lizards. Why Is It So Difficult To Assemble Those Things That Really Matter In Life And To Dwell Among Them Only? I Am Referring To Certain Landscapes, Persons, Beasts, Books, Rooms, Meteorological Conditions, Fruits. In Fact, I Insist On It. A Letter Is Like A Poem, It Leaps Into Life And Shows Very Clearly The Marks, Perhaps I Should Say Thumbprints, Of An Unwilling Or Unready Composer.

One Should Not Believe Too Strongly In A Life Which Can Easily Vanish.

You Lived And Died Alone, Especially In Fighters. Fighters. Somehow, Despite Everything, That Word Had Not Become Sterile. You Slipped Into The Hollow Cockpit And Strapped And Plugged Yourself Into The Machine. The Canopy Ground Shut And Sealed You Off. Your Oxygen, Your Very Breath, You Carried Into The Chilled Vacuum, In A Steel Bottle.

The Book Was In Her Lap; She Had Read No Further. The Power To Change One’s Life Comes From A Paragraph, A Lone Remark. The Lines That Penetrate Us Are Slender, Like The Flukes That Live In River Water And Enter The Bodies Of Swimmers. She Was Excited, Filled With Strength. The Polished Sentences Had Arrived, It Seemed, Like So Many Other Things, At Just The Right Time. How Can We Imagine What Our Lives Should Be Without The Illumination Of The Lives Of Others?