At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.

Something amazing happens when the rest of the world is sleeping. I am glued to my chair. I forget that I ever wanted to do anything but write. The crowded city, the crowded apartment, and the crowded calendar suddenly seem spacious. Three or four hours pass in a moment; I have no idea what time it is, because I never check the clock. If I chose to listen, I could hear the swish of taxis bound for downtown bars or the soft saxophone riffs that drift from a neighbor's window, but nothing gets through. I am suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, and the very lack of sensation is delicious.

The Procrustean bed. . .suggests itself with dispiriting aptness as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him as a handsome fellow with a large vocabulary and an oleaginous tongue, not unlike the chairmen of many English departments.) There's just one crucial difference. Sometimes Procrustes lopped off his victims, and sometimes he stretched them, but the Culture Wars always lop. I have never seen cultural politics enlarge a work of literature, only diminish it.

We spread our sleeping bags on the snow and crawled inside. The vantage point was dizzying. It was impossible to tell whether the comet was above us or we were above the comet; we were all falling through space, missing the stars by inches.

[The shells] do not have the meaning they once did, but, as Swann said in Remembrance of Things Past, "even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them." (22)

My life seems too fast now, so obstructions bother me less than they once did. I am no longer in a hurry to see what is around the next bend. I find myself wanting to backferry, to hover midstream, suspended. If I could do that, I might avoid many things: harsh words, foolish decisions, moments of inattention, regrets that wash over me, like water. (196)

Why would I wish my senses to be dulled when they could be sharpened? Why would I wish to mumble when I could scintillate? Why would I wish to forget when I could remember? Of course, since even in those days I was a loquacious workaholic who liked to stay up late, you might think I’d pick a drug that would nudge me closer to the center of the bell curve instead of pushing me farther out on the edge—but of course I didn’t. Who does? Don’t we all just keep doing the things that make us even more like ourselves? As I lay in bed with a godawful headache, sunlight streamed through the open window, and so did the smell of good French coffee from the hotel kitchen downstairs.

As Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald, describing the act of letter-writing: “Such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something

wasn’t education a matter of infusing one’s life with flavorful essences, pressing out the impurities, and leaving only a little sludge at the bottom?