Dog Years

It's freeing, to think that there's always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language.

...in the face of all dangers, in what may seem a godless region, we move forward through the agencies of love and art.

Maybe we should be glad, finally, that the word can’t go where the heart can, not completely. It’s freeing, to think there’s always an aspect of us outside the grasp of speech, the common stuff of language. Love is common, too, absolutely so—and yet our words for it only point to it; they do not describe it. They are indicators of something immense: the word love is merely a sign that means something like This way to the mountain.

A walk is a walk and must be taken; breakfast and dinner come when they are due. The routines of the living are inviolable, no hiatus called on account of misery, spiritual crisis, or awful weather.

However much grief I carried, I liked the way my life was tending, these bright new directions. It's only human, to mourn and to reach toward forwardness at once.

My mood settles around me, a wool coat that seems to grow heavier with the months in which I accomplish very little--and then, since the coat is too heavy to allow movement, accomplish nothing at all.

Hope is leaven; it makes things rise without effort. I have moved forward at times without hope, when Wally was sick and dying, and there wasn't a thing in the world to do but ease his way. Without hope, you hunker down and do what needs to be done in this hour; you do not attend to next week. It is somehow like writing without any expectation or belief that one will ever be read-only worse, since even a Dickinson secreting her poems away in private folios sewn by hand expects, at some unknowable time, her treasure to be found, her words to be read. Hopelessness means you do the work at hand without looking for a future.

Judy, of course, doesn't stand in the ruins; she is the ruin. In this way she enthralled a generation of gay men, singing her way out of suffering while still bearing the inescapable marks of damage.

Our new millennium began, and it seemed a little bit possible--though surely if we examined the thought too closely, it would evaporate--that a brighter time might be ahead; we have, after all, the round, clean slate of the new number, the row of zeros after the initial digit in 2000.