The Angel Esmeralda

If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.

A film can be undermined by the person you’re seeing it with, there in the dark, a ripple effect of attitude, scene by scene, shot by shot.

It's almost unbelievable when you think of it, how they live there in all that ice and sand and mountainous wilderness. Look at it,' he says. 'Huge barren deserts, huge oceans. How do they endure all those terrible things? The floods alone. The earthquakes alone make it crazy to live there. Look at those fault systems. They're so big, there's so many of them. The volcanic eruptions alone. What could be more frightening than a volcanic eruption? How do they endure avalanches, year after year, with numbing regularity? It's hard to believe people live there. The floods alone. You can see whole huge discolored areas, all flooded out, washed out. How do they survive, where do they go? Look at the cloud buildups. Look at that swirling storm center. What about the people who live in the path of a storm like that? It must be packing incredible winds. The lightning alone. People exposed on beaches, near trees and telephone poles. Look at the cities with their spangled lights spread in all directions. Try to imagine the crime and violence. Look at the smoke pall hanging low. What does that mean in terms of respiratory disorders? It's crazy. Who would live there? The deserts, how they encroach. Every year they claim more and more arable land. How enormous those snowfields are. Look at the massive storm fronts over the ocean. There are ships down there, small craft, some of them. Try to imagine the waves, the rocking. The hurricanes alone. The tidal waves. Look at those coastal communities exposed to tidal waves. What could be more frightening than a tidal wave? But they live there, they stay there. Where could they go?

If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought," he said, "the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.

I thought about soccer in history, the inspiration for wars, truces, rampaging mobs. The game was a global passion, spherical ball, grass or turf, entire nations in spasms of elation or lament. But what kind of sport is it that disallows the use of players' hands, except for the goalkeeper? Hands are essential human tools, the things that grasp and hold, that make, take, carry, create. If soccer were an American invention, wouldn't some European intellectual maintain that our historically puritanical nature has compelled us to invent a game structured on anti-masturbatory principles?

Was he at the movies to see a movie, she said, or maybe more narrowly, more essentially, simply to be at the movies?

It makes a man feel universal, floating over the continents, seeing the rim of the world, a line as clear as a compass arc, knowing it is just a turning of the bend to Atlantic twilight, to sediment plumes and kelp beds, an island chain glowing in the dusky sea.

If you let me teach you not to end a sentence with a preposition, Edgar thought, I will save your life.

This spot was so close to perfect we would not even want to tell ourselves how lucky we were, having been delivered to it. The best of new places had to be protected from our own cries of delight. We would hold the words for weeks or months, for the soft evening when a stray remark would set us to recollecting. I guess we believed, together, that the wrong voice can obliterate a landscape.

People say great art is immortal. I say there's something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.

The shallower our arguments, the more intense we became.

If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought,” he said, “the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.” We loved the idea of being everyday crazy. It rang so true, so real. “In our privatest mind,” he said, “there is only chaos and blur. We invented logic to beat back our creatural selves. We assert or deny. We follow M with N.” Our privatest mind, we thought. Did he really say that? “The only laws that matter are laws of thought.” His fists were clenched on the tabletop, knuckles white. “The rest is devil worship," he said.

Minnesota is a human moment.

Do we have to believe something happened exactly the way it was shown by artists?

We listen to the old radio shows. Light flares and spreads across the blue-banded edge, sunrise, sunset, the urban grids in shadow. There is a sweetness in the tenor voice of the young man singing, a simple vigour that time and distance and random noise have enveloped in eloquence and yearning. Every sound, every lilt of strings has this veneer of age.

Don’t you sometimes feel a power in you? An extreme state of good health. An arrogant healthiness. That’s it. You are feeling so good you begin thinking you’re a little superior to most people. An optimism about yourself that you generate at the expense of others. Don’t you sometimes feel this?

There is a seaward bulge of stratocumulus. Sun glint and littoral drift. I see blooms of plankton in a blue of such Persian richness it seems an animal rapture, a colour change to express some form of intuitive delight.

People had hoped to be caught up in something bigger than themselves. They thought it would be a shared crisis. They would feel a sense of shared purpose, shared destiny. Like a snowstorm that blankets a large city – but lasting months, lasting years, carrying everyone along, creating fellow feeling where there was only suspicion and fear. The war would ennoble everything we say and do. What was impersonal would become personal. What was solitary would be shared.

To men at this remove, it is as though things exist in their particular physical form in order to reveal the hidden simplicity of some powerful mathematical truth.

All human existence is a trick of light.

I think of kids. It makes me feel selfish, to be so wary of having a family. Never mind do I have a job or not. I'll have a job soon, a good one. That's not it. I'm in awe of raising, basically, someone so tiny and soft.

It is just so interesting," he says at last. "The colors and all." The colors and all.

Me doy cuenta ahora de que el primer día apenas llegué a mirar. Creía estar mirando, pero solo estaba percibiendo un mero barrunto de lo que hay en estos cuadros. Ahora es cuando estoy empezando a mirar.

Você não sente às vezes um poder dentro de você?”, pergunta Vollmer. “Um estado extremo de saúde, sei lá. Uma saúde arrogante. É isso. Você se sente tão bem que começa a achar que é um pouco superior às outras pessoas. Uma espécie de força vital. Um otimismo sobre você mesmo, que é gerado quase que em detrimento dos outros. Você não sente isso às vezes?” (Sinto, sim.) “Deve ter um termo em alemão que quer dizer isso. Mas onde eu quero chegar é que esse sentimento poderoso é muito — sei lá — delicado. É isso. Um dia você sente, no dia seguinte de repente você se torna insignificante e condenado. Uma coisinha de nada dá errado e você se sente condenado, totalmente fraco e derrotado e incapaz de agir de modo poderoso, ou até mesmo sensato. Tirando você, todo mundo tem sorte, e você é um azarado, impotente, triste, incompetente e condenado.” (Sei, sei.)