The Quiet Game

I will do those things which make me happy today and which I can also live with ten years from now.

Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always. And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.

Emotions are by nature amorphous. When confined to words, our longings and passions, our rebellions and humiliations often seem melodramatic, trivial, or even pathetic.

You yourself are guilty of a crime when you do not punish crime.

Jung didn’t try to separate good and evil. He knew that both exist in every human heart. He called the propensity to evil the Shadow. And he believed that trying to deny or repress the Shadow is dangerous. Because it can’t be done. He believed you have to recognize your Shadow, come to grips with it, accept it, and integrate it.

A man lives morally all his life, then in one weak moment commits an act that damns him in his own eyes and threatens his liberty, even his life.

I educated myself, discovered my gift for language, learned that the larger world lay not across oceans but within the human mind and heart.

Broad is the gate that leads to destruction, but narrow the way that leads to salvation. . . .

If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.

Our actions have consequences that last long after us, entwining the present with the future in ways we cannot begin to understand. I have resolved a simple thing: I will do those things which make me happy today, and which I can also live with ten years from now.

learned that the larger world lay not across oceans but within the human mind and heart.

Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations.

A glacier consumes whole forests by inches.

The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always. And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago. And

The hour of justice does not strike on the dials of this world.

Rumor runs through the community like a plague, and truth is the first casualty.

Our actions have consequences that last long after us, entwining the present with the future in ways we cannot begin to understand.

Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.

hair. He’s bald now. But he still looks like he could ride a bull ragged.” I jump at the sound of the garage door. Mom gives me a little wave, then crosses the kitchen as silently as if she were floating on a magic carpet and disappears down the hall. Moments later, my father walks through the kitchen door, his face drawn and tired. “I figured you’d be waiting for me.” “Dad, we’ve got to talk.” Dread seems to seep from the pores in his face. “Let me get a drink. I’ll meet you in the library.

You never wear red to no funeral; red says the dead person was a fool.

White America looks at the Vietnamese, the Irish, the Jews, and they say, ‘What’s the problem with the blacks?’ The resentment you hear around this town is based on that, not on old ideas of superiority.

Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

I don’t say it was hard, because everybody got it hard, some way.

Even chitlins smell good to a starving man.

Sometimes we think we are moving randomly. But random behavior is rare in humans. We are always spiraling around something, whether we see it or not, a secret center of gravity with the invisible power of a black hole.

Mom covers the wrought-iron patio table with newspaper, and Dad dumps the steaming crawfish

There have been times I would have given anything for such faith, for the belief that divine justice exists somewhere in the universe. Facing Sarah’s death without it was an existential baptism of fire. The comfort that belief in an afterlife can provide was obvious in the hospital waiting rooms and chemo wards, where