The Summer Without Men

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.

Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our sublimations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme, the image that forms on paper or canvas, the inner cantata, the cloistered embroidery, the dark and dreaming needlepoint from hell or heaven or purgatory or none of those three, but there must be some sound and fury from us, some clashing cymbals in the void.

Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.

We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.

There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren’t there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment.

We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.

Lots of women read fiction. Most men don't. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don't. If a man opens a novel,. he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside.

Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder. [p. 61]

I often felt the girls' speech was interchangeable, without any individuality whatsoever, a kind of herd-speak they had all agreed upon.

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.

Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters, farcical buffoons who bumble through our lives, making fine messes as we go, but when you get close, the ridiculous quickly fades into the sordid or the tragic or the merely sad. [p. 73]

Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.

Loss. A known absence. If you didn't know it, it would be nothing, which it is, of course, a nothing of another kind, as acutely felt as a blister, but a tumult, too, in the region of the heart and lungs, an emptiness with a name: You

I had read my way not to knowledge but into an inscrutable oblivion.

The transience of human feeling is nothing short of ludicrous. My mercurial fluctuations in the course of a single evening made me feel as if I had a character made pf chewing gum. I had fallen into the ugly depths of self-pity, a terrain just above the even more hideous lowlands of despair. Then, easily distracted twit that I am, I had, soon after, found myself on maternal heights, where I had practically swooned with pleasure as I bobbed and fondled the borrowed homunculus next door. I had eaten well, drunk too much wine, and embraced a young woman I hardly knew. In short, I had thoroughly enjoyed myself and had every intention of doing so again. [p. 59]

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

We all start out the same in our mothers' wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn't swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around.

As John Ashbery once said, “Being a famous poet is the not the same thing as being famous.

Tolerating cracks is part of being alive.

It is not that there is no difference between men and women; it is how much difference that difference makes, and how we choose to frame it.

No existe el futuro sin el pasado, porque lo que va a suceder no se puede imaginar más como una forma de repetición.

And the pen, as it were, Dear Reader, is now in my hand, and I am claiming the advantage, taking it for myself, for you will notice that the written word hides the body of the one who writes. For all you know, I might be a MAN in disguise. Unlikely, you say, with all this feminist prattle flying out here and there and everywhere, but can you be sure?

Doesn’t the seventeenth-century use of the measurement yard for penis strike you as a bit of an exaggeration, unless the yard then was not the yard now?

Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.

And in my secret heart of hearts, I admit there was some old mush that hadn't been scooped out of me by hardship and insanity. But there was also the story itself, the story Boris and I had written together, and in that story, our bodies and thoughts and memories had gotten themselves so tangled up that it was hard to see where one person's ended and the other's began.