Tomcat in Love

The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste.

What is love, for God's sake, if not the most distilled obsession?

Mrs. Kooshof's intolerance for complexity, for the looping circuitry of a well-told tale, symptomizes an epidemic disease of our modern world. (I see it daily among my students. The short attention span, the appetite limited to linearity. Too much Melrose Place.)

The days seemed to stretch out toward infinity, blank and humid, without purpose, and at night I was kept awake by the endless drone of mosquitoes and helicopters. (Why wars must be contested under such conditions I shall never understand. Is not death sufficient?)

I am forever astonished at the longevity of childhood. How it never ends. How we are what we were. How turtles and engines and stolen kisses leave their jet trail across our gaping lives.

Can a word stop your heart as surely as arsenic?

But this, too, was a performance.

Every dark cloud may well have its silver lining, but I have come to learn that every silver lining has its dark consequences.

My sole fond memory from this period is of a rubbery little Appalachian number by the name of June. Acrobatic tongue. Tooth decay. Illiterate in everything but love.

I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology.