All cat stories start with the statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this..."

We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.

A pretty sight, a lady with a book.

I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.

Bli i hvert fall ikke lektor, hadde han sagt, ikke steng deg inne i skolen. Hvis du absolutt vil bli det, så må det utelukkende være fordi du ikke gidder å bli noe annet. Dette mener jeg i fullt alvor, hadde han sagt til sin svigerdatter, før hun flyttet hjemmefra. Han kjente seg overvunnet. Alt han stod for, var blitt fjernet fra samfunnets dagligtale. Han gikk rundt i leiligheten i Jacob Aalls gate og tenkte over dette, kveld etter kveld, etter at Eva hadde gått og lagt seg. Tok seg noen akevitter, som han skylte ned med øl, passet nøye på at han ikke tok for mye, for han ønsket ikke å stille på skolen i bakrus, men nå og da hendte det likevel at det ble for mye. Akk ja, tenkte han, når han skulle legge seg, og forstod at det likevel var blitt for mye. Han kunne bli nokså opprørt av å sitte slik og tenke. Det verste var at han syntes han ikke hadde noe å si lenger. Bare til seg selv. En epoke hadde gått under, og han satt her og snakket med seg selv. En epoke hadde gått under, og med den Elias Rukla qua samfunnsmenneske, fordi han jo hadde stilt seg til rådighet for nettopp denne epoken, som offentlig oppdrager. Noen ny generasjon hadde han liten lyst til å bli oppdrager for, det hadde han for øvrig heller ingen forutsetninger for, for å si det mildt. Så enkelt er det, utbrøt han. Det er faen meg sånn det ligger an. Forfall på alle kanter.

Hans tendenser til for mye drikk hadde nok akselerert etter som årene gikk. Nå pleide han å sitte oppe om kveldene, etter at Eva hadde gått og lagt seg. Det hadde blitt en vane som virket beroligende på ham, han trengte den stunden helt for seg selv, men sine akevitter og øl. For det hadde skjedd noe med ham som han hadde vanskelig for både å forstå og forsone seg med. Og det var en gradvis tiltagende følelse av å være samfunnsmessig satt ut av spill. Det plaget ham sterkt, og han syntes også det var oppsiktsvekkende at det skulle forholde seg slik. Men det var liksom lite av det som ble budt ham som samfunnsmenneske som interesserte ham tilstrekkelig lenger. Verken TV eller aviser forsmådde å stimulere ham lenger.

His teacher at med
school called him a
minotaur who swallows
other people's labyrinths.
Good I'll do psychiatry he
said.

To feel anything
deranges you. To be seen
feeling anything strips you
naked. In the grip of it
pleasure or pain doesn't
matter. You think what
will they do what new
power will they acquire if
they see me naked like
this. If they see you
feeling. You have no idea
what. It's not about them.
To be seen is the penalty.

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of "living" there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane; one does not "live" at Xanadu.

One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

It is hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised; melancholy to realize how much of anyone's memory is no true memory at all, but only the traces of someone else's memory, stories handed down on the family network.

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignation with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something people with courage can do without.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.