Literature could turn you into an asshole; he’d learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.

When my husband died, because he was so famous & known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me — it still sometimes happens — & ask me if Carl changed at the end & converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again.

Carl faced his death with unflagging courage & never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief & precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive & we were together was miraculous — not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous & so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space & the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me & it’s much more meaningful…

The way he treated me & the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other & our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

Nothing Good Gets Away ›

I write these words at a time when my latest novel in progress has been deemed beyond the pale of publishing: too disturbing, too “foul and distasteful.” So as far as job security goes—ask any Sub-Sub, any customs inspector who realizes only too late that he went down with that big white whale—not much has changed. Except that now I don’t give a fuck. They’re all the first, they’re all the last.

And it was during this period that Madeleine fully understood how the lover’s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn’t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, that most solitary of places.

“…Because it’s the halves that halve you in half. I didn’t know, don’t know, about the in-between bits; the gory bits of you, and the gory bits of me.”

Listen, if you really want to do this with your life, you have to believe you’re necessary, and you are. People want to live like this with their cars and their big fucking houses they can’t even pay for, then you’re necessary. The only reason that they get to continue living like kings is because we’ve got our fingers on the scale in their favor. I take my hand off, and then the whole world gets really fucking fair really fucking quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say that they want that but they don’t. They want what we have to give them but they also want to, you know, play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from. Well that’s more hypocrisy than I’m willing to swallow so fuck ‘em. Fuck normal people.

That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.

…this was court street. and court street, where it passed through carroll gardens and cobble hill, was the only brooklyn, really—north was brooklyn heights, secretly part of manhattan, south was the harbor, and the rest, everything east of the gowanus canal…apart from small outposts of civilization in park slope and windsor terrace, was an unspeakable barbarian tumult.