[b]John Fowles from The French Lieutenant’s Woman
We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.[/b]
Yep, there the ones I’m familiar with.
I am infinitely strange to myself.
Imagine then the reactions of others.
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.
Let’s pin down why that makes absolutely no sense.
You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it…fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in the flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo sapiens.
Let’s just say that some are considerably more adept at this than others.
The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time; our sense of that, not a disinterested love of science, and certainly not wisdom, is why we devote such a huge proportion of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster ways of doing things - as if the final aim of mankind was to grow closer not to a perfect humanity, but to a perfect lightning-flash.
And then to market it of course.
There are some men who are consoled by the idea that there are women less attractive than their wives; and others who are haunted by the knowledge that there are more attractive.
What’s the equivalent for women, he wondered? A bank account?