Go Back
"Is that comfortable?" my mother asked me about this extremely short item, a miniskirt. "Sure," I lied, because actually, bending over in it presents some logistical problems. "Besides, it's a sort of test for men. If they don't see you as a sex object in this, then you know they're really advanced."
Standing at the railing of the departing ship Batory....
When the brass band on shore strikes up the jaunty mazurka rhythms of the Polish anthem, I am pierced by a youthful sorrow so powerful that I suddenly stop crying and try to hold still against the pain.
On Artur Rubenstein's performance of the A Major Polonaise
With its heroic, revolutionary echoes, the audience breaks out into a shout which is simultaneously a toast and a salute of camaraderie and celebration. Exhausted and exhilarated, the crowd moves slowly out. We've had our moment of collective euphoria; we've had our catharsis.
On enterprising women
They are unhesitant in using their sexuality to advance themselves in the world, and they often marry for money, a free ride, or take lovers who can assist them in their careers. They do so with the self-confidence of women who are used to being the object of desire and who can clearheadedly separate strategy from feelings. I admire this gambling wit, which, with the moralism I've acquired in America about sex and the sentiments, I would never imitate.
On reflection at the day's end
In English, words have not penetrated to those layers of my psyche from which a private conversation could proceed. This interval before sleep used to be the time when my mind became both receptive and alert, when images and words rose up to consciousness, reiterating what had happened during the day, adding the day's experiences to those already stored there, spinning out the thread of my personal story.
Nostalgia is a source of poetry, and a form of fidelity. The largest presence within me is a welling up of absence, of what I have lost.
Telling a joke is like doing a linguistic pirouette. If you fall flat, it means not only that you don't have the wherewithal to do it well but also that you have misjudged your own skill, that you are fool enough to undertake something you can't finish....
I'm turned off by the intonations I hear on the TV sitcoms - by the expectation of laughter, like a dog's tail wagging in supplication, built into the actors' pauses.
"We've gathered in Penny's bedroom, getting ready for a party"
Rachel doesn't get dates because she's too tall and masculine, and Moselle because she's too beautiful and therefore boys are afraid of her. I never thought you had to do anything special to be feminine - surely, it's enough to be a woman, isn't it? - but this belief, which seems a given to me, strikes my college-mates as very sophisticated.
She is finely attuned to affectations and pretense; she can be a merciless parodist of false tones, of people's attempts to give themselves superiority and make more of themselves than they are.
The way to jump over my Great Divide is to crawl backward over it in English. It's only when I retell my whole story, back to the beginning, and from the beginning onward, in one language, that I can reconcile the voices within me with each other; it is only then that the person who judges the voices and tells the stories begins to emerge.
When time compresses and shortens, it strangles pleasure; when it diffuses itself into aimlessness, the self thins out into affectless torpor. Pleasure exists in the middle time, in time that is neither too accelerated or too slowed down.
On the future....
When I image, imagine, those shimmers of nonexistent possibility suspended on as thread of purely mental light, time expands and creates a breathing space in which sensations can be savored.