📚Marginalia

We are friends with the people we do things with, as much as we are with people we resemble.

We are all, at heart, gradualists, our expectations set by the steady passage of time.

Shopping for houses is amazing. People who would never invite you into their homes under any other circumstances open their doors wide, allow you to peer into their closets, pass judgment on their wallpaper, ask pointed questions about their gutters.

Oftentimes is it madness more than genius that moves the world forward. Who else but the mad would reach so far, stretching for the impossible?

What is prayer but a focus of the mind, a focus of consciousness and if consciousness is a quantum phenomenon, then prayer is a quantum phenomenon.

And like all quantum phenomena, it will and must measure and influence the result.

In other words?

Prayer works.

I look back over what I’ve written and I know it’s wrong, not because of what I’ve set down, but because of what I’ve omitted. What isn’t there has a presence, like the absence of light.

I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you’re depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?

Thrown over a precipice, you fall or else you fly, you clutch at any hope, however unlikely; however - if I may use such an overworked word - miraculous. What we mean by that is, Against all odds.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself.

Was this betrayal, or was it an act of courage? Perhaps both. Neither one involves forethought: such things take place in an instant, in an eyeblink. This can only be because they have been rehearsed by us already, over and over, in silence and darkness; in such silence, such darkness, that we are ignorant of them ourselves. Blind but sure-footed, we step forward as if into a remembered dance.