SACCADES

sac·cade n. (1) A violent check the rider gives a horse by drawing both reins suddenly; (2) A strong pressure of the violin bow against the strings by which three or four notes are played at once; (3) The involuntary jerking movement in the act of swallowing; (4) The seemingly random scans the eye makes across an object; as in REM sleep; a rapid irregular movement of the eye as it changes focus moving from one point to another, for example, while reading

Some flavors in a meal should appear once, memorably and inspiring great frustration, like a single shot in a non-narrative film.

At the ribbon-cutting, one of the old city elites. Ten years since I’ve seen him—does he recall me? No reason to—and he still seems to look past people. His smile is of one who has long been expecting the illness for which he is incapable of preparing.

“Ennui” is the slow way of humiliation.

The lover who cannot, for long, understand how she does not understand you. She always speaks of it, that realization, as an epiphany, and this is a cause of celebration for her (and for you, if you are wise). It is also, for you, a renewal of mourning.

(Overheard): “ . . . I will not let a piece of writing go until it has outgrown me . . .”

His wife doesn’t believe he could have settled for his dead father.

J scheduled lunch in order to cancel the date eloquently, confidently. Asking for a rain check was a way of postponing the regret of seeing me at last.

Gossip?—a sleep requiring an audience.

His role in life is to feel lucky—a martyrdom of graciousness.

The way the facial features go flat—without attentive, appeasing alertness—when the mind behind it is imagining.

When he delivered mail, D would encounter odd things. At one house, a yellow card Beware of Monkey. (The beast would appear, shit into its hand, and throw the stuff at him.)

It’s as difficult to speak of luck as it is of sex. Too little said and one seems a blockhead. Too much and one assures his judges of their accuracy.

A book written to rescue all the losses can’t help but be sentimental.

The liar undoes himself not with his lie but its necessity, which endures the successes of his falsehood and calls on him disguised sometimes as noble aims, sometimes as practical comfort and sometimes—as if to suggest that the opposite face smiles beneath its mask—death.

Often, the most generous act is recognized for what it is, much later, usually too late for the receiver to do anything but sit abashed.

“I think I inherited a backbone of whispers.”—student essay

Extended long enough, another’s brilliance grows tiresome. It does, however, earn an uncommon politeness.

To call one a hypocrite is always to be accurate though not always right.

Profound revelation must seem, in retrospect, inevitable—and obvious. It is this latter quality that is its most enchanting chastisement.

It was nonsense—except as a provocation.

Most current enthusiasms are the objects of future nostalgias. (It may be their most substantial value.)

Five years have elapsed since he last confided to me about his unhappy marriage, his mistress, his fear of ruining a life—his own or his wife’s or his lover’s or his daughters’. Nothing seems to have happened in these intervening years. He wrote a book, he enlarged his house, he had surgery on his knee. Nothing—but only because he is asking me to listen, just listen.

We ask many things of life, not knowing what to ask of it.

To gain the attention is to gain the animal, when the attention is what is sought. All metaphysics in our time, and in the foreseeable future, will be in describing how the human does or does not follow thereafter.

When one “connects” to a past event or period, one is impressed into its servitude.

He asked what she thought her dream meant because he could not restrain himself from a fearful interpretation.

How...