THOUGHTS THINKING

9 1 R T H O U G H T S T H I N K I N G I R V I N G F E L D M A N The voluble man is as vain of his reasons as he is ashamed of his acts. The kitchen mystery: here death becomes food. The mark of the academic is the presence of ideas in the absence of thought. Unlike horizontal and vertical, depth is conjectural – and therefore the dimension of anxiety. Clarity is transparency made visible. She was fighting for her life, while he was a dilettante of feeling – with the result that she appeared to be unscrupulous and he an idealist. The lover, making the gift of his passion, will not permit his beloved to say, ‘‘Oh, I wanted something else.’’ 9 2 F E L D M A N Y Rhythm is habit raised to rapture. Had Freud been a businessman his psychology might have seen man not as miserable congeries of defense mechanisms but as enterprising and engaged with his own freedom. Imitation is the highest form of misquotation. Scum sinks to the top. She came to love and bickered to stay. No poverty so poor it has no secrets. Since the substance of a confession in a ‘‘confessional’’ poem or memoir can’t be verified – and is often known to be false – the genre isn’t defined by its scandal but by the reader who accords fundamental value to its being, in fact, true, without which the work would have little interest. Vulgarizing, this reader prefers the journalism of the doomed self to the paradise of the self imagined. Has anyone observed that until the past hundred years or so all fiction was written in the past tense? – which works to ventilate and refresh the past’s fatedness of fact (what happened had to happen) with fiction’s openness of possibility: this story didn’t have to happen, and yet, in imagination, in the telling, it happens every time you hear it. What was and is once and only once has been set free to live forever. On the other hand, the mere present tense is barren. Tragedy repeated becomes farce. Farce repeated turns to disgust. ‘‘Of course, I would lie to you to make you happy.’’ ‘‘What else have you done to make me happy?’’ Bush: Being saved was just a better way of not having to grow up. Every girl has a dream, every woman a story. T H O U G H T S T H I N K I N G 9 3 R Only if you take your neighbor as seriously as you take yourself will you have a self that can be taken seriously – by your neighbor, by yourself. ‘‘Political correctness’’ provides a structure of taboos for a society where no speech is forbidden. Why is there something and not nothing? Because we have been spared. ‘‘Don’t you admire me?’’ the mousetrap asks the mouse, whose bulging eyes are eloquent. And then, ‘‘I’ll take that for a ‘Yes.’ ’’ The point of self-discipline is to make the slave in me unavailable to any master other than myself. Hermits of space, the wanderers. A eulogy spoken by a stranger, a professional eulogist at his third funeral that morning. What he says is hasty, banal, ignorant, repeats the very clichés he put in your mouth to then elicit from you. Hearing them said aloud, you sit there sobbing, saying to yourself, ‘‘This is right. This is right.’’ Imagination isn’t particular inventions but the transposition of the whole into the realm of the possible. Why has the hug replaced the handshake? Because actors – to show o√ their lovableness – want the largest, least ambiguous gestures. In the hug, eyes don’t meet, and the handshake’s nuances are lost. Imagine a debate between a sane liar and a madman who tells the truth. What counts isn’t how well you burnish the lamp but how it shines. 9 4 F E L D M A N Y Your material resists you; your material supports you. Honor it. At every instant, we test in thought the power...