Strange how reluctant I was to acknowledge that control of my fate lay beyond my own conscious will. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.
There is something I have learned since being paralyzed, and that is that in the absence of sensory information,
A tissue of small sounds filled the room, a bird, a clock, a voice from another garden. What we call silence.
Even in his sleep he couldn't escape.
Sometimes, Dan, friends have to take a stand and say: Hey, idiot, we’re here for you no matter what. We’re not going to disappear when you get grumpy or angry, we’re in this for the long haul. We’re in this for each other.
For despite his confidence, and his apparent maturity, I suspected that there was in him a deep and childish need to elevate, and idealize, the love object. This is not uncommon in artists. The very nature of their work, the long periods of isolation...
these are precisely the conditions that killed love, after first blighting its growth: squalor, fear, uncertainty, overfamiliarity.
Perhaps that's the whole point about infidelity, I suggested, not that one has sex but that by doing so one puts at risk someone else's happiness?
