I can't sleep…
Here, unhurried, one could browse for hours.
Ordinary life drowned, went under.
On the street outside, often cold and wet,
it seemed, were passers-by in overcoats and expressions of care,
but within the shop one leafed through pages in a kind of narcotic dream.
~ James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection
Image source: Child in Time.
I think the British writer James Meek is accurate when he describes Light Years (1975) by the American novelist James Salter. […]
“There is no complete life. There are only fragments. We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.”
And this, again, is a common experience [from Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (1921)]:
“Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
~ Galen Strawson, I am Not a Story
Art: Simon Birch (via Lost at E Minor)