Fifteen short pieces

(packed by weight, not length, so some shortening or lengthening may be experienced during shipment)

[A gentle reminder that I write books, in the twin hopes that you will enjoy them and that I will not die forgotten.]

We have discovered an ecstasy more profound than laughter; it is forbidding other people to laugh.

*

One implies one, but two implies an infinity, as can be proved by mirrors.

*

There is power in doing something once, and power in doing something a thousand times, but there is no power in between. The well-traveled cosmopolitan and the backwoods shut-in alike have contempt for the tourist. The teetotaler and the alcoholic, the virgin and the lothario, may each sneer at the other, but at least it is clear they all know what they are doing. Impotently we waffle between their poles of commitment, sad and lowly figures.

*

In second grade, I received as a gift a World Almanac; this edition had on its back cover a series of questions, simple factual matters—What is the capital of Uganda? Who was the eighth US president?—the answers to which were somewhere in the pages of the almanac.

My friend Joe and I sank deep into this game, and for weeks we would obsessively paw through the almanac, looking for populations and exports. A folded piece of notebook paper served as both a bookmark and an ever-growing answer key. Eventually we answered every question. Kampala. Van Buren. It was a good time.

The next year World Almanac put out (as was their custom) a new edition. By great good fortune, the broadside Scholastic catalogues distributed through the school—order some books, students!—offered just this new almanac, and I ordered it. It arrived, and I want you to imagine the excitement with which Joe and I turned to the back cover.

Indeed, once again the almanac featured the litany of questions, all new and all different. But this time, next to each question was a page number. The page of the almanac with the answer on it.

What is the capital of Uruguay? Turn to page 523. Who was the ninth US president? Turn to page 284. These example are all hypothetical, but you get my meaning.

Rationally, we should have been able to still play out little game. We could have blacked out the page numbers, or simply ignored them. But we didn’t, and perhaps we couldn’t. It was too hard to pretend we were plumbing secrets from the depths when the secrets were so overtly not secret. We didn’t play the game at all, and I don’t know if I ever cracked the spine of that almanac.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about those almanacs in the years since second grade. Probably I should stop wasting time and just google up what other people have said about them.

*

There’s no such thing as punching up. If the punch lands, you were punching down.

*

In the beginning was the difference; and we will abandon every principle, uproot every custom to preserve that difference.

The North turned abolitionist because the South, for economic reasons, would not. As soon as Mitch McConnell married an Asian woman, it was incumbent upon my demographic to label such an act as problematic. Teen Vogue needs to be opposed to miscegenation or how will it know it’s not the same person as Clarence Thomas?

I will bathe my hands in the blood of a thousand innocents, but not for one moment will I endure being one of them.

*

Two-thirds of manners is a series of traps designed to catch lower-class interlopers (which fork to use when??) but the remaining third is simply being kind and generous to all. Unfortunately, no one will agree on which rules fall into which third. Emily Post went to her grave believing that a knowledge of the byzantine sequences for making introductions is just common sense.

*

Power is always local.

*

All actions are propaganda, in the sense that they assert, quite boldly, this is the sort of thing people do.

The only thing we learn is what’s normal. I have repeated myself to normalize the thought for you.

*

Deep within me lurks a secret room so full of light and splendor such that if I could only show it to others this act alone would transform the world. Such is (most of) the reason I write, to try to offer to benighted souls my best approximation of a splendor I have never successfully articulated, and cannot always access.

Of course, I am also the most private of people, and would sooner die than let anyone have a glimpse of almost any room inside me, let alone that one.

All I can hope is that the tension here—between my desire to explode the world through splendor and my need not to violate the Second Precept—will generate something that people will someday take for art.

*

No people has ever been lied to as much as people today. The distant past received a lot of inaccurate information, in the sense that thunderstorms are presumably not, in fact, Zeus raging, and the Earth rests on neither elephants nor turtles; but the ones who promulgated these untruths actually believed them. They were not, so to speak, lies.

As the twentieth century saw the twin ascensions of advertisement and propaganda, it crowed, “I am the zenith of mendacity! No time will be fuller of lies than this!”

How naive and almost charming that crowing appears now.

*

Who is John Frum?

*

The critic approaching an unfinished text must, by custom, assert either that the text is in fact finished (“Kubla Khan,” A Sentimental Journey, Tristram Shandy) or completely unfinishable (Don Juan, The Prelude, Tristram Shandy).

Dmitri Nabokov hung on to the unfinished Original of Laura for so long out of kindness, I suppose; he knew critics would be unable to make either assertion about it, and then where would they be?

*

Alas, I can tell you no more, for the Third Precept is never tell anyone anything.

—Aha! Now I have you! For you, in telling me the Third Precept, have in fact told me something.

Yes, true, but that’s all right. Because the First Precept is disobey.

*

I remembered my umbrella.