Reflection

I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.....

This morning I smell the oats and I see a little boy watching his reflection in a copper pot he's polished. His father comes in and laughs and offers him his shaving mirror instead. But in the shaving mirror the boy can only see one face. In the pot he can see all the distortions of his face. He sees many possible faces and so he sees what he might become.

--Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

Malamud Quote

This from a Bernard Malmud book I'm reading, The Tenant, about a writer struggling to finish a novel, while fighting eviction from his apartment in New York. My copy is from The Slegte in Rotterdam, and is from 1972...

Without looking up at the window at his side, the writer imagined the wintery day beyond, crystal bright, lit cold beauty, glad of his existence, but without desire to be in or of it, breathe its stinging glow into his half-retired lungs, live it. This sort of pull and push he had long ago quelled in the self, else he would never have seriously written.