perder el juicio
They were testing air-raid sirens on campus this morning, I guess as practice for the day the Luftwaffe comes to bomb us. They sounded like theremins blasting through megaphones, greeting the vintage fifties flying saucers that will finish my book, make me smarter and better, render me able to hold a steady job without childish despondency, reconcile me to my shortcomings, grant me rest.
It's a gross Roman, as the Germans would say—my stepfather thinks that at this point I should just rename it War and Peace. If the day comes when I accomplish something that could be placed next to Tolstoy without vaporizing on contact, surely it will not be I who accomplishes it. I will have turned into something unrecognizable to myself. Read Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments yesterday, all about how the great transformation must come from without rather than within—so compromised and farcical as we all seem, how could we move unaided to anything but more farce? And yet it happens. We will sprout bizarre flowers when the season comes, we will be new.
