I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an
awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible.
Perhaps the relevant truth is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.
We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life?
Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.
Despair busies one, and my weekend was spoken for. I was going to lie down on the floor of my apartment in the draft of the air conditioner and spend two days and nights traveling a circuit of regret, self-pity, and jealousy.