Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

It shook my faith. It was my first great disappointment as an adult, my first postwar defeat. I rallied briefly and painted the walls grass green. I tacked burlap on the windows, but I was still lonely. It was a green loneliness now.

Until we became sophisticated about it, sex was everything Freud said it was.

While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us.

You’d see them stop and pull out their pads or notebooks to jot down something that had just struck them—the color of the sky, the bend of a street, an incongruity. These notes were postcards to literature that we never mailed.

To open a bookshop is one of the persistent romances, like living off the land or sailing around the world.

It’s not so much to ask, I said. I just want love to live up to its publicity.

In a way I was just as inhibited as they were by my upbringing, which condemned me to a combination of boredom and desire.

They were more real than anything I had ever known, real as only imagined things can be, real as dreams that seem so unbearably actual because they are cleansed of all irrelevances. These uncles, these books, moved into the vacuum of my imagination.

Is something the matter? I asked, but of course she didn’t answer. She didn’t believe in questions.