Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir

Je m’adonnais à des espiègleries bon enfant, comme de pousser légèrement une porte entrouverte afin d’apercevoir le piano à queue de Virgil Thompson, ou de rôder devant la plaque d’Arthur C. Clarke dans l’espoir de le voir émerger tout à coup. De temps à autre, je tombais sur Gert Schiff, l’universitaire allemand, armé de volumes sur Picasso, ou su

Don’t little children, awakened one morning and told, “Now you’re five!”—don’t they wail at the universe’s descent into chaos? The sun slowly dying, the spiral arm spreading, the molecules drifting apart second by second toward our inevitable heat death—shouldn’t we all wail to the stars?

He paid the bill, left the restaurant and started walking through the streets, his melancholy growing more and more beautiful. He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realized that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.

I smiled because I wanted Cat to think I understood the ways of the world. One person’s endured lechery was another person’s cherished summer affair.