| is Joan Didion.This is from the essay "Goodbye to All That," about being young in New York,?in Slouching Towards Bethlehem.:
I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for awhile.I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage.I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later - because I did not belong there, did not come from there - but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs...I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them.I could stay up all night and make mistakes and none of it would count...You see, I was in?a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there.In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May.
That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.That is what it was all about, wasn't it?Promises? |
|
Webhosting