back from london
the man who disembarked at Gunnersbury -- I wonder which quote gripped him, what moved him to reach for his phone and furtively lift some line from the notebook of quotes on my lap, which I often leaf through to pass time on the train. was it my thought-note on Nietzsche -- "no life without morality, no absolute morality. what do we do?" was it Walter Benjamin -- "to be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright", or "the only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope"? perhaps something more obscure -- Kathleen Ossip's advice to "first become ordinary, if you ever wish to become anything else" -- caught his eye. or Robert Hass's aching line -- "longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances". whatever it was, it was a curiously intimate experience, as though we had shared something much more than adjoining seats on the train, even though throughout the whole encounter we never exchanged a word. much less a glance.