“To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.”
“Between the end of that strange summer and the approach of winter, my
life went on without change. Each day would dawn without incident and
end as it had begun. It rained a lot in September. October had several
warm, sweaty days. Aside from the weather, there was hardly anything to
distinguish one day from the next. I worked at concentrating my
attention on the real and useful. I would go to the pool almost every
day for a long swim, take walks, make myself three meals.
But
even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness.
The very water I drank, the very air I breathed, would feel like long,
sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the
threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of
loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock
in the morning.”
“Holding this soft, small living creature in my lap this way, though,
and seeing how it slept with complete trust in me, I felt a warm rush in
my chest. I put my hand on the cat's chest and felt his heart beating.
The pulse was faint and fast, but his heart, like mine, was ticking off
the time allotted to his small body with all the restless earnestness of
my own.”
“I laughed. “You’re too young to be so … pessimistic,” I said, using the English word.
“Pessi-what?”
“Pessimistic. It means looking only at the dark side of things.”
“Pessimistic … pessimistic …” She repeated the English to herself over and over, and then she looked up at me with a fierce glare. “I’m only sixteen,” she said, “and I don’t know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I’m pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.”
“Pessi-what?”
“Pessimistic. It means looking only at the dark side of things.”
“Pessimistic … pessimistic …” She repeated the English to herself over and over, and then she looked up at me with a fierce glare. “I’m only sixteen,” she said, “and I don’t know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I’m pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.”
Book One, First Sentence: "When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a pot full of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking spaghetti."
