Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written–disrupting a cliche and, presumably, creating a genre. That was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I find, are the ones learned in your sleep. Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love–you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you’re over. You’ve caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.
“It is only stupid to put up the sails when the wind is against,” the wife of the Italian mineral-water tycoon said, on the deck of their beautiful schooner, which had remained all the summer in port. “Because then you lose them.”
–Renata Adler
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