| NOTE BOOK: INITIAL PUBLIC OFFERING | xv |
| AUGUST 2007 | |
| 195. “one of the people upon whom nothing is lost” (H. James) | |
| OCTOBER 2007 | |
| 256. Nora inu (Stray Dog) (Kurosawa) | |
| NOVEMBER 2007 | |
| 336. “the clear architecture / of the nerves” (O’Hara) | |
| DECEMBER 2007 | |
| 382. We Have to Be Careful about the Words We Use | |
| JANUARY 2008 | |
| 442. The Strength of Weak Gods | |
| 467. “the unconscious critical acumen of the reader” (Trollope) | |
| MARCH 2008 | |
| 595. “Partial Enchantments of the Quixote” (2) | |
| APRIL 2008 | |
| 711. Paradise Bereft: The Social Elegy of De Quincey | 10 |
| 716. The Silent Correction Continues | 12 |
| MAY 2008 | |
| 780. “so true” (Coleridge) | 13 |
| 810. “Scars faded as flowers” (Crane) | 14 |
| OCTOBER 2008 | |
| 1157. The Trouble with Aphorisms | 16 |
| NOVEMBER 2008 | |
| 1187. “What is truth? said jesting Pilate” (Bacon) | 18 |
| 1203. Ciceronian Suburbs | 19 |
| DECEMBER 2008 | |
| 1229. “Cold!” (Gena Rowlands) | 21 |
| JANUARY 2009 | |
| 1295. “Age does not improve us” (Forster) | 24 |
| FEBRUARY 2009 | |
| 1340. The Afterlife of Moles | 25 |
| 1341. “In the society of their common danger his innocence might serve to protect him” (Montaigne) | 26 |
| 1349. “But I shall see it reanimated” (Walton) | 27 |
| MARCH 2009 | |
| 1388. “The Unteachable Monkey,” “The Fables of Panchatantra,” “Indian Humor” | 29 |
| 1389. “stippled Hopkins” (Nabokov) | 30 |
| APRIL 2009 | |
| 1402. “And I am out on a limb, and it is the arm of God” (O’Hara) | 32 |
| 1418. “They just look at me blankly” (The Author’s Mother) | 32 |
| 1422. “He began to repeat the same stories more than once a day” (De Quincey) | 33 |
| 1440. “The mind, intractable thing” (Moore) | 34 |
| MAY 2009 | |
| 1461. “His jokes are no trifles” (Blake) | 35 |
| 1476. “Ms. Arthur” (Tina Fey) | 35 |
| 1488. The Finer Reaches of Monotony | 36 |
| JULY 2009 | |
| 1566. “So they groped and shuffled along” (Grahame) | 38 |
| 1579. “That’s wonderful, Sue. What are you studying?” (Capote) | 38 |
| 1585. “I have loved you all my life!” (Dickens) | 40 |
| AUGUST 2009 | |
| 1608. “What hurts now, but might become love” (Hollander) | 41 |
| 1621. “Forth, pilgrim, forth!” (Chaucer) | 41 |
| SEPTEMBER 2009 | |
| 1646. “I know where the wild things are” (Nunokawa) | 42 |
| 1659. “bouquet of attention” (Mailer) | 42 |
| 1663. “I am finally seeing, I was the one worth leaving” (Postal Service) | 45 |
| OCTOBER 2009 | |
| 1708. “Merleau-Ponty’s readers can know him” (Sartre) | 46 |
| 1724. Why Do We Fall in Words? In Order to Avoid Falling Ill. | 46 |
| DECEMBER 2009 | |
| 1794. The Good Enough Elegy | 48 |
| 1818. “may be translated thus” (Lewalski & Sabel) | 48 |
| 1824. “A written French that was at once rapid and cursive, quick to evoke images” (Alain Badiou) | 49 |
| JULY 2010 | |
| 2084. Home Reparations | 50 |
| JULY 2010 | |
| 3027. “What the hell can you learn from Las Vegas?” (The Author’s Mother: A Play in Eleven Lines) | 52 |
| DECEMBER 2010 | |
| 3095. “Why this overmastering need to communicate with others?” (Woolf) | 53 |
| JULY 2011 | |
| 3359. “a service of love” (De Quincey) | 54 |
| AUGUST 2011 | |
| 3397. “The loss of all hope … does not deprive human reality of its possibilities” (Sartre) | 56 |
| 3399. “show of grief” | 56 |
| 3422. “It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was” (Wilde) | 57 |
| SEPTEMBER 2011 | |
| 3427. “The Bondsman always labors in submission to the true master and Master, the fear of death” (Robert B. Pippin) | 59 |
| 3505. “Telephone Directory,” “Heaven” (Auden) | 60 |
| 3507. “She’d take it all for fun if I didn’t hurt her” (G. Eliot) | 61 |
| OCTOBER 2011 | |
| 3527. “gigantic broken revelations” (G. Eliot) | 62 |
| 3528. “The secret discipline of imagination” (Harry Berger Jr.) | 64 |
| 3534. “On pardonne tant que l’on aime” (La Rochefoucauld) | 65 |
| 3540. “(Why is it such agony to meet people—at least sensitive people?)” (Anne Morrow Lindbergh) | 66 |
| NOVEMBER 2011 | |
| 3551. “I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things” (Melville) | 68 |
| 3570. “There are only two things: Truth and lies” (Kafka) | 69 |
| DECEMBER 2011 | |
| 3597. “He glimpsed something generic and joyous, a pageant that would leave him behind” (Updike) | 70 |
| JANUARY 2012 | |
| 3622. “the law of his heart” (Hegel) | 72 |
| 3269. “He somehow felt he was headed in the right direction” (E. B. White) | 73 |
| 3270. “I track my uncontrollable footsteps” (H. James) | 74 |
| 3272. “the masked pain of his bewilderment and solitude” (Trilling) | 76 |
| FEBRUARY 2012 | |
| 3281. “Add the case that you had loved her” (Dickens) | 78 |
| 3283. “grief for disappointments of no fatal consequence” (S. Johnson) | 78 |
| 3287. The Human Part of Speech | 80 |
| 3299. The Elements of Sympathy | 80 |
| 3302. Tradition and the Individual Eavesdropper | 81 |
| 3303. Notes toward Aphorisms | 82 |
| MARCH 2012 | |
| 3313. “Money is a kind of poetry” (Stevens) | 84 |
| 3314. We Apologize for the Allusions | 85 |
| 3317. “a preponderance of loving affections” (W. James) | 86 |
| 3871. Conversion for Dummies | 87 |
| 4004. “a love stronger than any impulse that could have marred it” (G. Eliot) | 88 |
| 4010. “a piece of classical debris which insists on being noticed” (Maurice Natanson) | 89 |
| APRIL 2012 | |
| 4014. “cleaning house and throwing out things you know you’re going to miss” (Pauline Kael) | 91 |
| 4020. “Why Write?” (Sartre) | 92 |
| 4021. Principia Mathematica | 92 |
| 4023. “how to talk to people you don’t like” (Salinger) | 93 |
| 4037. “aspects of the life of Jack Kennedy of which Lyndon Johnson was unaware” (Robert Caro) | 94 |
| 4039. “a cry of pure pain” (Mary McCarthy) | 96 |
| MAY 2012 | |
| 4047. “Several people on the trip told me that I was an inspiration, which made me feel good” (The Author’s Mother) | 97 |
| 4050. “I think to myself: where have they gone?” (Alfred Kazin) | 98 |
| 4060. Noncomputable Memories | 99 |
| 4063. “Things answer only if they are questioned” (Erwin Straus) | 100 |
| JUNE 2012 | |
| 4073. Helping a Stranger Feel at Home | 102 |
| 4081. “In the vast literature of love” (Updike) | 102 |
| 4094. “She touched—she admitted—she acknowledged the whole truth” (Austen) | 103 |
| 4098. “To wait” (Ashbery) | 104 |
| 4100. The Near Enough Angel | 106 |
| JULY 2012 | |
| 4102. The Abstraction of Love | 108 |
| 4107. Sentiment and Author, Uncertain | 108 |
| 4112. The Trouble with Parting | 110 |
| 4113. “concealed from the reader” (Northrop Frye) | 111 |
| 4118. The Mirror Stages | 111 |
| 4120. Beauty, Coming and Going | 111 |
| 4129. “Turn your fear into a safeguard” (G. Eliot) | 112 |
| 4130. “and apply yourself to your books or your business” (Thackeray) | 113 |
| 4132. “I dwell with a strangely aching heart” (Frost) | 115 |
| AUGUST 2012 | |
| 4136. “the dread fear of the unemployed that the world needed them no longer” (Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.) | 116 |
| 4154. “the most surprising openness” (Georg Simmel) | 117 |
| 4159. “the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings” (G. Eliot) | 118 |
| 4161. Surpassing Speech | 120 |
| SEPTEMBER 2012 | |
| 4170. “Good God, man, get on with your story!” (Uncle Arthur, as reported by Brendan Gill) | 121 |
| 4172. Postseason Sentiment | 122 |
| 4181. “The voice reaching us from a great distance must find a place in the text” (Michel de Certeau) | 123 |
| 4182. Losing Voice to Regain It | 124 |
| 4183. “though now superseded in details” (Angus Fletcher) | 125 |
| 4186. “the purpose of writing” (Strunk and White) | 127 |
| 4188. “their breathless disorder” (Sartre) | 128 |
| 4189. Gods and Men | 130 |
| 4190. A Will, Thus a Way | 131 |
| OCTOBER 2012 | |
| 4196. Beyond Display | 133 |
| 4198. “but yes, of course, I loved the … evenings of New York” (Camus) | 134 |
| 4200. “Come live with me, and be my love” (Marlowe) | 135 |
| 4230. Some Wounded Trees | 136 |
| 4231. The Importance of Being Alone | 137 |
| 4232. “She was never wholly admirable” (Woolf) | 139 |
| 4237. “Often, almost nightly” (Nabokov) | 140 |
| 4244. Bringing up Baby | 142 |
| NOVEMBER 2012 | |
| 4245. This Side of the Dark Side | 143 |
| 4251. Can You Hear Me Now? | 144 |
| 4255. Weaker and Wiser | 145 |
| 4258. The Care and Loving of a Gift | 147 |
| 4260. “your whole peculiar plot” (Stevens) | 148 |
| 4261. “What is truth?” (Bacon) | 148 |
| 4262. Past “the province of literature” (Housman) | 149 |
| 4267. “I’ll come and see you again, as soon as I can” (Tolkien) | 151 |
| 4269. “He … gave me clues to keep me afloat in the conversational stream” (qtd. by Erving Goffman) | 151 |
| 4270. “poor Marcus Aurelius” (Pierre Hadot) | 152 |
| DECEMBER 2012 | |
| 4275. “her endless power of surrender” (H. James) | 154 |
| 4281. “Not a creature was stirring” (Clement Clarke Moore) | 154 |
| 4284. The Portal’s Tale | 155 |
| 4291. The Life of Love | 157 |
| 4293. “a proficiency in telephoning and telegraphing” (Wharton) | 158 |
| 4301. “an extraordinary mildness” (Auden) | 159 |
| 4304. “Mine would, sir, were I human” (Shakespeare) | 160 |
| 4306. “Make it up as we go along” (Talking Heads) | 161 |
| JANUARY 2013 | |
| 4319. “whom I hopelessly love” (O’Hara) | 163 |
| 4324. Midlife Morning | 163 |
| 4327. “my dreams are not calm” (De Quincey) | 164 |
| FEBRUARY 2013 | |
| 4339. Finding My Picture of Dorian Gray | 165 |
| 4349. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each” (T. S. Eliot) | 166 |
| 4350. “I was part of the nastiness now” (Chandler) | 169 |
| 4351. When What You Say Comes Out Just Right | 169 |
| 4352. From Wary to Wonder | 170 |
| 4355. “Having survived entirely your own youth” (Merrill) | 171 |
| 4359. “prevented him from burning the difficult beginnings” (Updike) | 171 |
| 4360. Cold Gathering | 172 |
| MARCH 2013 | |
| 4366. My Mother, and Welcome to Her! | 173 |
| 4367. “difficult marvels” (Merrill) | 174 |
| 4372. “vanished early” (Austen) | 175 |
| 4378. “I have now at last become a writer only” (Fitzgerald) | 176 |
| 4383. Something Given from Somewhere Hidden | 176 |
| 4384. “busy seeking for otters” (Boswell) | 177 |
| 4386. “this penetrative suggestion of life” (Pater) | 178 |
| 4388. Making Up in the Middle of the Night | 178 |
| 4390. “The scars were of different ages” (Darwin) | 179 |
| APRIL 2013 | |
| 4399. “I have promises to keep” (Frost) | 181 |
| 4400. Self-Doubt for Adults | 181 |
| 4401. “for the party” (Austen) | 182 |
| 4402. “compelled her to grace” (Hardy) | 182 |
| 4403. “impulses which she had not known before” (G. Eliot) | 184 |
| 4404. “There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men” (Wilde) | 184 |
| 4405. Reserve Army of Rescuers | 184 |
| 4406. The Charmed Cycle | 185 |
| 4407. “Only he and his opponent … knew that he was being destroyed” (G.L.S.) | 186 |
| 4408. Self-Reliance for Commoners | 186 |
| 4415. What to Love | 187 |
| 4418. “funny” (O’Hara) | 187 |
| JUNE 2013 | |
| 4405. “an endlesse moniment” (Spenser) | 188 |
| 4409. “for poetry was all written before time was” (Emerson) | 189 |
| 4410. “What they made of his lectures is not known” (Peter Singer) | 189 |
| 4411. “And in short, I was afraid” (T. S. Eliot) | 190 |
| 4413. “the pleasure of giving respect” (Tobias Wolff) | 190 |
| JULY 2013 | |
| 4415. Of Bragging | 192 |
| 4417. “writing at tension’s limit” (Bolaño) | 193 |
| 4419. “almost converted” (G. Eliot) | 194 |
| 4420. “as if I, not they, were leaving” (Merrill) | 194 |
| 4424. “up again old heart!” (Emerson) | 196 |
| 4427. “irrevocably a poet” (Samuel Johnson) | 197 |
| 4430. “speechless wonder” (F. Creuzer) | 199 |
| 4432. “not mentioned because it is the whole of the story” (Empson) | 200 |
| 4433. “our togetherness” (Auden) | 201 |
| 4434. “an agreeable melancholy” (Hume) | 201 |
| 4435. Books of Revelation (Class Notes) | 202 |
| 4439. “Dreams advise” (Milton) | 204 |
| 4441. Over My Head | 204 |
| AUGUST 2013 | |
| 4453. “A Need for Gardens” (Richard Brautigan) | 206 |
| 4454. “Love Enough to Be Kind” (Barthes) | 207 |
| 4456. “without losing his reverence” (Emerson) | 209 |
| 4457. “his sincerities are … elegiac” (Richard Poirier) | 210 |
| 4458. “Make gentle the life of this world” (Aeschylus) | 211 |
| 4464. Two Cheers for Vagueness | 213 |
| 4465. Continuous Diary | 215 |
| 4466. “But in the movie, died” (Updike) | 215 |
| 4468. “It’s the kingdom of heaven” (Camus) | 216 |
| 4474. “the small band of true friends” (Austen) | 217 |
| 4477. “The end of art is peace” (Heaney) | 218 |
| 4478. “our Puritan anxiety” (Anne Morrow Lindbergh) | 219 |
| SEPTEMBER 2013 | |
| 4479. “Nature’s first green is gold” (Frost) | 221 |
| 4481. “her lovely, deliberate blandness” (Vidal) | 221 |
| 4483. “Men who die childless … are denied an ancestor shrine” (Jack Goody) | 224 |
| 4490. “For our vines have tender grapes” (Song of Solomon) | 225 |
| 4492. “Sincerity” (Auerbach) | 225 |
| 4493. “Fallings from us, vanishings” (Wordsworth) | 227 |
| 5002. “Love those for whom the world is real” (Merrill) | 230 |
| 5007. “Then, all of a sudden, I started to cry” (Salinger) | 231 |
| 5008. “a God to thank” (Fitzgerald) | 233 |
| OCTOBER 2013 | |
| 5012. It’s Different from the Ones in Peru | 234 |
| 5014. “I cannot be mended” (Stevens) | 236 |
| 5016. “Where every paradox means wonder” (Merrill) | 236 |
| 5017. Self-Pastoral | 237 |
| 5018. “how he got out of the room” (G. Eliot) | 237 |
| 5019. The Strangeness of Tears | 238 |
| 5024. “We are going to be in for trouble” (Lillian Hellman) | 239 |
| 5025. “where nobody was looking” (Sontag) | 240 |
| 5026. Coming up Empty | 240 |
| 5027. “It was now too late and too far to go back” (Dickens) | 241 |
| 5030. “note” (Barthes) | 243 |
| 5032. “where lost was found” (Merrill) | 243 |
| 5033. Loving on Time | 244 |
| 5034. “lost for lacke of telling” (Spenser) | 245 |
| 5035. Thanks for That | 247 |
| 5039. “so right” (Ellmann) | 248 |
| 5040. Street-Level Closeness | 249 |
| NOVEMBER 2013 | |
| 5042. Waiting for Light | 251 |
| 5043. Playing Fair with Your Feelings | 252 |
| 5044. “(I too in this dictum)” (Kafka) | 254 |
| 5045. Coming and Going | 256 |
| 5047. Another Country | 257 |
| 5048. “hope” (Camus) | 258 |
| 5049. “sure as tomorrow morning” (Hopkins) | 259 |
| 5050. “a perfect edition of my works” (Pope) | 260 |
| 5051. “full of pain” (Milton) | 262 |
| 5052. Making It Through | 263 |
| 5055. From Ritual to Romance | 265 |
| 5056. “pathless ways into happy ones” (Ruskin) | 266 |
| 5057. Voir Dire | 267 |
| DECEMBER 2013 | |
| 5072. The Good Enough Beginning | 269 |
| 5074. “A Hundred Million Billion Sonnets” (Queneau) | 269 |
| 5075. “He saw himself as a ludicrous figure” (Joyce) | 270 |
| 5077. “like a tree of tears” (Merrill) | 272 |
| 5079. Rage Comes Home to Roost | 273 |
| 5080. “if nobody can understand it?” (G. Eliot) | 274 |
| 5086. “burning boy” (Bishop) | 275 |
| 5092. “allies in the fight” (Trilling) | 276 |
| 5093. Part for the Whole | 276 |
| 5094. News of the Day | 277 |
| 5095. “Somebody loves us all” (Bishop) | 278 |
| 5096. “real religious feeling” (Wittgenstein) | 278 |
| 5097. Seeing off People You Love | 279 |
| 5098. Old and New Friends | 280 |
| 5099. Lost and Found | 282 |
| 5100. “Now Voyager” (Whitman, H. Crane, C. Robinson) | 284 |
| JANUARY 2014 | |
| 5102. Fool for Love | 285 |
| 5103. Keeping It Public | 285 |
| 5104. “How can anyone want such things?” (Bishop) | 287 |
| 5105. Mint Car | 287 |
| 5106. Questions of Rescue | 289 |
| 5111. “for One only” (Browning) | 289 |
| 5114. All for Love | 290 |
| 5118. I’m So Much Less Sure of Myself Now Than I Used to Be | 292 |
| 5119. “something understood” (Herbert) | 294 |
| 5123. Notes as Novel | 296 |
| 5129. One Step at a Time | 298 |
| 5130. Finding Your Way through Fear | 298 |
| FEBRUARY 2014 | |
| 5134. Runaway | 300 |
| 5137. Human Landscape | 301 |
| 5139. Interpretation of Dreams | 303 |
| MARCH 2014 | |
| 5191. How to Live | 305 |
| APRIL 2014 | |
| 5211. Robert Frost | 308 |
| MAY 2014 | |
| 5236. Fantasy Fatherhood | 309 |
| 5237. Love Story | 311 |
| JUNE 2014 | |
| 5281. Then I Don’t Feel So Bad | 312 |
| JULY 2014 | |
| 5290. Revelation Roulette | 314 |
| 5213. Why We Teach | 317 |
| 5218. Good Enough for Good-bye | 319 |
| INDEX | 321 |
