we all sense it
we can see things


David Salle, Poets in Their Youth, 2009

* From Stoner, by John Williams:

"An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner's colleagues, who held him to no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits us all, and the the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers"
...

"In his forty-third year, William Stoner learned what others much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another."
...

"In his extreme youth, Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart."

* Bob N., sportscaster.

* "Don't tell 'em, let 'em guess." -- Miles Davis (from this 1982 interview)